According to Imahori and Lanigan (1989), only when effectiveness and appropriateness are examined, will the actual process of how sojourners’ and hosts’ competent intercultural interactions be achieved. In order to examine the effectiveness, firstly it is important to make it clear of the term “effectiveness” in this context. In fact, this term has already been defined in Chapter 2. According to Deardorff (2016) effectiveness is the degree of which the
individual’s goals were achieved. This statement identifies the core of “effectiveness” as to whether and how much the individual’s goals have been accomplished—that is another element of relational model. In Chapter 5.3, by comparing the goals and accomplishment of the students taking TC course, it found out that overall the participants’ goals (NB: the goals of the participants and the goal of the course were different. The former goals are the reason why they chose the course; the latter goal could be found in the Appendix A). have not only been accomplished at the end of the course, but also exceeded their expectations. Such findings provide some evidence for the effectiveness of the course at least from the students’ perspective.
According to Spitzberg (2000), effectiveness “is the accomplishment of valued goals or rewards relative to costs and alternatives” (p. 380). This definition points out the need of considering other alternative training methods for developing intercultural competence. As a matter of fact, currently at the university, the Centre for Global Programmes also offers a short course for intercultural studies and events such as International Conversations Afternoon (ICA). For the intercultural studies course, although it is free to attend for
university students, it is mainly open access and aiming for the overseas partner universities. The sessions consist of group work, thought experiments, role play, problem solving, poster presentation and debates, which cover topics related to culture. However, it is just a three- week course which only takes place once a week for an hour. That makes the total duration of
the course four hours only, which is much shorter than Transcultural Communication (4 hours × 8 weeks=32 hours). Such short-term training might work in developing knowledge and skills, but it is doubtful for the development of awareness and motivation which need more time in training. Also there is no assessment for the participants to perform at the end of the course. Thus, the actual outcome of the training is unclear. Moreover, the participants of this course seem to be primarily international students, as they are from overseas partner universities (e.g., Tohoku University, Tokyo University, and Chinese University of Hong Kong). As the course takes place during summer vacation when all the home students go back home, it is rare for the home students to volunteer themselves to participate. Hence it will disappoint the students who wish to interact with home students during the course. In all, for the short course Intercultural Studies, it is suitable for the students who want to have some hands-on skills and cultural knowledge. It might have an immediate effect on intercultural learning, however its intercultural effectiveness in the long term is debatable. Even if it could achieve some degree of intercultural effectiveness, international-home students’ relationship would not be developed with the absence of home students.
Another event organised by Centre for Global Programmes is International
Conversations Afternoon (ICA). As it sounds, this is an event for students to meet each other and interact. It takes place once a week during the academic term in one of the colleges’ common room. Like any other event, ICA is free to come and provides a relaxing
environment for students to communicate. Therefore, it is suitable for students who wish to practise English and seek opportunities to meet people from different culture. However, as it is not an academic course, there is no teacher or organizer for theories or knowledge learning on culture and skills. The participants might be able to learn from each other during
interaction. However, for the international students, going to ICA is just an add-on experience to their lives abroad. As the literature suggested, simply going abroad for a certain period of
time is not enough for developing intercultural competence. It is also not enough for developing intercultural effectiveness if only going to event such as ICA without some systematic training.
Overall, compared to other alternatives for developing intercultural competence, the course Transcultural Communication is more academic and intensive. The four aspects of intercultural competence are covered by the content of the sessions and the assessments. By reading handouts beforehand and discussions during seminars, students can learn theories about culture. Creating criteria for assessing intercultural competence makes them have the chance to reflect and integrate the knowledge they have. Attending the final assessment (group discussion) gives the chance for students to actual demonstrate their intercultural competence in an actual intercultural interaction. Lastly, reflective journal and evaluation report show the degree of their awareness in their own intercultural competence development and the consciousness during interaction. In terms of developing home-international students’ relationships, as discussed in Chapter 5.3, the TC course created a friendly and diverse
environment where both home students and international students were involved to learn and communicate. It provided a platform for developing home and international relationships, as they could hear each other’s ideas and opinions especially under the culture-related topics. As a matter of fact, it was found that some students had developed good friendships with each other after the course. Thus, taking the course could solve the problem of lack of
opportunities to meet people and form intimate relationships, as reported in Chapter 3. To summarise, the course Transcultural Communication is a better choice for developing intercultural competence, especially for the student seeking intercultural effectiveness and satisfactory relationships.
Besides effectiveness, another aspect of intercultural competence is appropriateness. According to Imahori and Lanigan (1989), “the process of communication can be defined as
either competent or incompetent depending on the appropriateness of behaviours in
communication process” (p. 276). As pointed out in Chapter 1, the degree of appropriateness is determined by the interactants involved in the interaction. These statements indicate that appropriateness should only be examined by each other based on interactants’ behaviour during the communication. The assessment of the TC course did provide video data to observe participants’ behaviour in the group discussion, however it is not valid to determine participants’ appropriateness from the researcher’s or any third party’s perspective. Instead, it is only valid when the participants involved in the group discussion evaluate each other. In Chapter 2, it has been introduced that students taking the TC course for credits were asked to do so through writing evaluation report about themselves and other members’ performance. Due to the limited time for this research, it does not include the studies in this research. However, it will be a good direction for the further research in the future.