Ethnic Chinese Students’ Communication with Cultural Others in a New Zealand University

Abstract

This interpretive study explores the intercultural communication experiences of ethnic Chinese students in a New Zealand university classroom context. In aspiring to collaborative relationships with their New Zealand peers and in seeking help from teaching staff, ethnic Chinese students often experienced difficulties in intercultural communication. In moving from dialectic to dialogic styles of learning, they had to acquire communication strategies that enabled them to question, challenge, interrupt, and manage co-operative learning situations. Alliances among other ethnic Chinese and international students appeared to facilitate intercultural and educational understanding. By contrast, communication and co-operation with New Zealand students, although desired, often remained elusive. The study has implications for optimizing intercultural communication in the classroom with students from Chinese and other non-Western cultures.