Intercultural communication challenges: a case study of multilingual workplaces in Thailand

This study aimed to investigate the intercultural communication challenges that the employees working in multilingual workplaces in Thailand faced as well as howthey overcame the challenges. A total of 40 employees consisting of 20 Thai employees and 20 foreign employees who worked in English tutorial schools in Thailand for more than a year and had high English proficiency were chosen as participants. The researchinstruments in this study were a self-assessment questionnaire and the semi-structured interview. The self-assessment questionnaire was adapted based on Byram’sIntercultural Communicative Competence model which concerned knowledge, skills, attitudes and cultural awareness. The self-assessment questionnaire was used for the purpose of exploring the intercultural communication challenges and the semistructuredinterview was also employed in order to investigate the intercultural communication challenges as well as how to overcome the challenges for in-depth information. The data from the questionnaire was analyzed through SPSS program for descriptive statistics in mean score, standard deviation ( S.D.) and percentage. The conceptual content analysis was also employed to analyze the data from the semistructured interview. The findings showed that the intercultural communicative competence (ICC)was necessary in language teaching and conducting educational assessments. From five dimensions of Byram’s ICC model, the employees were highly competent in critical cultural awareness the most (x̄ = 4.47), followed by skills of discovery and interaction(x̄ = 4.45). The skills of interpreting and relating were also demonstrated as high (x̄ = 4.41), followed by having positive attitudes towards multicultural people (x̄ = 4.28) and knowledge on cultural differences (x̄ = 4.05) accordingly. Thus, the knowledge of ICC was considered the area where the employees lacked, which resulted in the occurrence of challenges in their workplace. The findings from the interview revealed that the employees found it challenging to simplify the language used in the workplace, especially in classrooms with various students. With the aim of overcoming challenges, the employees were required to develop this unconscious knowledge of ICC by observing students’ reactions before responding and simply asking their colleagues who dealt or had experience with teaching various groups of students before. Another challenge found was specifically happened when employees had to provide feedbackto students as students’ perceptions towards receiving constructive feedback were different due to the differences in cultures. This challenge was due to the insufficiency of ICC conscious knowledge and could be overcome by doing research or self-study on cultural differences in order to best select the appropriate communication styles that match individuals. The employees were also suggested to be more open-minded and adaptive to different intercultural contexts in order to become a competent communicator.