Developing cultural intelligence to address intercultural misunderstandings: A practical interactional pragmatics approach in higher education

This paper contributes to the study of interactional pragmatics (cf. Haugh, 2018), and to emerging research on intercultural pragmatics (McConachy, 2019) by introducing the Cultural Intelligence (CQ) framework for identifying cross-cultural variability in students’ intercultural encounters. In Higher Education, where internationalisation of the curriculum has produced cohorts with diverse
cultural backgrounds, intercultural interactions are often perceived more as challenges than as opportunities (Spencer-Oatey, 2008). This presentation focuses on intercultural misunderstandings triggered by differences in communication styles (Bowe, Martin, & Manns, 2014) and their perceived
impact on achievements in teaching and learning contexts (Ryan, 2007). The following questions guide our research:
1. How do students perceive their ability to successfully communicate across cultures?
2. How do they assess their capacity to adjust their speech acts, verbal and non-verbal communication when interacting in diverse settings?
3. What are the limitations of using quantitative measures of cultural awareness?
To answer these questions, we apply the CQ (Cultural Intelligence) framework (Rockstuhl, Van Dyne, 2018). This framework operationalises intercultural competence as a combination of factors related to motivation, cognition, metacognition, and behaviour. We focus on the specific subdimensions socio-linguistics, speech acts, verbal communication, and non-verbal communication
deriving from CQ to analyse students’ perceptions of their encounters.
We use a mixed-methods approach to explore data collected among
undergraduate and postgraduate students enrolled in one Australian university which operates across multiple continents. Our corpus comprises students’ self-rating scores reported in the Cultural Intelligence Scale, an online
self-inventory tool, as well as qualitative data from self-reflective essays and focus groups. From the mapping of the students’ perceptions, we outline both the desirability and the necessity of learning and teaching sociopragmatic awareness. We then discuss a series of strategies to overcome intercultural misunderstandings by enabling appropriate pragmatic transfer (Zegarac &
Pennington, 2008).