2014 Volume 16 Issue 1 Pages 63-76
In the fields of global human resources development, there is a greater need for intercultural understanding. This has mainly been proposed and delivered as part of training in foreign languages.However, intercultural issues are very elusive, mysterious and difficult to treat in an easy-to-understand way. We need a structured analytical methodology to analyze these issues by using a method that is independent of participant' s level of language skill. To achieve this goal, we propose a new methodology for intercultural understanding exploring and looking at variations in analytical thought process by using a computer-mediated multilingual communication system, in which a multilingual case tool used in MBA schools is experimentally introduced. The system provides an environment that integrates intercultural knowledge and multicultural conflict-resolution experience to the participants. We conducted experiments to evaluate how effective our proposed methodology was for extracting the variations in analytical thought process from multilingual communication data. By comparing the experimental results from participants with different cultural backgrounds, we found that we could extract both the cultural similarities and difference among three groups of participants, Korean, American, and Japanese.
