Abstract: The aim of the speech is to show the potential in the use of critical incidents in business communication and beyond. The Critical Incident Cycle will be introduced to show selected life situations from business contexts deemed as significant by their actors as a cyclical process revealing a person’s learning process. This is because these situations known as critical incidents can unfold both, the situational reactions, including emotion, cognition and behavior, as well as the long-term metacognitive and meta-behavioral revision and change. As such, critical incidents are explorable for the purpose of a person’s personal and professional growth and learning and can be used not only as a didactic tool inside classroom, but also as means for autonomous life-long learning and self-development in the area of intercultural competence in work practice.

Real-life situations experienced by students in varied international and organizational contexts collected in the form of written narrations in varied subjects of the Škoda Auto University study programs will be adapted for the purpose of analyses and forms of implementation in a wide range of learning environments. Each presented case will include instruction for individual and group brainstorming, class discussion, analysis, including participant reflections, evaluation, and a didactic summary. Presented cases from a variety of professional fields including management and leadership, human resource and diversity management, international relations, sociology or psychology, to name a few, will aim at particular areas of the soft-skill development with accent on intercultural communication and professional skills.

Bio note: Dagmar Sieglová works as the head of the Department of Languages and Intercultural Competences at the Škoda Auto University in Mladá Boleslav. Besides teaching intercultural competence and diversity management, intercultural marketing and business English, she is the supervisor of the Language Management course at the Department of Human Resource Management. She gained her expertise from her Master’s in Intercultural communication at the University of Pennsylvania, US and her Ph.D. in Linguistics at Charles University in Prague, CZ. Her sociolinguistic research covers topics of language management, intercultural communication, second language acquisition while adopting conversational analytic research procedures. She also specializes in teaching and learning methodology and didactics. She provides workshops and training for the educational, public as well as professional sector.