Intercultural competence as an aspect of the communicative ...

oom for the interviewer to probe deeper certain issues, to clarify any misunderstanding,
‘enable the interviewer to test the limits of the respondent’s knowledge’ (Cohen et al.
2008: 357) and give an opportunity to the interviewer to testify to the participant’s beliefs
and attitudes.
The interviews were all conducted in Serbian, for several reasons. As some studies
have shown (Penbek et al. 2009), the insistence on the English language might have been
a deterrent for students to take part in interviews or might have resulted in the data that
are not rich enough for a serious analysis. Also, the researcher was not familiar with the
students’ proficiency in English, and the exact phrasing or wording in English was not the
focus of the research, rather it was how students understood particular situations.
The aim of conducting interviews was to gather information about interviewees’
language learning histories, their current usage of English language and, finally, their
understanding of particular intercultural incidents. Also, some of the questions in the
interviews were closely related to the questionnaire, as they offered an opportunity to the
researcher to more closely explore the responses and see if and how they related to the
overall ‘picture’ that the questionnaire offered.
The answers obtained through the interview shed light on the attitudes of the
participants, as well as their feelings and knowledge about and skills in intercultural
competence. Therefore, the questions asked were feeling, knowledge, background and
distinguishing questions, thus ‘genera[ting] data which give an authentic 30 insight into
people’s experiences’ (Silverman 2006:118).
Interviews were audio recorded and subsequently transcribed. The answers were
coded in order to identify the patterns, values and attitudes that contribute to ICC. Also,
the interviews were followed by the researcher’s noting down immediate impressions and
possible changes to be included in later interviews.
3.5.3. Culture assimilator
A separate part of the interview consisted of the critical incidents from the culture
assimilator, where the participants had to provide their answers and explanations for the
given episodes. Their answers were used to further analyse the IC sensitivity, as well as to
further fine-tune the assimilator. The episodes were written down and given one by one to
the interviewees, mostly in the same order. However, as with the semi-structured format
30 The authors here believe that ‘authentic’ implies that the interviewee’s point of view can be granted ‘the
culturally honored status of “reality”’ (Miller and Glassner 2010:133).
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