Developing intercultural awareness and communication skills in the Australian "internationalised" tertiary context

This paper is organised into five main sections. The first section refers to theoretical perspectives on the internationalisation and ‘democratisation’ of education. It then provides the background to the development of, and details of the content of, the initial intercultural awareness and skills development sessions developed by the author in the National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research at Macquarie University. Next it outlines a successful model of embedding generic academic and professional communication skills into a postgraduate program in accounting at Macquarie University in Sydney. In the next section I describe an approach to the integration of intercultural awareness and communication skills development trialled in two postgraduate programs in two different tertiary institutions in Australia, providing evidence from student interviews, focus groups and lecturer observational notes of perceived outcomes of the embedding approach. The final section outlines my conclusion