8.2 Introduction

You are about to conclude your professional and personal learning journey in intercultural communication. We developed this journey and its various paths with the aim of enabling you to analyse intercultural interactions and communication processes and use this analysis for developing a common ground of understanding. In other words, exploring the nature and effects of interculturality, use the potentials inherent in such encounters and be ready to cope with possible misunderstandings and confusions which may accrue from cultural differences. And this is the step, you are about to take in the course of this session. You are going to apply your learnings and use them as part of the process to outline how you can deal with misunderstandings and misperceptions through the process of negotiating culture.

You embarked on this learning journey to acquire knowledge, but by applying your knowledge and working on the various tasks you equally had the opportunity to develop useful skills. By introducing the conceptual framework of intercultural competence, the purpose of this session is also to provide you with a framework helping you to reflect on the knowledge and skills you have acquired.