Xiaowei Zhou & Richard Fay School of Education, University of Manchester, UK

1. Using a small-culture narrative approach to explore intercultural communication: A departmental approach and a Chinese-focused case study Xiaowei Zhou & Richard Fay School of Education, University of Manchester, UK April 25th 2011, Peking University, China 1

2. Plan for the Salon • Introduction(s) • Case Study 1: Richard and the development of his approach(es) to Intercultural Communication (research) • Case Study 2: Xiaowei and the development of her approach(es) to Intercultural Communication research • Concluding remarks • Questions, comments, discussion 2

3. Richard -personal & professional narrative • Manchester … through Anglo-Irish eyes • Culture-shock …. at Oxford • Poland … and British Life and Institutions • MEd TESOL (1990) @ Manchester … meeting Holliday • Language Teacher Education @ Manchester • Developing intercultural courses (@ Manchester & beyond) • Greece and the Balkans … projects informing my small-culture , narrative and reflexive PhD (1998-2004) • Supervisions of intercultural (large and small culture), narrative, reflexive doctorates (incl. Xiaowei, 2005-2010) 3

4. Richard’s struggle with cultures large and small [My] desire to understand generic Greekness has been personally rewarding, my professional self needed to understand Greek Higher Education, the Greek practice of distance learning, and Greek project teams. Further, although I have found some specific aspects of Greekness … to be useful in understanding the contextual backdrop against which the project action takes place, understandings of Greekness seemed much less helpful when I focused on understanding the project itself. Instead, my search for understanding focused on the cultures of the ‘English’ programme and the project. In this move from a focus on Greekness per se to a focus on the emergent cultures of the project, my thinking has been influenced by the work of Adrian Holliday (e.g. 1994 and 1999) …. 4

5. Adrian Holliday • ‘Appropriate methodology & social context’ (1994) • ‘small cultures’ (1999) • ‘Doing and writing qualitative research’ (2004/2007) • ‘Intercultural communication: An advanced resource book …’ (2004/2010) • ‘The value of reconstruction in revealing hidden or counter cultures’ (2004) • ‘The struggle to teach English as an international language’ (2005) • ‘Intercultural communication and ideology’ (2010) and  he also Externally Examined my PhD.  links to Brian Street (below) and Marshall Singer (Xiaowei) 5

6. Holliday’s Key Ideas (for Richard and ….) • Key idea 1: Appropriate methodology (tissue rejection) + BANA / TESEP cultures of ELT (not geographical terms) + TESOL practitioner (and student?) as ethnographer(s) of classroom • Key idea 2: Host culture complex • Key idea 3: Small culture approach … to combat otherisation and act as an antidote to an often uncritical default large culture approach (not actually an issue of size) • Key idea 4: Culturism & native-speakerism (modelled on e.g. racism, sexism, age-ism) • Key idea 5: Reflexivity, transparency, voice (in research writing) • Key idea 6: Power of reconstructed narratives (in intercultural awareness-raising) 6

7. Large and small (neat binaries?) 7

8. Richard’s conversion to narrative …. I began noticing the presence of narratives throughout the project, in the stories colleagues were telling each other to explain why and how things were as they were. For example, new members were socialised into the team through the explanatory narratives of the original members … …. their accounts seemed to capture their understandings of what was happening but also their emotional responses to it and their developing practices. …. In sum, I realised the extent of the narrative world of the project in comparison to my earlier concern for the experienced world of the project. I began to believe that I could access and construct understandings of the project through the stories told by some of the participants in it.  thinking then informed by Jerome Bruner, Michael Connelly et al (Narrative Inquiry) 8

9. Richard’s PhD (2004) Stories of Emergent Cultures of Distance Learning and Collaboration: Understanding the CELSE-Hellenic Open University Project • Fay, R. and Hill, M. (2003) • Educating language teachers through distance learning: The need for culturally-appropriate DL methodology • Open Learning, 18 (1), 9-27. 9

10. Intercultural courses @ Manchester • Masters-level (MA TESOL …. + new MA in IC)  Language Education as Intercultural Practice  Developing Researcher Competence  Computer-Mediated Intercultural Competence  Intercultural Education in Practice • BA-level  Computer-Mediated Intercultural Communication  Becoming Global  Going Global: IC for International Experience  Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters ?? • Doctoral Narrative Inquiry  Narrative-reflexivity 10

11. Hiromi Furusawa An integrated approach to understanding Japanese students’ classroom communication: A case study (Masters Dissertation, 2005) … As a Japanese citizen myself, I have been interested in this issue [of Japanese students being seen as ‘passive’ in the Western classroom] both as a student at US and UK Higher Education as a teacher [ .. ] of English as a Foreign Language in Japan. It has been my hope to find a way to help my fellow Japanese to overcome the difficulties, if any, which they experience in the English-medium classroom. My journey to find a way lasted throughout my MEd studies … and it turned out to be far more complicated than I expected it to be. 11

12. Hiromi continued In this dissertation I will discuss how I, a Japanese teacher of English as well as a postgraduate student [in] UK Higher Education, have deepened my understandings of Japanese students’ classroom communication behaviours. …. Instead of presenting only the outcome of the journey, I have chosen to write about the process I went though to develop my knowledge on the issue because ‘knowledge is not something objective and independent of the teacher to be learned and transmitted, but, rather, is the sum total of the teacher’s experiences’ (Clandinnin et al 1997). I believe discussion of my experiences both as a teacher and researcher is necessary in effectively presenting my knowledge to others. 12

13. B-level CMIC -- Ways of engaging with ‘culture’

14. Doctoral -- Mapping Narrativity and Reflexivity

15. The IC approach @ Manchester • IC courses … …. all informed by a small-culture, reflective and reflexive, and often narrative approach to the intercultural. • Richard’s research & supervision areas include …  conceptualising approaches to the cultural and intercultural  narrative inquiry  reflexivity and the narrativity-reflexivity of research texts  developing researcher competence  doing research multilingually  2005 Xiaowei Zhou begins PhD ---- Case Study 2 15

16. Xiaowei -personal & academic narrative (I) • Relocation from South China to North China: culture shock first experienced • Romantic relationship with a “northerner”: culture shock between “north” and “sourth” reinforced • Romantic trips to the UK: culture shock between national boundaries experienced • BA module, MA assignment and dissertation: initial intercultural communication thinking and research Zhou, X. (2003). Cultural identification and the second language grammaticality in speech: Three cases of Chinese college graduates in the UK. Unpublished Paper for the postgraduate module “Empirical Research Methods in Languages Studies”, Peking University, Beijing. Zhou, X. (2005). Expectation versus reality: Cultural difficulties of Chinese students in the United Kingdom. Unpublished MA dissertation, Peking University, Beijing. 16

17. Xiaowei -personal & academic narrative (II) Long-term academic sojourn: • Marked experience of cultural generalisations and otherisations • Becoming increasingly in line with the small-culture theory: Adrian Holliday, Marshall Singer (next page) • Shift of attention from “Chineseness” to emergent cultural phenomena at the group level (non-size-oriented) 因地制宜？ 因材施教？ 因人而异?

18. Group I: the Chinese Society of University X Group II: individuals from PR China Group III: women in their 20s Group IV: doctoral research students in the School of Education Group V: sales advisors in a clothing retail company Group VI: daughters Group VII: wives Group VIII: a teaching team for a particular intercultural course … Xiaowei as a member of the Chinese Society Group I: the Chinese Society of University X Group II: individuals from PR China Group III: men in their 30s Group IV: Masters students in School of Computer Science Group V: waiters in an Italian restaurant Group VI: experienced accountants Group VII: sons… Xiaoming as a member of the Chinese Society The notion of culturally-unique and culturally-complex individuals…(Marshall Singer, 1998)

19. The broad focus of my PhD research (Academic) acculturation, involving --- • second (academic) culture acquisition / learning • changes in the affective, cognitive and behavioural dimensions • the sojourner’s positioning between the home (academic) culture and host (academic) culture e.g. development of intercultural sensitivity (Bennett 1993 & 1998): denial -> defence -> minimization -> acceptance -> adaptation -> integration

20. Some relevant existing studies (I) … Using the large-/small-culture framework as a filter, I found that these studies tend to … • make cross-cultural comparisons in relation to national contexts • otherise “Chinese students’” characteristics and attribute them to the Confucian Heritage • overgeneralise sojourners’ mood fluctuations, acculturation strategies etc. Also, there are not many studies addressing acculturation as a dynamic process longitudinally. 'Passive recipients of knowledge', 'lacking in critical thinking', 'given to rote learning without developing real understandings', and 'quiet/reticent learners'.

21. Some relevant existing studies (II) … My stance: These studies did provide some interesting and potentially useful generalisations. However, they tend to describe part of the picture, as I believe that acculturation is a phenomenon involving many more complexities. This is where I find the Small-Culture approach a useful enrichment to my understandings of acculturation.

22. Research focus sharpened… Reformulation of terms: • from “Chinese students” to “some students from mainland China” • from “culture” to “cultural context” (e.g. ACC1 and ACC2) Research focus: I wanted to learn about the phenomena of academic acculturation by exploring the understandings of some students from mainland China with regard to their academic experiences on an Economics-related Master’s course in a UK HE institution over a one-year period. I wanted to explore their understandings as reflected in their reported moods over time related to their academic lives in the UK and their personal experience stories of their “initial academic experiences” as developing at particular moments in time and influenced by the accumulation of further experiences. Not just about terminology, but, more importantly, about belief! Now I understand why a PhD is called a Doctor of Philosophy!

23. Research design and some data (I) • One-year longitudinal • Six cases • weekly generation of data related to the participants’ mood status regarding their academic lives • four narrative interviews with each participant regarding their initial academic experiences

24. 5 4 3 2 1 0 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 Research design and some data (II) Mood data • numerical and verbal

25. Research design and some data (III) Narratives • four tellings of the “same” experience • participants deciding on the beginnings and ends

26. Key findings (I) • the participants’ interactions with their host academic-culture complex seemed to mainly take place in the sites of the modules they attended • their host academic cultural complex can be understood as the following host academic-culture complex (ACC2):

27. 5 4 3 2 1 0 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 Key findings (II) • Some responses to the U-Curve:

28. Key findings (III) - quiz Who experienced more intense mood fluctuations? Newcomers or the “old hand”? Why? • The “old hand”. She chose more difficult modules to study, while the newcomers chose to “play safe”. What was their most commonly experienced negative mood? Why? • “急/ji [anxiety]”, related to assessment (e.g. preparation, notification of results). In which of the following aspects did the participants report most / least intense mood fluctuations? Why? (1.overall mood; 2. lecture- comprehension experience; 3. assessment; 4. relationship with academic staff; 5. relationship with peer students; 6. using academic related resources) • 3 (most intense), key to successful graduation • 4 and 5 (least intense), preferred self-teaching, living separately, perceived difficulty in forming intimate relationship with the culturally-complex peer students

29. Key findings (IV) Cultural learning: • more oral participation in the classroom; • varieties of English; • presentation and seminar skills (different emphases in EAP and subject courses)…

30. The six cases’ uniqueness • Fiona： 好强的适应者 [A fighter for Adaptation] • George: 跟进度着急的学生 [A student struggling with teaching pace] • Laura: 懵懂的探索者 [A muddle-headed explorer] • Emma: 平静的自学者 [A peacful self-taught learner] • Jenny: 不投入感情的实用主义者 [A detached instrumentalist] • Sarah: 失望的“老油条” [the disappointed “old hand”] How do the above relate to “Chinese students’ acculturation into the UK education system” and “Confucianism”? Represent? Reflect part of? Or…

31. Large-culture approach: Prescriptive Top-down Essentialist Culturist (culture determines human thinking and behaviour) Ruling out explanations other than explanations based on (supra)national cultures small-culture approach: Interpretive Bottom-up Non-essentialist Operationalist (culture emerges through human interaction) Open to all possible explanations, including explanations based on (supra)national cultures It is not a matter of SIZE! Concluding remarks 9(Xiaowei and Richard) Intercultural communication, narrativity, reflexivity …

32. 谢谢 THANK YOU Contact: leazxw113@hotmail.com richard.fay@manchester.ac.uk 32