Introduction
The research question is “How can young people develop cultural competence when they are living in London?” Cultural competence is an important ability to understand and communicate with people from different cultures. It provides people with a more cultural perspective to solve their problems (Improving Cultural Competence 2015). This project is about helping young people to develop their cultural competence and be able to communicate with people from different backgrounds. The background to this project is that London is a multicultural city and there are many opportunities to meet people from different places when living in London. However, living in a multicultural city does not always develop people’s cultural competence because they need to accept both cultures from their home country and host country. The perspective of this research is from an international student in London who are from China.
Methodology
The research methods are used in this project include literature review, qualitative and action research. Some background information and theory of this research are supported by books and journal articles. I also attend online sessions about cultural competence to get more information from experts. Furthermore, surveys and interviews with stakeholders and experts are used to collect data to develop the interventions.
My previous interventions were created to test how can boots people’s confidence and self-awareness in a cross-culture environment. After that, I made an online quiz based on the UAL language learning centre to test participators’ level and knowledge of cultural competence. In addition, I interviewed many experts who are online English teachers to know their knowledge and experience of cultural competence. Based on their feedback, I created my current intervention to test if the similarity between people can narrow the culture gap. It is a game about answering cultural questions such as “What’s your favourite breakfast?” “What birthday traditions do you have?” and players can find if they have similarities during the game.
Reflection and Analysis
At the beginning of this project, the range of my topic is big and it needs to be narrowed down. I contacted UAL Students’ Union and Language Centre to gain more information about cultural competence, but I did not get useful information from the Students’ Union and Language Centre. However, Language Centre provides online resources that I can learn some knowledge about intercultural communication. I also attended an online session about developing intercultural competence at The London School of International Communication. I found knowledge, skills and attitudes are three important elements in the process of developing cultural competence. I tried to help people gain more knowledge about culture in my research but then I failed. People can acquire cultural knowledge from books, online recourses and it is a huge area that will never end. What I learn from my research is that attitudes are more important. If people have attitudes about cultural competence, they have the power to learn the knowledge.
Then I focused my research on people’s attitudes. And I got some useful feedback from my experts who are culturally competent online English teachers. What I learn from them is that cross-cultural communication is not a big issue as people think. It is important to think everyone is the same. This feedback inspired me because I always try to find cultural differences instead of similarities.
Conclusion
By doing the research so far, I found developing cultural competence is not as difficult as I thought if I focused my project on effect people’s attitudes. However, there are some challenges I have in this research project because I need to gather stakeholders from different cultural backgrounds to test my interventions. At the same time, I can learn how to work with different people during this research process. As my current intervention has not been finished, I will test it on more people soon afterwards and to see if it can improve my project.