Doing cross-cultural interviews from Vietnamese students' experience and reflective practice: lessons on intercultural communicative competence

This article presents and assesses the effect of an educational intervention using cross-cultural interviews to help university students with their intercultural communicative competence by investigating students' reflection on their interviews with foreigners, including: difficulties, solutions, interviewees' opinions and qualities making up a good cross-cultural interview. There were 40 under-graduate students participating in the research. Through applying qualitative content analysis, the study found that attitudes were considered the most pivotal component contributing to the success of cross-cultural interaction, which required careful preparation of the conversation topic so as to come up with good questions that can open chances for opinion exchange and curiosity; friendliness and confidence which could help interviewers and interviewees overcome their limitations of language competence, background differences and build up a comfortable atmosphere for idea discussion and mutual understanding. Furthermore, the task helped students to recognize cultural differences and raised their cultural awareness by giving them a chance to reflect on their own culture and perspectives and compare them with others' ones.