Assessing Intercultural Communication

Assessing intercultural communicative competence can be challenging for a number of reasons. First, there is little consensus regarding the precise definitions of subcomponents of intercultural competence, making it difficult to identify specific constructs to assess. Second, intercultural competence is locally situated, so the “same behavior or skill may be perceived as competent in one context but not another or one perceiver but not another, and thus no particular skill or ability is likely to ever be universally ‘competent’” (Spitzberg & Changnon, 2009, p. 6). Third, in a related vein, some aspects of intercultural communicative competence might not be suitable for classroom assessment, an issue that is addressed at the end of this chapter. In spite of these challenges, for personal and institutional purposes, assessing learners’ progress in intercultural communicative competence remains an important educational objective. Thus, in this chapter, I review several relevant concepts in L2/Lx assessment, then explore how they relate to understanding intercultural communicative competence, illustrating the theory with three case studies.