Barriers to Intercultural Communication Implications for English Teaching at Tertiary Level in Vietnam

With multiple preferential policies, a lucrative market and an abundant labor force, Vietnam has become a promising destination for foreign investors since the end of the 20 th century.Businesspeople from different countries have come to Vietnam to look for opportunities to do business.The country's picturesque landscape as well as its exotic cuisine culture have also attracted millions of others to visit it every year.Besides, hundreds of thousand of Vietnamese travel abroad for holiday, business, medical treatment and educational purposes every year.Consequently, the need to use English for intercultural communication has never been greater.Nevertheless, crosscountry boundary interlocutions are immensely demanding as it involves communicators from various unfamiliar cultural backgrounds around the world.To achieve their communicative goals, relevant parties need to be aware of the cultural differences which may lead to misunderstanding or even conflicts.Clearly, to send and get the messages across -culturally effectively, one needs to have both linguistic and cultural competence.This fact has dictated a crucial task for English instructors and educators to incorporate culture in their teaching program.Many researchers (Nguyen, 2008; Mitrulescu, 2001, and others) even consider culture the fifth skill which should be taught in parallel with other four language competencies, namely speaking, listening, reading, and writing.Being aware of its critical roles, a considerable number of researches have been devoted to find ways to overcome them.A number of researchers focus on dissecting components of cultures (e.g Hofstede's, as cited in Panocov 2020; Byram, 1997;Bennett, 2009) whereas others (for example, Gudykunst, 1993;Jandt, 2017;Neuliep, 2018) explore barriers which prevent people from communicating crossculturally successfully.Although different scholars have distinct approaches to this challenging problem, their insights illustrate that cultures are so broad and complicated that they need to be dealt with sensitively, systematically and scientifically.Consequently, various cultural issues need to be addressed during the instruction to get English learners ready for intercultural encounter situations.Because of the diverse nature of culture as mentioned above, this paper only focuses on reviewing and analyzing barriers to intercultural communication.Basing on the theory frameworks, suggestions will be made to improve intercultural teaching in Vietnamese tertiary contexts.