daronloo

Arasaratnam and Doerfel's (2005) study on defining intercultural communicative competence (ICC) may be dated, but I believe their discussions are very relevant to the current situation of ICC.  Their study aimed to define ICC from a grounded exploratory approach.  Their reasoning behind this is because of the subjective understanding of what intercultural is, and what competence is.  Communication, from an intercultural perspective, is typified as spoken discourse. To come to a definition of ICC, the study interviewed a group of international and local students studying in an American university.  The students were asked what they thought ICC is, and what they thought are key components of a person who is interculturally competent.  Though responses were diverse, a common thread was induced. But would this common thread still be applicable to different cultural contexts?  Probably from a qualitative perspective it would be, but perhaps not if viewed wit...

I am sure this list will expand in the coming months and years, but these are three things that I have realized recently.  Beats me why it took me so long to realize them. 1.  No matter how thorough you think your conceptual framework is, there will always be something out there that could debunk your whole research. 2.  When you organize your articles (soft copies) on your computer, forget APA referencing style, start off with the title and leave the authors to the very end. 3.  Don't wait till you have accumulated piles of files in your download or documents folder before organizing.  Organizing can be a pain in the behind when you wait too long.

This morning my supervisor emailed me asking me if I would be interested to participate in our Faculty's conference later this week.  I was feeling like an opportunist today, so I said yes. I only got to work on the poster this evening and spent about an hour working on it.  I was not quite sure how I am supposed to design the poster, but I would imagine something with important catch phrases and keywords with minimal texts.  That's what I did.  As I was creating this poster, I got to thinking, am I on the right track?  My train of thought while making the poster was quite direct, with very little interruption.  It felt like I had a direction to go.  This encourages me but at the same time scares me.  How would I know that the direction I'm taking is not too simplistic?  Is it so uncritical that I am able to go from point A to point B without much interference? I reckon that despite having a seemingly simple research design, the depth of ...