How Intercultural Competent Am I?

By Stephanie Ann Houghton

© 2013 – Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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This textbook aims to help students to develop thesis-writing skills through experiential learning by conducting a research project based on a diary study, and reporting on it in a mini-thesis. It was developed for the benefit of international students who, in their penultimate year of undergraduate study, are planning to write a graduation thesis in English related to intercultural communication in their final year with little or no prior knowledge of the subject, or of thesis-writing itself. The overarching structure of the book provides a clear overview of the main parts of a thesis, and how they fit together. It presents wide-ranging activities designed to help students to critically analyse and evaluate the academic literature with a specific research question in mind, and provides a basic introduction to qualitative research methodology placing a special focus upon the use of diary studies in research. Thirteen units guide students through the process of analyzing and evaluating competing models of intercultural competence before using them as frameworks to structure self-reflection in a small-scale study. Along the way, students write a series of structured diary entries in response to different kinds of intercultural experience that ultimately allows them to draw conclusions about not only their current level of intercultural competence, within the terms they choose to define it, but also about the standards they tend to apply in practice. To promote extensive reading, the textbook may be used in conjunction with its optional accompanying handbook from which many reading passages are drawn: Tsai, Y. and Houghton, S. Becoming Intercultural: Inside and Outside the Classroom (Newcastle-upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010).