Course description
Have you ever felt out of place when traveling away from home? Have you ever failed to find the humor in a joke that’s obviously funny to others? Have cross-cultural friendships ever introduced you to new perspectives?

Cross-cultural interactions can be powerfully transformative experiences, but they can also be difficult to navigate. Globalization has offered growing opportunities for intercultural exchange, but also misinterpretation and conflict: this has sparked a renewed interest in the scholarship of intercultural communication and has led to a rise in training programs designed to develop “cultural competence” in the diplomatic, educational, philanthropic, and business worlds.

This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of the joys and challenges of intercultural communication. Drawing from psychology, linguistics, semiotics, and anthropology, we will discuss theories of intercultural communication and examine common barriers to understanding. Topics covered include the interplay between language, culture, and cognition, and the fraught relationship between language and power. We will examine examples of paralanguage and metalanguage in speaking and writing; code-switching and code-meshing; culture-specific non-verbal communication; and the conceptual differences between multilingualism, translingualism, and interlinguistics.

Class activities will draw on the multicultural and multilingual background of VIU students, featuring language games and collective problem-solving challenges that build on course readings. Students will learn about constructed languages (conlangs) designed specifically to foster intercultural understanding, and collectively develop proto languages of their own. We’ll also examine and enact strategies commonly taught in cultural sensitivity training programs, and employ the theories learned in class to critically assess their efficacy. Students will then collaborate to propose new training modules based on situations they have experienced or witnessed themselves.


Syllabus

• The concept of culture in the era of globalization
  • Subcultures, co-cultures, and institutional cultures

• Culture shock and the shock of “re-entry”
  • Definitions and stages
  • Representations of culture shock in fiction
  • Making sense of personal experience

• Intercultural communication and its barriers
  • Pidgins, creoles, diglossia, multilingualism, code-switching and code-meshing,
  • body language, silence, laughter, and proxemics (cultural differences in interpersonal space)
  • Dress, gender roles, and cultural conventions
  • Language ideology, stereotypes, and ethnocentrism
  • Assimilation vs. segregation

• Applications and case studies
  • Multicultural college campuses and workplaces
  • Intercultural families, dating, and relationships<
  • Study/service abroad & re-entry
  • Mapping speech communities in Venice

• Cultural intelligence (CQ) and cultural competence
  • Definitions and critical evaluations
  • Ethics in intercultural philanthropic interventions

• Interlinguistics (solutions for intercultural communication)
  • Constructed languages for global understanding
  • Case study: Esperanto over the decades
  • Cultural rights and linguistic justice

Learning Outcomes
Identify barriers to intercultural communication and propose solutions, critically examine real-world cross-cultural encounters, formulate a research question, and design a study.

Pedagogy
Through class discussions, group assignments and active learning strategies, instructor encourages students to share cross-cultural insights and collaboratively construct knowledge. Short readings teach concepts that are then applied in group tasks, language games, film analyses, case studies, and Venetian field trips.

Assessment
35% - Group work, games, class activities, individual presentations, field trips, film viewings
20% - Quizzes
20% - Culture shock in fiction: applying theory to a story, novel, or film
25% -Theory in practice: research proposal on a speech community or intercultural encounter of student’s choosing (e.g., language dynamics of Venice, international adoption, Deaf culture, minority languages in multicultural nations, ethics of interventional philanthropy)

Last updated: March 23, 2026