An Exploratory Research On The Effect Of Cultural Awareness On Intercultural Communication Competence

It has been more than five decades since Hall (1959) initiated the study ofintercultural communication. Paced up by globalisation, and more recently byglocalisation, much progress has been made and the research area has expanded intovarious fields such as education, health care, and business. Studies have been focusedon training of intercultural communication competence (ICC) in the United States andEurope and ICC in language teaching in China. Yet, the contrasting approach is stillamong the mainstream of research methods. A large number of papers compare oneculture against another to present the specific differences, thus provide guide forprofessional communicators in intercultural contexts.This paper addresses the issue of ICC from a perspective distinct from many ofthese previous cultural studies that are focused on the comparison of different culturesin order to work out a referential model of a certain culture or a list of differencescommunicators should attend to. Rather than analysing what is contained in a specificculture, it focuses on the awareness of culture differences in general which serves forthe intercultural communicators as a guiding ideology. Responding to the need of ICCtraining in the contemporary society, this paper seeks to trigger thoughts on a general,reliable and stable approach to ICC, which is less affected by time or exceptions andthat applies to any culture at large, by analysing a successful example of interculturalcommunication, thus highlights cultural awareness as the core component of ICC. Theresearch is based on the linguistic data collected by the author during his work as aninterpreter in a Chinese family-owned enterprise which at the time undertook part of aSino-Australian construction project. Through a qualitative analysis on theconversations which took place between the Australian manager and the Chinese firm,it reveals how cultural awareness fundamentally affects the interculturalcommunication competence of the COO. The study finds him aware of culturalelements and positively adapting to the cultural differences. It is also found that hiscultural knowledge grows in later stage as a positive outcome of his culturalawareness.