Abstract
China is fast becoming a coveted destination and a hub for higher education among international students, particularly since the announcement of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in September 2013. Consequently, China’s higher-education institutions are seeking ways to make international students’ educational experience more consistent with their expectations. Nonetheless, instructional communication—that is, communication for the purpose of engaging students academically while reducing problematic misunderstandings in the classroom—is a bane of the educational experience of international students in China. Therefore, this article extends instructional communication and intercultural sensitivity models to pedagogical, learner-centered contexts in an attempt to develop an integrated conceptual framework on sustaining international student–Chinese faculty interactions in the classroom. That framework has three key constructs: (a) the faculty’s classroom behaviors and international students’ characteristics, (b) international students’ instructional beliefs, and (c) learning outcomes. They will serve as the basis for positioning instructional practices in responding more appropriately to enhancing the experience of international students as global learners and toward deepening and sustaining the internationalization of China’s higher-education institutions, specifically within the context of BRI.
Highlights
A nation’s higher-education institutions are a repository of skills, talents, innovation and expertise that drive its economy and its social well-being
It is against that backdrop that this article develops, within the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) context, an integrated, conceptual framework for enhancing instructional communication between international students and their Chinese faculty
More important, the present study examines international students’ classroom experiences, a palpably missing dimension in instructional communication research in which “college students constitute the group of greatest interest to instructional communication scholars” [13]
Summary
A nation’s higher-education institutions are a repository of skills, talents, innovation and expertise that drive its economy and its social well-being. It presents an erumpent approach to sustaining BRI by enhancing instructional communication, an approach that departs from the dominant theoretical anchors in the General Theory of Instructional Communication [17,18,19] It focuses on the students’ lived experiences in a culturally disparate environment, even as it iterates the mission of BRI as a strategic, integrated undertaking geared toward both maritime and educational development of institutional charges—international students. To provide an erumpent platform that reduces international students’ instructional misunderstandings that may result from their inadequate oral proficiency in the language of instruction (or learning) and lead to their failure to accomplish their educational goals, goals consistent with the spirit of BRI.
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