Intercultural Communication Competence

Initial Work: 1987

In 1987, based on a comprehensive literature review from a variety of disciplines, Chen defined communication competence as the individual's ability to execute certain actions in order to elicit a desired response in a specific environment. When the concept is applied to the intercultural context, culture itself should be emphasized. The model of intercultural communication competence generated from the literature was comprised of four dimensions, and each dimension contains four components. The first dimension, personal attributes, includes self-disclosure (the ability to self-disclose or be open to others), self-awareness (the ability to monitor or be aware of oneself), self-concept (the ability to develop a positive self-concept), and social relaxation (the ability to be relaxed in social interaction). The second dimension, communication skills, includes message skills (the ability to send and receive messages), social skills (the ability to demonstrate social skills), flexibility (the ability to demonstrate behavioral flexibility), and interaction management (the ability to manage interactions). The third dimension, psychological adaptation, includes frustration (the ability to deal with frustration), stress (the ability to deal with stress), alienation (the ability to deal with social alienation), and ambiguity (the ability to deal with ambiguous situations). The last dimension, cultural awareness, includes social values (the ability to understand social values), social customs (the ability to understand social customs), social norms (the ability to understand social norms), and social systems (the ability to understand social systems).

Continued Work: 1996

In 1996, Chen and William J. Starosta reexamined the four dimensions of the intercultural communication competence model and suggested that the concept could be studied from the three aspects of human ability: cognitive, affective, and behavioral.

The cognitive aspect of intercultural communication competence is represented by intercultural awareness, which refers to the ability to understand cultural conventions that affect how people interact with each other. In other words, intercultural awareness is a process of attitudinally internalizing insights about the predominant values, attitudes, and beliefs of a group of people. As the ability to draw an accurate cultural map, to sort out the cultural theme, or to understand cultural grammars, intercultural awareness proceeds from the level of knowing superficial cultural traits to the level of knowing significant and subtle cultural traits that contrast markedly with our own to the level of how another culture feels from the insider's perspective. Moreover, intercultural awareness can be studied from culture-specific and culture-general approaches. The former approach aims to impart information about cultural guidelines in order to interact effectively and appropriately with people from a specific culture; the latter aims to understand the universal influence of culture on human behaviors through different learning methods. Cultural games, such as “baFa baFa,” through which people can come to know the possible variations in and general influence of culture, is one kind of learning method available.

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