Intercultural Competence in the Internationalisation of Higher Education

InternationalisationInternationalisation has become an increasingly important topic in higher education institutions in an era in which the world’s citizens are seeking to be more unified and interconnected. For institutions to be truly internationalised, intercultural competenceIntercultural competence seems essential. During the last decades, researchers have defined and investigated intercultural competenceIntercultural competence across many academic areas. A growing consensus is emerging on the nature of intercultural competence as it aims towards ‘the successful acquisition of the international perspective’ (Bennett, 1993, p. 24). This Chapter addresses these issues, focusing first on the internationalisation of higher education to establish the context of the research, and second, on intercultural competence, two of the main theoretical foundations on which this investigation is based. The topic is expanded in Chapter 3, which describes the remaining theoretical aspects. To fulfil these objectives, after the background on higher education internationalisation (Sect. 2.2), a chronological review of the notion of culture is presented (Sect. 2.3). Next, the term ‘intercultural competence’ is defined (Sect. 2.4), followed by a brief review of the various models of intercultural competence (Sect. 2.5) to observe the similarities and differences among them. After establishing the context through the most relevant theoretical aspects, the following sections describe the process model of intercultural competence (Deardorff, 2006; Sect. 2.6), the notion of intercultural empathy (Sect. 2.7), and the role of intercultural competence in the internationalisation of universities (Sect. 2.8). Next, different tools for assessing intercultural competence are briefly reviewed (Sect. 2.9), and the Intercultural Effectiveness Scale (IES) (The Kozai Group, 2011; Sect. 2.9.1) is explored in depth. Given the important role of context in intercultural communication, in the succeeding section, the relationship between pragmatics and intercultural competence is discussed (Sect. 2.10). In addition, an instrument that measures intercultural competence through pragmatics skills is introduced (Sánchez-Hernández & Maíz-Arévalo, 2021). Finally, intercultural adaptability (IA), one of the dimensions of the rubric, is discussed in depth (Sect. 2.11).