Enseigner la culture de l’autre: la tentation culturaliste

The Didactics of culture and interculturality often follows a solid approach, ignoring the fundamental diversity of each culture. Lecturers are confronted with a dilemma: How to teach the ‘culture’ of the Other without falling into the trap of stereotyping? This contribution analyses the discourse of French lecturers in Malaysia, a multicultural and multilingual country, and questions their theoretical framework of culture. It appears that more teaching material which takes into account agreater sense of diversity is needed for the classroom

Asian students' intercultural preparation for academic mobility: getting ready for diversities or reproducing the expected?

Many academic contributions on Asian students abroad focus on their lack of interactions with the local population and their unpreparedness for intercultural encounters. Asian students appear as socially deficient and unfit for the new environment. These assumptions are problematic because they do not take into consideration the input prospective students receive prior to their departure through institutional training and unsupervised research on the host country under the student’s own initiative or a mix of both. Representations are also based on cultural differentialism which locates individuals in distinct, boundary-making categories, thus silencing most forms of individual diversities in the home and host societies. The main question arising thus deals with the kind of input that Asian future mobile students acquire, which is susceptible to impact their intercultural experiences. Data used for this article come from three different sets of interviews with Asian mobile students. Using a critical discourse approach, the discourses of these students are analysed from the perspective of their preparation to move to the host destination. Recurrent othering processes—both from institutional actors and from the students themselves—appear prior to departure, independent of the students’ origin and destination. Rather than blaming students, it would be more significant to look at what materials are available for them prior to their departure

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Taiwanese students in Malaysia and interculturality: when national identities take primacy over individualities

Using a liquid approach, the authors analyze the intercultural discourse of Taiwanese students who had taken part in a short term exchange program with a Malaysian university. The four participants were graduating in Mandarin Chinese in their home institution and were following a Chinese program in multilingual Malaysia. Data were collected through focus groups held in Mandarin Chinese and focused on their experience in the host country. The authors analyze how participants talk about themselves, Malaysians, and their adaptation to the host country. The processes of essentialization and othering that occur and put in contrast the host and the home contexts are similar to those held in Asia-to-Europe mobility and very far from an “interculturality without culture” (Dervin, 2010). If we focus on the construction of discourses, this Asia-to-Asia mobility forces us to relativize the opposition of cultures as an explanation for difficulties encountered by mobile students

The struggles of an international foreign language lecturer with representations of cultural identity

Malaysian universities often resort to international faculties to teach, so-called, international languages, especially when a BA program is offered by the institution. International foreign language lecturers (IFLL) are “convenient”: (i) their presence enables the country to overcome the shortage of local qualified lecturers (Bodycott and Walker, 2000, 80-1); (ii) when they are native speakers, they guarantee a high level of proficiency in the taught language-for a representation of the native speaker see Rampton (1990/2003) and for a critique of “native-speakerism” ideology Holliday (2006); (iii) their fluency in (at least) one international language is expected to give them an advantage in publishing in international journals; (iv) they contribute to the dissemination of an image of a global (reputable) university which can attract international staff; and (v) more recently, with the increasing importance given to international rankings for universities such as that of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (Marginson and van der Wende, 2007), where the number of international staff has become an evaluation criterion, their presence reputedly improves the place in which they work. While beneficial for the institution from an administrative point of view, IFLL also become the incarnation of a language and its associated culture for the language learners, especially when the geographical distance reinforces the xénité [strangeness] (Dabène, 1994) of the studied language. IFLL thus fall under the widespread association of language and culture, even if the latter concept is rarely questioned in the Malaysian context (Chin, 2013). As native speakers, they become the living example of the language they teach, and at the same time, a representative of an “imagined culture” (Dervin, 2012)

Enseigner la culture de l’autre : la tentation culturaliste

The Didactics of culture and interculturality often follows a solid approach, ignoring the fundamental diversity of each culture. Lecturers are confronted with a dilemma : How to teach the ‘culture’ of the Other without falling into the trap of stereotyping ? This contribution analyzes the discourse of French lecturers in Malaysia, a multicultural and multilingual country, and questions their theoretical framework of culture. It appears that more teaching material which takes into account agreater sense of diversity is needed for the classroom