ABSTRACT
The 'intercultural seminars' are an educational intervention designed as part of doctoral research to support and enhance the intercultural learning and development of thirty-one sojourners at a public university in Portugal. The learning goals and outcomes for individual modules were crafted according to the areas of competency of the intercultural competence model at the heart of the intervention. Conceptual foundations for the seminars were based on Fantini's model of intercultural communication competence (ICC), which depicts intercultural competence as a set of 'complex abilities needed to perform effectively and appropriately when interacting with others who are linguistically and culturally different from oneself'. Selection of contents builds on an extensive literature review and on needs analysis of participants' stages of intercultural communicative competence development and their areas of interest for intercultural learning elicited by a pre-test questionnaire. The host culture was, then, the leverage for developing student intercultural communicative competence across its areas of competence while exploring sojourning challenges and student identities.
