Intercultural Competence in Fostering Teachers ’ Reflection in Understanding Students ’ Diversity

In recent decades, the development of multicultural competence, or synonymously called intercultural competence (IC), has been developed as a theoritical context in education areas. Teachers’ inner reflection can do more in specific aspect of learning quality by understanding students’ cultural differences through intercultural competence understanding. Adding self-reflection in the process of understanding interaction within different cultures and language will add more self-value in lessen the ethnocentricity. As teachers are having different culture experience, they would share to each other about the differences to another teacher, in which it allows the teachers to reflect from one another. This would subsequently, help teachers to run innerreflection to themselves, to dig more on their own values, that probably added after having cultural-changing experience


INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the growth of international students has a significant growth.The number of international students enrolling higher education outside their home country reached over three million students in 2007.The number growth of such students having approximately doubled every 20 years since 1975 (OECD 2009).France, Germany, the UK and the USA receive nearly half of these foreign students, with most developing and transitional countries being significant net suppliers of students, and hence, being 'net importers' of higher education (Adnett, 2010).Having said that, the ability to understand the multicultural competence is greater than ever in education, both for students and teachers.In recent decades, the development of multicultural competence, or synonymously called intercultural competence (IC), has been developed as a theoritical context in education areas (e.g., Byram, 1997;Buttjes and Byram, 1991;Zarate, Levy and Karmsch, 2008).
Having said that, teachers' urgency in understanding different cultures to deliver the best quality learning is one of the most highlighted aspects of teaching.Apart from enough numbers of teaching methods, selfreflection has been an approach to developing teachers' professional expertise.Both by doing inner reflection or outer reflection that is done with colleagues, peers or subordinates.Not only it helps teachers to understand students' engagement in the class and to ensure the learning quality that is given, but it also helps teachers to understand their inner self that leads to the understanding of their behaviours (Branson, 2005).The author sees that teachers' inner reflection can do more in specific aspect of learning quality by understanding students' cultural differences through intercultural competence understanding, especially to international students, as teachers' inner reflection proven in awakening conscious moral leadership (Baron, 2005) and that all types of social behaviour, pragmatic acts to understand IC are interpreted within the context of moral order (Kadar and Haugh, 2013).
This following essay will discuss the essential role of intercultural competence that will focus on teachers'  Verschueren, 2000).Other

Intercultural Competence in the Education Process
In the area of education, foreign students are often a visible minority and make around 10% of student population on many university campuses, which means there are over million university students coming from outside their country (Elosua, 2014).Having said that, there is an urgent need to deal with "subjective culture" (Triandis, 1993, cited in Elousa, 2014) Berger (2004) comments that teachers guide the students to approach the "growing edge" of their knowledge and awareness, to help build firm fundamental ground within creating an understanding towards anything, particularly in culture differences.

Relevant Pedagogy
The main idea of reflection is to give attention to one's experiences, In practical example, there is a research on teachers' experience teaching international students that is conducted by Salmona, et al (2015).If the basic understanding has become a familiar concept throughout the teachers, eventually it is also beneficial for teachers helping the international students to have cultural transition and make the students feel comfortable during the adaptation phase.
claim that mediation then takes position as a process where individual makes conscious efforts to consider the cultural frames that shape interpretation of pragmatic acts in each languages, to see how different languages and its consequences are used.Thus, metapragmatic awareness for intercultural mediation is characterised by valid awareness of culturally being contexted of pragmatic acts within and across cultures.Meditation has been positioned in relation to languages and cultures which necessitates comparison.While early attempts result in comparisons and value judgements of self and other, the ability to reflect and the ability to develop interpretation can be addressed as measurements of development (Liddicoat, 2006) However, intercultural mediation cannot be simplistically assumed that it will always be successful.Liddicoat and McConachy (2016) mentioned that counteraction and discomfort encountered in the trial of meditation serve the important function of bringing to awareness to each individual's personal boundaries, which can be explored through further reflection.In this sense, while mediation is informed by an individual's starting point of meta-pragmatic awareness in any given interaction, the individual needs to engage in continual reflection in order to have the ability to cultivate incoming cultural data thus increase metapragmatic awareness.In sum, the findings of Liddicoat and McConachy's (2016) research has found that meditation in intercultural competence works only for linguistic character as the main aspect in any kind of communication.Thus, the cultural knowledge and interpretation need to be taken into the account of culture in the construction of meaning which relates to meta-pragmatic awareness that provides a resource for reflection on interpretation of cultural practices in intercultural competence in teaching and learning.
behaviours and meanings are made and interpreted for them to inform future decision-making.Thus, to turn into culturally relevant, teachers need to be engaged in honesty, within critical reflection that challenges them to see how their personality influences their students in either positive or negative ways that includes an examination of how race, culture, and social class shape students' thinking, learning and various understandings of the world (Howard, 2003).Palmer (1998) adds that critical reflection requires deeper level of selfknowledge, as knowing inner self is as crucial to good teaching implementation as knowing the students and the taught subject.When teachers do not know themselves, they hardly know who their students are and subsequently, they cannot teach them well.The understanding of knowing inner self deeply is developed by Branson on his 'The Self' framework, which subsequently he used to see the practical effect to school principals by Self affecting how one understands and interacts with the reality and not just unconfined to their own views of understanding.Through this way, one can consciously monitor oneself inner influences thus able to act freely in achieving the best moral outcome.Branson claimed that the structured self-reflection process can nurtured moral consciousness within oneself.Which subsequently, it completes the process of interpretation in making sense of culture and language differences, as As Kadar and Haugh (2013) have mentioned previously, that all types of social behaviour, pragmatic acts are interpreted within the context of a moral order ANALYTICAL DISCUSSION IC leads to unconscious judgments over culture, which then it has mediation to lessen the judgement that exists.As Liddicoat and McConachy (2016) state that mediation helps individual to have a process where individual makes conscious efforts to consider the cultural frames that shape interpretation of each languages in practical way, to see how different languages and its consequences are used.Thus, awareness of identifying symbolic or non-verbal interaction for intercultural mediation is characterised by valid awareness of culturally contexted of pragmatic acts within and across cultures.However, referring to the findings of Liddicoat and McConachy's (2016) that their research has found the usage of that meditation in intercultural competence works only for linguistic character as the main aspect in any kind of communication.The author then, comes up with proposing model of self-reflection as the development of mediation in educational area from Bennet's (1993) outline of IC, which then self-reflection can help teacher to be cultural mediator by using Branson's concept of 'due to what seems to be a problem in IC is that cultural assumptions that leads to judgements came from someone's value that does not acknowledged by that person consciously, thus the judgment itself tend to remain unconscious (Coupland and Jaworski, 2004).Having said that, the author thinks that combining structured self-reflection that is proposed by Branson is highly relevant to the development of meditation.Thus, self-reflection can provide construction of self-concept which relates to the understanding and awareness of interaction between different cultures and languages that leads to cultural practice in intercultural competence in teaching and learning for teacher facilitates and understanding better in communication as well as action between people in different culture.The aspects within Branson's 'the self' concept will affect one on how to understand and interacts with the reality and not just based on their own views of understanding.
skills and cultural empathy to students that has cultural diversity.Salmona et al. (2015) explains that what important for future teachers is the development of greater cultural competence.The finding of the research was the difficulties that the teachers from The United States experienced due to the lack of understanding in the new context and not yet having the cultural skills to adjust to new culture or having the confidence to find out about it.The other finding is that teachers found it difficult to accurately defining behaviours in the culturally different context.Thus, it reflects the lack in cultural empathy as they expressed selfconscious perceptions about how they were perceived and accepted by the people of the local culture and anxiety about meeting the expectations of locals.However, A most positive finding for teacher education is that after a few weeks of struggling to interpret local behaviours, they began to empathise with others the encountered experiencing an unfamiliar situation.As in one of the informant comment in the research was talking about assumption that help increase empathy, that the teacher said, "I think it' s reminded me to remember that not everyone knows or has experience with the same things that I do.Don't just assume that they will know what you are talking about or what is customary in a situation" (p.47)As teachers are having different culture experience, they would share to each other about the differences to another teacher, in which it allows the teachers to reflect from one another.This would subsequently, help teachers to run innerreflection to themselves, to dig more on their own values, that probably added after having culturalchanging experience.As Lawrence (2001, cited in Carol and Ryan, 2005) comments that academics are still teaching to the ideal form of teaching, the traditional approach of telling the students about something, instead of having a value-added in delivering the knowledge which gives valuable support in teaching process.In essence, Liddicoat and McConachy (2016) would support that based on certain assumptions, and people build knowledge, interpretation, assumption and values to judge about the aspect of reality are depending on a range of consciously and unconsciously evaluation criteria of understanding.Subsequently, when selfreflection can increase the range of consciousness, effective communication upon cultural differences can be a neutral tool for teachers to do teaching activities.CONCLUSION Adding self-reflection in the process of understanding interaction within different cultures and language will add more self-value in lessen the ethnocentricity.as Brunner and Guzman (1989) claims that the process allows students, teachers and facilitator to have action-oriented knowledge about culture reality, thus can help in clarifying and articulating the norms and value within the new culture context to reach general agreement about the next action in the future.In sum, developing cultural competency skills for teachers is fundamental for teaching process, to grow out of traditional teaching method, through developing intercultural competencies based on self-reflection approach.The process will then go beyond the understanding of linguistic, racial or ethnic difference, this will enhance the way teachers think, teach and learn.Self-reflection would then help international students or teachers when they draw on culture, they could pick up an interpretation to construct their social action that is based on intersubjective that their diverse social group would agree.It will also shape the critical awareness towards culture, effective communication and tolerance between different background of home-nations.