in today’s multiculturally interconnected world, cultural understanding is the key to communication and a buffer to communication breakdown. that is, the objectives of language learning cannot be viewed as a mainly linguistic task anymore; they should be directed towards achievement of intercultural communicative competence. therefore, the foreign language teachers should utilize and promote th...

In this article I will argue that the globalisation process has carried two major implications for intercultural communication research: 1) It has provided a new target group; professional practitioners in multiethnic societies. 2) It has made ‘cultural identity’ one of the most important concepts in intercultural research. The challenge for intercultural research today is to provide analytical...

This research examines the dynamics of consensus building in intracultural and intercultural negotiations achieved through the convergence of mental models between negotiators. Working from a dynamic constructivist view, according to which the effects of culture are socially and contextually contingent, we theorize and show in two studies of U.S. and Chinese negotiators that while consensus mig...

The paper presents a framework, combined with a checklist for designing and evaluating multimodal, intercultural ICT, especially when embodied artificial communicators are used as front ends for data bases, as digital assistants, as tutors in pedagogical programs or players in games etc. Such a framework is of increasing interest, since the use of ICT across cultural boundaries in combination w...

As the number of foreign people living in Japan has rapidly increased in the last decade, the necessity for intercultural understanding among Japanese people and foreigners alike is becoming more imperative. In the higher education system of Fukui prefecture in Japan, the researcher and her co-researchers aim at developing an original Intercultural Training program using information and communi...