Building intercultural competencies: implications for academic skills development

Abstract

The transition to university is a new experience for each student, with all students expected to develop new ways of thinking, learning and communicating. Many students (although this is less common in Australia) will also be adjusting to living away from home for the first time and will be absent from familiar support networks. The vocabulary of a new discipline will be as foreign to local students as it is to international students, and accepted Western academic styles of communication may be equally unfamiliar to many local students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds. The diversity evident in classrooms worldwide includes difference based on factors such as age, gender, religion, disability, educational background and class. It is an all-inclusive mixture of differences and similarities along a given dimension and contributes substantially to the complexity of individual learning styles and background experiences evident in any classroom. For students, developing the intercultural expertise to successfully navigate a new culture is a prerequisite of university success; it will also be a prerequisite for success in increasingly transnational workplaces.