"A nation's culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people."
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Studying abroad isn’t just about improving your language skills. It’s also about immersing yourself in a different culture, or maybe even cultures. Study abroad can give you the chance to develop your intercultural skills by surrounding yourself with different people and cultures. For example, Williams (2005) found that students who had studied abroad exhibited a greater change in intercultural communication skills after their semester abroad as compared with students who stayed on campus. Results also found that exposure to different cultures was the greatest predictor of intercultural communication skills.
However, it should be noted that research is showing that simply ‘turning up’ in another country is not going to improve your intercultural awareness. And here we are not talking about studying abroad in the UK and on return being able to name five famous English authors. If that was the case, you could find that out without leaving home. What we are talking about is what has become known as ‘little-c’ culture.
Being able to perceive little-c (cultural) differences (as opposed to knowing Big-C differences – like being able to list German composers) is a subjective process for negotiating cultural differences and is not the same as negative stereotyping. Bennett (2009, p. S3) explains that cultural patterns ought not to be treated as stereotypical categories into which every member of a group fits, but instead as clues for interpreting the behaviour of individual group members.
"A nation's culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people."
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Student Videos
1 — What did you do to improve your intercultural skills? What advice would you pass on to other students?
2 — Can you tell us an interesting story about how you dealt with culture shock?