A pre-placement questionnaire was completed by a cohort of 30 students participating in the Erasmus exchange programmes from the University of Salamanca, placed in British universities, and by a group of 25 Nottingham Trent University students hosted by diverse Spanish universities. The questionnaire was then analysed with the aim of providing a profile of their intercultural communicative competence (ICC), based on data about their self-perceived motivation and their intercultural awareness, knowledge, attitudes and skills, prior to their stay abroad. Despite the fact that their previous experience abroad, level of language proficiency and home university requirements for the placement differed, both groups shared a positive attitude towards the host country, considered themselves ready to adapt to new cultural environments, regarded misperceptions and solving conflicts as their greater challenge and expressed a willingness to grow personally and professionally. These data will inform a larger research project seeking to identify the factors that promote the acquisition of intercultural competences, as a basis for universities to equip students with tools aimed at overcoming obstacles that may pose an educational challenge for them and hinder the development of their ICC while on placement abroad.

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Drawing on seminal notions of culture to help diagnose and evaluate intercultural training (Byram 1997), this paper reports on the preliminary results of a research project seeking to explore key elements of the intercultural dimension during Erasmus placements. Preliminary data from a questionnaire distributed to students from Nottingham Trent University (UK) and Salamanca University (Spain) show that, in spite of their differences, both groups display positive attitudes towards the host country at the beginning of their placements, even if the eradication of deeply ingrained prejudices still pose the main educational challenge for the students and their home and host institutions.

This paper presents a qualitative analysis of the impact of university students’ socialisation patterns on the development of ICC (Intercultural Communicative Competence) during their Erasmus placements. In our research, we complement previous comparative analyses of a quantitative nature between UK and Spain based students’ ICC. The answers to sixteen items from a questionnaire provided by 40 Nottingham Trent University and 30 University of Salamanca students shed light on three pivotal dimensions: everyday interaction patterns, overall perception of the study sojourn, and intercultural lessons learned during their stay. Our results show that, at the end of their placement, both cohorts report no substantial differences on their means to socialise while abroad and that the two confer paramount importance to being open-minded and using the target language proficiently, while their perception differs regarding aspects such as their previous knowledge about the host country or their self-image as representatives of their home culture.