Maximizing the benefits of international education collaborations : managing interaction processes

International collaborations are frequently mentioned in university strategies as a way of promoting internationalisation, often in relation to achieving greater connectivity among staff from different backgrounds. Much less explicit attention is paid to the underlying rationale for facilitating such connectivity, or the challenges academic staff may face in participating in such collaborations. In this article I argue that failure to pay adequate attention to such interaction issues can hinder the added value that international projects can offer and that much greater attention needs to be paid to the collaboration process itself in order to maximise benefits. I analyse the interaction experiences of staff who participated in a set of Sino-British collaborative e-learning projects and report and illustrate the key challenges they faced and the ways in which they responded. I conclude with a number of implications and recommendations for personnel involved in researching, planning and/or participating in international education collaborations

Reconsidering Chinese modesty: Hong Kong and mainland Chinese evaluative judgements of compliment responses

Compliments are usually intended to have a positive effect on interpersonal relations, yet for the outcome actually to be positive, both the compliment and the compliment response need to be handled appropriately. This paper focuses on different types of compliment responses, and explores Chinese people’s evaluative judgements of these different types. Gao and Ting-Toomey (1998) argue that modesty is an important component of Chinese politeness, and that to blatantly accept a compliment is considered impolite. Several studies (e.g. Chen 1993, Yuan 1996 and Loh 1993) have indeed found that compliments are rejected more frequently in Chinese than in English, yet other evidence suggests that acceptance responses are also relatively common in Chinese. This paper explores a number of hypotheses associated with these issues. It reports a study carried out in Mainland China and Hong Kong, and discusses the notion of Chinese modesty in relation to the findings

The Global People competency framework: competencies for effective intercultural interaction

This Competency Framework explains the competencies that are needed for effective intercultural interaction. In contrast to the Life Cycle Model for Intercultural Partnerships (see the Global People Toolbook) which presents the competencies by stage (i.e. key competencies are identified for each stage of a project life cycle), the Competency Framework presents them by clusters. Intercultural competencies can be grouped into four interrelated clusters, according to the aspect of competence they affect or relate to: - Knowledge and ideas - Communication - Relationships - Personal qualities and dispositions We overview these four clusters in Section 2. In Sections 3 – 6, for each competency cluster, we list the key component competencies, along with descriptive explanations of each of them. We also provide case study examples from the eChina-UK Programme to illustrate one or more of the following: - How the competency manifests itself; - Why the competency is important or is needed; - How the competency can be displayed in behaviour; - What problems may occur when the competency is not present. The Competency Framework is thus useful for those who wish to gain a systematic, in-depth understanding of intercultural effectiveness and the competencies need to achieve it

Achieving mutual understanding in intercultural project partnerships : co-operation, self-orientation, and fragility

Communication depends on cooperation in at least the following way: In order to be successful, communicative behavior needs to be adjusted to the general world knowledge, abilities, and interests of the hearer, and the hearer's success in figuring out the message and responding to it needs to be informed by assumptions about the communicator's informative intentions, personal goals, and communicative abilities. In other words, interlocutors cooperate by coordinating their actions in order to fulfill their communicative intentions. This minimal assumption about cooperativeness must in one way or another be built into the foundations of any plausible inferential model of human communication. However, the communication process is also influenced to a greater or lesser extent, whether intentionally and consciously or unintentionally and unconsciously, by the participants' orientation toward, or preoccupation with, their own concerns, so their behavior may easily fall short of being as cooperative as is required for achieving successful communication

Chinese students' psychological and sociocultural adjustments to Britain: an empirical study

This paper reports an empirical study of the psychological and sociocultural adjustments of two cohorts of Chinese students taking a foundation course in English language at a British university. Using Zung's (1965) Self-Rating Depression Scale and a modification of Ward and Kennedy's (1999) Sociocultural Adaptation Scale, quantitative data were obtained on the students' adjustment experiences, and these were correlated with other variables such as grade point average, age and length of stay in Britain. Interview data provided a richer picture of their experiences. The study found that the majority of students had few psychological or sociocultural adjustment difficulties. Nevertheless, social interaction with non-Chinese was consistently identified as problematic and this, as well as difficulties in adjusting to daily life, were very highly correlated with psychological stress. End-of-course grade point average was found to be negatively correlated with the psychological stress experienced near the beginning of the academic year. The paper calls for further research to follow up these findings, and concludes with a list of suggestions for universities to help address overseas students' psychological and sociocultural adjustment needs

Identity, face and (im)politeness

Face and (im)politeness are widely discussed and debated in the pragmatics literature. This special issue, which has developed out of a symposium presented at the 7th International Pragmatics Conference at Riva del Garda, Italy in 2005, aims to enrich our understanding of these concepts by examining them from the perspective of identity. The first three papers consider the conceptual insights that different (sub-)disciplines can offer for our understanding of face, (im)politeness and the management of rapport. They draw on work in social psychology on identity, and take a cognitive pragmatic perspective to deconstruct relevant emic concepts/lexemes. The next four papers present discourse-based research on the topic. They examine different types of identities, including role identities (e.g. leaders and mentors), national identities (e.g. Turkish and British), ethnic identities (e.g. Pakeha and Maori), community identities (e.g. Cyber-parish member), as well as individual identities, and analyse how these identities impact upon the (mis)management of face and rapport

Sino-British interaction in professional contexts

This paper consists of two main sections. Section 2 provides a brief overview of and background to basic aspects of communication in a Chinese context. It provides some introductory information on the Chinese language, on naming patterns and on forms of address in the Chinese culture. It thus helps the reader gain some useful background information on Chinese communication, some of which applies to the interactional differences addressed in Section 3. The second section forms the largest part of the paper and discusses issues that members of the eChina-UK Programme (http://www.echinauk.org/) found particularly salient. It draws on case study examples, including recordings of project meetings, in order to exemplify communication issues that can impact on mutual understanding. We hope that these materials will help people with little experience of interacting with members of the Chinese culture to grasp some of the communication differences they may encounter. However, we strongly encourage the reader to refrain from forming immutable expectations of what communication with Chinese partners will be like. Rather, our aim is to increase sensitivity to the Chinese context and to raise awareness of the differences in interactional norms and principles that people may experience

Transformative learning for social integration : overcoming the challenge of greetings

Many universities in different parts of the world are seeking to enhance the cultural diversity of their staff and student body and yet repeated studies have shown that good integration can be difficult to achieve. Although several studies have examined the reasons why such integration is difficult, there has been very little research into the actual process of social integration. This paper addresses this gap through a qualitative study of intercultural learning. Students were asked to focus on a behaviour that was personally or professionally important to them but that they were having difficulty adapting to. The paper reports the varying, unfolding experiences of six of these students as they faced the affective, behavioural and cognitive challenges of adjusting to different greeting patterns and the strategies they used for gradually overcoming them. Drawing on the literature and the findings, an intercultural growth model is proposed. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of the findings for enhancing social integration at university

Managing rapport in intercultural business interactions: a comparison of two Chinese-British welcome meetings

This paper explores the management of rapport in intercultural business interactions. It compares two Chinese-British business welcome meetings that were held by the same British company. Despite many similarities between the two meetings, both the British and the Chinese were very satisfied with the first meeting, while the Chinese were very annoyed by the second. This paper describes the similarities and differences between the two meetings, and explores why they were evaluated so differently. It argues that research into the management of relations in intercultural communication needs to use a broader analytic framework than is typical of intercultural discourse research, and that it needs to gather a wider range of data types