International Experience Intercultural Competence

Questions: 1. How can listening help you develop intercultural competence?2. Discuss your own vision for the world. What is the role of intercultural competence in your vision? Answers: 1. In most, if not all, the places in the world, it would be both true and evident to state that listening is an essential skill. As a matter of fact, listening refers to your ability to understand information actively as spoken and the interest displayed in the topic of discussion. Additionally, it can entail a feedback provided to the speaker, such as making inquiries of pertinent questions that allow the person you are conversing with knows that you have understood the message. Being the case, listening helps you to understand others better and thus enabling you to develop intercultural competence. Cultural competence is all about your actions and will in building an understanding between you and others, meaning that you are open and respectful of others cultural perspectives and beliefs. As such, listening becomes an essential skill that enables you to build relationships, which are significant to cultural competence given that the foundations are made from understanding each others attitudes and expectations that as a result builds on each others strength in knowledge. On the other hand, intercultural competence involves the way you understand others culture and how they do yours, which listening as a skill plays a pretty big role in given that the key effective communication is listening, as without it, there are several misunderstandings. Taking this into consideration, you should learn to develop your communication skills by listening much so that your interaction across the different cultures of the world can be efficient and effective. 2. Above everything else, my vision for the world we live in today is to see peaceful co-existence everywhere. You will notice that there are ever clashes between different cultures, communities, and even countries. To put the ever rising clashes to rest, intercultural competence and mutual understanding have to be established. It is through these two important attributes that we can be able to come to a common understanding that will enable us to address the most virulent problems as faced by contemporary societies today. Taking a look at a majority of the most common occurrences that caused the disruption of peace, they have been as a result of hate speech, discrimination, and manifestations of prejudice. Interestingly enough, you will find these problems linked in a way to political and socio-economic misunderstanding and inequalities of between people coming from different cultural affiliations and background. As such, intercultural competence is of great significance if at all I would want to see my vision of a peaceful co-existence everywhere coming to be. However, to fulfill the vision of a peaceful co-existence everywhere in the world, education would be essential it would touch on the numerous aspects of our lives. Education would enable citizens from anywhere to culturally live together in different communities. This is because our capabilities to both communicate and understand each other as fellow beings who come from diverse cultural divisions is fundamentally important for making such societies work. In short, intercultural competence needs to be acquired through education, which objectively aims towards enhancing and developing this ability that can make an important contribution to a peaceful co-existence.