Yes, definitely! Attached are examples of what happens when you are not culturally competent, which can be very costly to international students.

Many thanks,

Debra

Article Workforce Education and Development (WED): Graduate Students...

Hi Kiran,

Yes, I agree with Debra and I appreciated her article.

These additional resources may interest you:

• Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice by Geneva Gay.
• Diversity & Motivation: Culturally Responsive Teaching by Raymond Wlodkowski & Margery Ginsberg.
• Effective educators are culturally competent communicators by Johann Le Roux.

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=rYspC7C-zowC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=Cultural+competence+and+teaching+effectiveness&ots=ElbmeA97xH&sig=XhLKWGnZQvrz0_KC3_6HhMkFnK4#v=onepage&q=Cultural%20competence%20and%20teaching%20effectiveness&f=false

http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED387036

http://www.iupui.edu/~c482web/documents/PDFs/leRoux.pdf

Debra Sharon Ferdinand,Stephen Cheung ,

Thanks for your contribution.

I suggest that you re-prase competence. It is an instrumental term, whereas culture is expressive. Paul

Is cultural competence leads to more effective teaching?

Agreed with other scholars & their supporting artifacts indicating cultural competence leads to more effective teaching.  From my personal experience living in a multi-cultural Malaysia that consists of Chinese, Iban, Indian, Kadazan, Malay, Peranakan / Baba-Nyonya, Portoguese-Eurasians etc.  Cultural competence / awareness make us to be wiser & more sensitive when delivering a teaching message so that you will not give a bad example / offend certain ethnic groups.  This cultural competence is analogous to finding a common good solution among many obstacles when different cultural values are overlapped.  To do so is not easy whereby we need to think hard & work hard but the outcome is fulfilling because the common good solution is beneficial to everyone.

Yes

Hi Kiran,

and many thanks for raising this very interesting questions. I thonk that intercultural competence is very much needed in every teaching/learning context and that we should also broader the notion of inter-cultural competence so as to include "interlocal" knowledge. What I mean is that we tend to interpret intercultural awareness as a notion that brings about ideas of different languages and nationalities, as is evident from the excellent contributions to this discussion provided so far. However, we need to be alerted to the fact that "interculture" means also addressing differences at a national and even local level, when, for example, classes can consist of mono-linguistic and mono-cultural students (as is the 99% case where I teach in Italy, for example), but students may belong to different local traditions, for example when they come from neighbouring regions but that can exhibit remarkable differences in terms of dialects spoken at home or local tradition. So this issue needs to be considered carefully by teachers. The use of peer-learning strategies can have a positive profound impact on teaching as well, as when students play an active role in teaching/learnig strategies, they can suggest possible lack of knowledge in teachers (so that teachers can be guided by the students themselves to this end).

You may wish to have a look at the paper below:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281442313_English_for_Linguistics_and_multimodal_peer_assessment_at_university_postgraduate_level?ev=prf_pub 

Article English for Linguistics and multimodal peer assessment at un...

Maria Grazia Sindoni

Thanks for adding your effort & contribution by views.

Dear Kiran,

   Good evening. Cultural competence and intercultural communication play a crucial role in the process of teaching. The following papers reflect this viewpoint:

   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303353560_Teaching_strategies_oriented_on_the_linguistic_modelling_of_intercultural_communications

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287814099_GLOBAL_AND_LOCAL_-_THE_STRATEGIES_OF_TEACHING

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303543422_RECENT_REDAGOGICAL_STRATEGIES_DIRECTED_TOWARDS_THE_MAINTENANCE_OF_NATIONAL_IDENTITY

Conference Paper Teaching strategies oriented on the linguistic modelling of ...

Article GLOBAL AND LOCAL – THE STRATEGIES OF TEACHING

Conference Paper RECENT REDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES DIRECTED TOWARDS THE MAINTENAN...

No language teaching without culture to develop socio-cultural competence.

A little bit off topic, but don't we also need to consider the intercultural competence of the teacher. I have recently heard stories from not-shy Japanese students about what happens when teachers are unshiftable in their belief that East Asians are shy and are determined to do something about it. In one case, at a language school in New York, it seems that in order to get a 'shy' Japanese student to speak more loudly, the teacher asked her a question and walked out of the room and told her to speak louder until he could here her. In another, in Dublin, the teacher made it very clear that she did not expect much Chinese participation in group discussions because Chinese don't express their opinions in spite of, according to my Japanese informant, very active participation by most of the Chinese students in the class.

I agree much with Martin,s that Intercultural competence is fundamental, but specifically for the SL or FL teachers, since culture is shaped by language. Teaching a language is teaching its culture to avoid miscommunication. 

Dear Augustinus,

I think you have misunderstood the point I am trying to make. My point is that both of these teachers appear to have failed to see individuals because they could not see past their stereotypes of Japanese and Chinese students in spite of evidence from others that the stereotype was inaccurate. The New York teacher seems to have believed that a Japanese student was shy because she was Japanese, and not that she was simply a shy person. Even worse, in my opinion, was that the teacher also appears not to have respected her right to be shy and tried to force her publicly to change. The Dublin teacher appears not to have noticed what her Chinese students were actually doing. Fortunately, this was not a 'high stakes' English programme. Imagine how inaccurate her grades might have been.