Intercultural competence as an aspect of the communicative ...

known practices, an individual who is not interculturally competent would not want to
readjust his/her worldview to include the worldview of the other as valid (Shaules 2007).
These critical incidents that deal with first encounters between people of different
cultures showed that our students might not be prepared for them, and that their first
reaction would be negative, coloured by stereotypes and prejudice they might hold
against those cultures. This is a typical behaviour that would be experienced by an
individual in the Defence stage of Bennett’s model (1993), where cultural differences are
indeed perceived as a threat and usually experienced as stereotypes. Also, in terms of
Byram’s model, these attitudes would point to a certain lack in all five types of saviors.
The unease that the interviewees mentioned is in contrast with the GPI results,
since there the categories where the students scored highest were Global citizenship and
Identity (3.7 and 3.9 respectively). These categories contain ideas such as being able to
recognize culture differences and discuss them, or being able to perform different social
roles, and show that what students perceived as their competence was not sufficient for
them to navigate the first encounter.
The data show that there was not any particular difference between the English
language students and students from other departments. In this particular case, even
though one of the interviewees was from the English Department who had had first-hand
experience with a foreign culture, she still had problems finding a correct attribution and
recognizing the possible cultural elements at play in critical incidents. Compared with the
GPI results, it could be seen that the mean scores for these two categories – Global
citizenship and Identity were a bit lower than the average for all students (3.5 and 3.8
respectively).
These first two incidents proved what Byram states, that attitudes learners have
‘towards people who are perceived as different in respect of the cultural meanings, beliefs
and behaviours they exhibit’ (Byram 1997: 34) are usually stereotypical and based on
prejudice. While these need not be always negative, Byram stresses that that cannot be
enough as a pre-condition for a successful IC interaction, these attitudes should be based
on curiosity, openness and ‘suspension of disbelief and judgement’ (ibid).
Another point that could be made is that since knowledge about another culture is
relational it does not provide a sound base for ‘the second category of knowledge:
knowledge of processes of interaction’ (Byram 1997: 36) in that culture on both
individual and societal levels. This second knowledge would become instrumental in
encounters and would help an individual act correctly. Both attitudes and knowledge play
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