Internationalization at Home: Implications for Promoting Intercultural Competence of Domestic Students in Chinese Universities

Abstract

With the deepening of economic globalization, the relations between China and other countries and regions are growing closer, the rising need for flexible knowledge workers drives the Chinese universities to develop the intercultural and global learning competence of students. The traditional ways are sending the students abroad and bringing international students in, then students can personally experience and be fully immersed in a different culture and education system, to promote their intercultural competence. The fluidity to some extent boosts the exchange of knowledge and the flow of talents. But compared to the number of students who stay in the homeland, mobility is still limited for the prevalence and development of internationalization in Chinese higher education. Therefore, internationalization at home becomes a vital part of equipping domestic students with global views and intercultural competence. The essay will review the explanations of internationalization at home given by many researchers, the premise and its importance of it. Then critically analyses the diverse aspects of it, the internationalization of teachers, the renewal of the curriculum and the “virtual” mobility (the distance knowledge exchange), the inspirations for Chinese universities to enhance the students’ intercultural competence and its limitations additionally. Internationalization at home should be valued as an important guideline for universities to prepare students in a globalization world, and the strategy break through the limitations of the traditional approaches to cultivating an “international” student, the internationalization of higher education at home deepen and intensify the basic functions of education by the internationalization of teaching, students, curriculum, to cultivate the students with a global view, creative thinking and international competitiveness.