Intercultural Communication Education Research Articles

Attempts at including, mediating and creating ‘new’ knowledges: problematising appropriation in intercultural communication education and research

Abstract In recent years, there have been multiple endeavours at unsettling the dominance of western voices in knowledge production, consumption and dissemination in language and intercultural communication education and research. Including, mediating and creating ‘new’ knowledges about interculturality are epistemic acts that may sustain and exercise decoloniality and decentering through (potential) dialogues with e.g., the Global South. However, these acts might unknowingly precipitate epistemological appropriation through their complicity or due to the pressures to comply with the skewed geopolitics of knowledge production, consumption and dissemination. This paper unpacks the complex deployment of languaging and knowledging in contesting, blurring and problematising both the dominant epistemological tenets and/or decentring attempts. For example, it presents the notion of ‘epistemological chameleon’ which captures how our knowledgings and languagings are (in)deliberately revamped and reshaped to fit ‘trendy’ narratives without destabilizing one’s assumptions and perspectives; an act that may often be driven by the necessity to survive within the skewed geopolitics of knowledge. The concepts and methods of devenir-langue and transknowledging as proposed by the authors, are used to examine how six recently published research papers in English by prominent Northern and Southern scholars may exhibit potential lingua-epistemological inaccuracies to include and showcase the voice of the Global South(s) while claiming in-/directly to push for decoloniality and epistemological diversity in language and intercultural communication education and research. These articles were selected as example cases based on their indicated rationales and intentions for decoloniality, criticality and inter-epistemological collaborations and are not meant to generalise the current state of this complex field. Implications from these analyses are the development of six ideal-types of inclusion, mediation and creations versus epistemological appropriation based on the papers. Further insights are made into the factors precipitating appropriation that may often be implicit, unheeded and unintentional.

ELF Communication Strategies: A Pedagogical Intervention Pilot Study

AbstractThis study investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of ELF communication strategy instruction for university students’ communicative competence. Conceptual studies on ELF‐informed pedagogy stress the importance of teaching strategies, which promote mutual understanding and positive relationships, but few empirical pedagogical studies exist. This gap seriously hinders efforts to develop more inclusive English language and intercultural communication teaching practices that meet real‐world communication needs. In response, this pilot study developed and tested the effectiveness of instructional materials and assessment instruments for teaching ELF communication strategies. These materials were pilot tested with 26 L1 and LX English speaking participants. The two assessments resulted in statistically significant improvements from pre‐ to posttest with small effect sizes. Participant opinion survey responses were overwhelmingly positive. Based on these encouraging preliminary results, follow‐up pedagogical studies should expand on this pilot study to yield a more comprehensive understanding of ELF communication strategy instruction.

Criticality and Reflections of Intercultural Communication Education during Post-pandemic Era in China

The occurrence of Covid-19 as both a Black Swan and Grey Rhino has taken a toll on international education and intercultural communication. Notwithstanding that the post-pandemic period has officially arrived, the phenomenon of ethnocentrism and right-ring populism has grown exponentially during pandemic, exacerbating the detrimental effects on intercultural communication, which are consistent during post-pandemic period. Hence, it is necessary to rethink intercultural communication education, research and training with criticality and reflections. This article examines the practice of intercultural communication education, research and training in China and explore possible countermeasures to cope with those issues.

Research on strategies for developing intercultural communicative competence for English majors

Nowadays, the world needs high-quality talents with multicultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence. English majors have advantages in language. They should adapt to the needs of the times and contribute to the practice of Chinese culture going out and the community of human destiny. It is important for both teachers and English majors to master strategies for intercultural communication. The paper takes foreign language teachers and English majors as the research objects. Quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted to investigate the current level of English majors' intercultural communicative competence and the problems encountered in cultivating students' intercultural communicative competence. Based on the results of the survey, it analyzes and puts forward strategies to improve the intercultural communicative competence of English majors. The results of this paper are instructive for teachers to optimize intercultural communicative teaching and develop intercultural communicative competence for English majors and provide new ideas and methods for future research in related fields.

Power relations and change in intercultural communication education: Zhongyong as a complementary analytical framework

ABSTRACT Power relations and change have become two of the most important foci of intercultural communication education and research. This paper contributes to these two elements by problematising and operating an analytical framework from outside the ‘West’, the Chinese notion of Zhongyong (the ‘Golden Mean’). Based on a dialogical analysis of focus groups collected during an art course, the paper shows that Zhongyong can expand and complexify our understanding of interculturality, looking into how e.g. the students balance otherness with otherness (or not), as well as make use of reflectivity and criticality (or not) to implement potential change when cooperating.

The Application and Impact of Flipped Classroom Model in Intercultural Communication Teaching

The Application and Impact of Flipped Classroom Model in Intercultural Communication Teaching

“Just Take Your Time and Talk to us, Okay?”– International Education Students Facilitating and Promoting Interculturality in Online Initial Interactions

ABSTRACT Meeting others abroad and/or online is considered important in the broad field of intercultural communication education (amongst others: international education, minority and migrant education, but also teacher education, language education) to test out one’s learning about interculturality. For several weeks, a group of university students from China and a group of local and international students studying at a Finnish university met regularly online to talk about global educational issues. Using a specific lens of interculturality, which focuses on the discursive co-construction of identities, we explore their initial interactions, how they deal with the uncertainty and potential awkwardness of their very first encounters, before they start working on their educational tasks. Based on the students’ self-disclosure (practices, thoughts, identity construction), and adopting a dialogical discourse analysis, the authors examine their co-construction of interculturality. The results show that the students try to facilitate interculturality while promoting it together more or less successfully. Reasons are discussed. The authors argue that research on the underexplored case of online initial interactions, which represent crucial moments in establishing and negotiating interculturality, could provide important research and pedagogical input for intercultural telecollaboration.

Visual Communication: Exploring Representations of Vietnamese Culture in Advertising

Visual communication has received much attention from studies in the field of foreign language education. In the Vietnamese context, however, little research has been conducted to explore the meanings of Vietnamese cultural aspects in visual advertising. To fill such a gap, this article investigated visual meanings of Vietnamese cultural values represented in visual elements of common advertising in the Vietnamese market. The data were firstly selected from various logos and images of popular brands in the Vietnamese market and then interpreted based on the Iceberg Model for Interpreting Vietnamese Images (IMIVI framework) (Huynh, 2022). The results revealed the selected advertisements carried core Vietnamese cultural values in terms of visible and invisible elements. Specifically, culturally specific images such as flowers, animals, and traditional clothing were identified as visible factors. Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist values were found as invisible factors in selected images of popular advertisements in the Vietnamese context. Findings reported this article might be helpful for research in visual communication, multimodality, and foreign language education. The outcomes of this article are also interesting for cultural studies, especially for the roles of culture in commercial advertising, intercultural communication, and foreign language education.

An Exploration on the Cultivation of Intercultural Communication Competence in High Schools English Reading Based on the “The Third Place”

The Ministry of Education promulgated Curriculum Standards for Ordinary High Schools (2017), which regulated that it is necessary to cultivate highs school students with the intercultural communication competence and the ability to spread Chinese culture. The traditional intercultural communication teaching, which is target-language oriented, has caused the phenomenon of “Aphasia of Chinese culture”. Meanwhile, the intercultural communication cultivation in high school English teaching was also simply understood as the instruction of foreign knowledge. In order to solve the problems, the idea of “the third space” theory has been chosen as the theory of cultivating students’ intercultural communicative competence. “The third space” is neither composed of the native culture nor the target language culture, but an innovative space born in the process of dynamic contact, collision and interaction between the two cultures. Based on this theory, this paper summarizes the research status of intercultural communication competence and clarifies its specific connotation, reviews the cultivation of intercultural communication competence in high school English teaching. It takes A Child of Two Cuisine (a passage from unit 1, book 2 of English textbook of FLTRP Edition) as an example to state how to apply “the third place” to the lesson design based on the activity-based English learning. But due to lack of conditions, the argumentation of this paper lacks empirical research to test its effectiveness.

Unravelling intercultural communication education in the periphery: critical examination of interculturality university-level courses

ABSTRACT Critical discourses in intercultural communication (IC) scholarship continue to foreground the postcolonial malaise of Southern spaces. Intercultural communication education (ICE) may encounter some pedagogical challenges in its endeavour to reflect the complexity and depth of the discipline and its recent critical turn. This paper seeks to unravel the transformations and the emerging discourses accompanying the ‘critical turn’ in ICE. The rationale is (a) to engage more deeply with the realisations of this critical turn against a background of unequal power relations and its implications and contextualisations within the Global South and (b) to clarify the possibilities of ICE in disrupting ideological polarities and promoting social justice. The aims are, therefore, (a) to probe into the interrogating and resisting potentials of ICE in the periphery and (b) to discuss the complexities associated with teaching IC from a critical perspective in contexts situated within the lower spectrum of power asymmetries.

Student Initiative of Producing Their Own Mini Videos for Language Learning

This study explores how students produce their own mini videos using the target language to share experiences and communicate with native speakers. Multimodality is used as a theoretical approach. Class observations and in-depth interviews were used for data collection, which was analysed by theme. The research results indicate that students deem it the agency of their own learning rather than completing the assignments given by the tutor; they gain more from the discussions among their peers and native speakers than from giving the presentations in class only; watching and making comments on their own videos is visually and mentally stimulating, which triggers more thoughts and expressions. Students appreciate the cooperation among themselves, while they also find it challenging to manage their publicity. This research provides empirical evidence on how to encourage students' initiative to improve language skills and enhance intercultural communication competence, which sheds light on reshaping language and intercultural communication education.

Revitalizing interculturality in education: Chinese Minzu as a companion

<i>Dervin and Yuan’s (2022) book Revitalizing interculturality in education: Chinese Minzu as a companion challenged the lack of diversity in the disciplinary field of Intercultural Communication Education (ICE) with a detailed exploration and discussion on Chinese Minzu and Minzu education from a “non-Western” approach. By utilizing a case study research design, the authors gave voices to the participants that provided detailed narratives of concepts and practices of Chinese Minzu education at Minzu University of China (MUC). The book explored how the notion of Minzu was deconstructed and prompted readers to reckon Minzu education as a “companion, complement, and alternative” to the knowledge of interculturality in education. It added value to the international scholarship on multicultural/intercultural education by offering insights to the views, theories, and practices of Minzu education.</i>

Student Discourses of Community in an Intercultural Conflict and Community Course: A Critical Assessment

ABSTRACT This study is based on an undergraduate course on intercultural conflict and community building, which was grounded in critical intercultural communication pedagogy (CICP) and included a two-day, over-night, off-campus retreat. Three themes were critically analyzed and problematized in student retreat reflection paper discourse: celebrating difference and plurality, emphasizing similarity over differences, and building community: tools and tensions. Students praised individuals’ pluralistic cultural identities and differences, described spaces of connection primarily through the identification of similarities, and described communication practices such as sharing culturally-based visions and narratives in community building and intercultural conflict management. Bringing together frameworks for critical reflexivity and critical communities within CICP, the conception of critical intercultural communities becomes an important way to define, orient, and teach intercultural communication, conflict and community building.

Introducing intercultural communication pedagogy and the question of the other

ABSTRACT This paper constitutes the introduction to the special issue of Pedagogy, Culture & Society, titled ‘Intercultural Communication Pedagogy and the Question of the Other’, which emerged from the launch event of the Institute for Language Education at the Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh. It proceeds from the arguments that intercultural communication pedagogy has clung too long to essentialist competency models that erase all differences, and that to counteract their effects one needs to pay greater attention to the most pre-original and non-synthesisable ethical relation between self and other. To do so, the paper draws on debates that have problematised competency models, discussing in depth two interrelated central themes that these debates have tended to overlook. The first theme refers to the possibility of the oppressed turning into oppressors in their efforts to free themselves from the unified notion of culture that competency models support. The second theme refers to the emancipatory mission of critical pedagogy which, despite its best intentions, operates within a normative framework from which self and other become the same. The paper culminates with the questions that drive contributions to this special issue, offering an overview of the papers that it contains.

Becoming contemporaneous: intercultural communication pedagogy beyond culture and without ethics

ABSTRACT There is a significant amount of literature in which the educational question concerning intercultural communication is seen in terms of providing students with the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and competencies that will enable them to become effective intercultural communicators. While this line of thought seems to have become the ‘common sense’ of much educational policy, there is also a growing body of research in which critical questions are raised about this approach. There are particular concerns about the totalising tendencies in such approaches, and ethics is often mobilised as a way to understand and enact the intercultural encounter differently. In this paper, I contribute to these discussions from an educational perspective. I contrast a pedagogy of empowerment with a pedagogy of disarmament, show how the idea of culture functions as an explanatory device, raise the question of time in intercultural encounters, and argue that an ethical ‘turn’ may run the risk of becoming another totalising gesture in intercultural communication. Through these explorations, I outline the contours of a pedagogy for intercultural communication beyond culture and without ethics in which the central challenge is that of trying to become ‘contemporaneous’. I pay particular attention to what this may require from the teacher.

The affective ideology of the OECD global competence framework: implications for intercultural communication education

ABSTRACT This paper adds to the growing literature that critically examines the cultural politics of the OECD’s framework of global competence by turning our attention to the ‘affective ideology’ underlying this framework, namely, how affect is used ideologically to produce specific subjectivities and moralities in students. Building upon the work of affect theories in education policy, this paper explores how the concept of global and intercultural competences, as it is manifested in the OECD global competence framework, constitutes a site of affective sense-making and affective governance. In particular, the analysis reveals two ways in which this happens: first, by capitalising on global and intercultural competencies as self-centred, emotional skills to sell policy and pedagogical ideas and tools; second, by using certain affects as moral imperatives to shape global competence in intercultural communication education. The paper concludes with a discussion of the research, policy, and pedagogy implications for intercultural communication education.

Concluding remarks on intercultural communication pedagogy and the question of the other

ABSTRACT This paper constitutes the concluding remarks paper to the special issue of Pedagogy, Culture & Society, titled ‘Intercultural Communication Pedagogy and the Question of the Other’. The paper presents our own reflections of the broader implications and possible conclusions that can be drawn from contributing papers. Here, we argue that there is one notion, which has been overlooked in the field of Intercultural Communication Pedagogy, namely, the political. In this paper, we argue that the political should not be negated, or relegated, at the expense of the ethical – instead, the political should be included in addressing and redressing the ethics of Intercultural Communication Pedagogy. We reject the liberal doxa that Intercultural Communication Pedagogy should be conceptualised along the lines of non-conflict with the other, e.g., through understanding the other or having a dialogue with the other. Instead, we propose conceptualising the self and other relation in Intercultural Communication Pedagogy as a permanent antagonism, a permanent crisis, without resolution. In outlining our argument, we discuss some conceptual issues surrounding some postpositivist approaches and offer a way forward for Intercultural Communication Pedagogy through an engagement with the political.

“I Start to Doubt Myself When I Am Watching This”: Moments of Think-Aloud Reflexivity About Interculturality in a Virtual Exchange Project

Although virtual exchange has been widely discussed during the (post-)pandemic era, how students do reflexivity in this context has yet to be fully explored. This study invites students from Chinese and Finnish universities to think aloud and reflect on their virtual exchanges by presenting them with video clips of their online intercultural encounters. This is referred to as “‘think-aloud reflexivity”’ in this study. Grounded in Foucault’s (1988) technologies of the self and Clark and Dervin’s (2014) multidimensions of reflexivity, the study 1) identifies and analyses moments of think-aloud reflexivity as triggered by the video clips presented to students; and 2) examines how students’ reflexivity is constructed. Research findings, based on an analysis of students’ speech acts (Austin, 1962), reveal three ways of constructing reflexivity: evaluating, clarifying and reviewing. Three themes also emerge while doing reflexivity in the study: self-criticality, empathizing with others, and reconceptualizing doing interculturality. Recommendations for telecollaboration are given based on the findings, inviting scholars and researchers to un-re-think the notion of reflexivity in intercultural communication education.

Intercultural Communication in An Undergraduate English Coursebook in Mainland China: A Discourse Analysis Perspective

In recent years, intercultural communication education is occurring frequently in Chinese English textbooks. However, there is a lack of study on how these textbooks present the knowledge of intercultural communication and competence. To fill this gap, this article proposes to conduct a qualitative analysis of one English textbook (College English Intercultural Communication Course) published in mainland China. With Derrida’s deconstructive thinking, the topics, characters, contents, exercises and point of view provided by the textbook are evaluated via discourse analysis. Based on the deconstructive reading of the textbook, two cultural problems are found: (1) western-centric ideas; (2) essentialism and othering. There is an internal conflict between the deconstructive method of presenting intercultural communication and competence claimed by the textbook and an inner-circle unitary cultural center it actually constructs.

An Introduction to Intercultural Communication Teaching of English in Colleges and Universities in the Era of Big Data

An Introduction to Intercultural Communication Teaching of English in Colleges and Universities in the Era of Big Data