INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION ON STUDENTS BUDDIES’ INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION COMPETENCE

Abstract

In the last decade, intercultural communication competence (henceforth: ICC) has been acquiring a quite attention from researchers and educators in higher education. ICC seems to be considered as a fundamental unit of competences that students need to have in a multicultural and diverse world (Harun, Dalib, Yusof, & Ahmad, 2018). As one of the way that students can practice and implement their ICC, Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies (ACICIS) offers local students or buddies to be involved in helping the international students to find their accommodation. In relation to that, most of the relevant ICC studies tend to discuss individuals’ self-reflection of their own ICC coming to a different country by using questionnaires to collect the data. Little do studies investigate buddies’ ICC. Therefore, in this context, as to fill the empirical void, this research aims to investigate international students’ perception on buddies’ intercultural communication competence during the accommodation searching in Yogyakarta. This study is grounded on Chen (1992)’s theory on foundations of intercultural communication competence. The study is employed qualitative method. Participants in this research were two Australian students who are living in Yogyakarta for a semester. The data were obtained by using in-depth interview. The researcher analyzed the data by using thematic analysis method by Braun & Clarke (2006). The finding showed that the participants’ buddies have different competence and approach to perform appropriate ICC. An interesting finding was found that one of the international students experienced culture shock, which turned out to be a positive experience because the student found it as a new interesting experience.