The Impact of an Erasmus Placement in Students’ Perception of their Intercultural Communicative Competence

Pre- and post-questionnaires answered by UK Nottingham Trent University (NTU) and Spain’s University of Salamanca (USAL) students on their placement abroad support a comparative analysis of its impact on their intercultural communicative competence, comprising the awareness, attitude, skills and knowledge dimensions. NTU students started their placements with better results in them all. Yet, while both groups completed their stay with a similarly increased awareness, the knowledge and skills of the USAL group matched the results of NTU students and, whereas the scores of the attitude dimension towards the host country of NTU students did not increase significantly, those of USAL students decreased.     

Making American Friends: The Effects of Musical Tastes and English Proficiency on Chinese International Students’ Social Networks in the United States

This study investigated the relationship between Chinese international students’ social networks in the United States and their musical tastes. Based on concept of homophily, this study used a self-reported Social Network Analysis (SNA) survey to examine whether sharing similar musical tastes affected Chinese international students’ relationship, their musical tastes, and music consumption. The results showed that having high musical taste similarity predicted closer relationship between respondents and their alters, and higher likelihood of new music consumption. This study also found that frequent American English-language songs listeners were more likely to have Americans in their social network than less-frequent American English-language songs listeners.     

Predictors of Finnish Adolescent’s Prejudice towards Russian Immigrants and the Effect of Intergroup Contact

This study examined perceived threat as a predictor of Finnish adolescent’s prejudice towards Russian immigrants. Moreover, since Russian immigrants represent the largest immigrant group in Eastern Finland, this study also explored the relationship between intergroup contact, threat, and prejudice. The sample consisted of 305 Finnish adolescents ranging from 11 to 19 years old. Results showed threat to be a significant predictor of prejudice towards Russian immigrants in Eastern Finland. Individually, negative stereotype was found to be the only threat that significantly predicted prejudice towards Russian immigrants. Realistic and symbolic threats were not important to the attitudes of Finnish adolescents towards Russian immigrants. Moreover, there was no significant relationship between intergroup contact, prejudice, and threat (realistic threat, symbolic threat, and negative stereotype). Implications are also discussed.     

Acculturating the Traditional Chinese Medicine: A Culture-Centered Study of Chinese International Students’ Idealization of Medical Integration during Sojourns

ABSTRACT

To better understand the Chinese international students’ barrier to the U.S. health and medical system, this study investigates the students’ understandings of Traditional Chinese medicines during their sojourns in the United States. Holding that medicine is cultural/culture, the culture-centered in-depth interviews (n = 23) help understand the Chinese international students’ acculturation of the two medicines after their arrival in the new medical culture. The analyses focus on the rhetorical nature of medical acculturation: even though the students actually assimilate Traditional Chinese medicine, they claim to integrate the two. The results indicate how integration has been idealized and imposed as the only acceptable medical acculturation strategy for international students. The findings also suggest that medical integration has been used as a disguising cloak of medical assimilation and therefore, immigrants’ integration and acculturation should be carefully examined in health contexts.     

English Proficiency,Identity, Anxiety,and Intergroup Attitudes: US Americans’ Perceptions of Chinese

Guided by the Common Ingroup Identity Model and Berry’s acculturation framework, this study examined the roles that perceptions of language proficiency, cultural identity, and communication anxiety had on intergroup attitudes and stereotypes in the American–Chinese contact context. Serial mediation analyses with 10,000 bootstrap samples revealed that perceived English proficiency of a Chinese contact had significant indirect effects on affective and behavioral attitudes toward Chinese through American participants’ perceptions of their contact’s host and home culture identification and communication anxiety. Perceived English proficiency had an indirect effect only on positive stereotypes through the Chinese contact’s perceived identification with home culture.     

International Faculty in Chinese Universities’ Foreign Language Teaching Preferences

ABSTRACT

International college faculty in China are stakeholders in foreign language teaching. This project was designed to find out what international instructors’ pedagogical choices were in regards to English as a Foreign Language instruction. Twenty-eight international college instructors who taught oral English or English writing participated in interviews. Interviewees were employed at various tertiary institutions in large and small cities throughout China. Some interviewees described an audiolingual approach to foreign language teaching. Most interviewees took a situational approach to teach English as a Foreign Language. Finally, remaining international faculty described an intercultural approach when delivering EFL instruction.     

Gender and Race Differences in Middle School Students’ Perceptions of Caring Teacher Behaviors

This study investigated differences in 50 fifth through eighth grade students’ perceptions of caring teacher behaviors. The analyses revealed that African American and female students were more likely to value behavior that encourages academic achievement than were White and male students, who were more likely to value warm interpersonal behaviors.     

Challenging Colorblindness in Arizona: Latina/o Students’ Counter-Narratives of Race and Racism

This essay reviews Latina/o students' counter-narratives challenging colorblindness. The author highlights the experiences of students from Tucson Unified School District's Mexican American Studies program. By examining student counter-narratives, the author also identifies race-related terms that are more suitable for dialogue among and with young Latinas/os of the post-civil rights generation.     

The History and Culture of Chinese Fans （Ⅱ）

<正>Fans are symbols of Chinese culture and arts. Techniques and materials used for making fans are evidence witnessing the evolution of Chinese civilization.Poe...     

A Reexamination of Swedish and American College Students’ Communicative Attributes

This study examines the extent to which Swedish (n = 103) and American (n = 113) college students’ cultural background influences their communicative attributes. Students’ communication apprehension, self-perceived communication competence, willingness to communicate, out-of-class communication with instructors, in-class participation, and motives for communicating with their instructors were examined. Results of MANOVA tests indicate that American college students are more willing to communicate, perceive themselves as more communicatively competent, participate more in class, and are more motivated to communicate with their instructors for relational, functional, excuse-making, participatory, and sycophantic reasons. However, students’ communication apprehension and out-of-class communication with their instructors did not differ between the two cultures.     

The collective subjectivity of Chinese intellectuals and their café culture in republican Shanghai 1

Abstract

Using a brief comment by Lu Xun regarding the thriving café culture in 1920s’ Shanghai as a point of departure, this paper investigates how the male intellectuals of the time constructed, affiliated with, and practiced the café culture in the 1920s and 1930s. The paper first provides a historical overview of Shanghai’s café scene, and it investigates the general relationship between coffee and colonialism. The main body of the paper explores how Shanghai’s café culture in the Republican period was constructed in connection with male subjectivity. The paper demonstrates that the café as a gathering site was attractive to the young and educated male urbanites because it provided them a strong sense of community, based on the mutually conditioning homosocial bonding and heterosexual impulses, where they could socialize among themselves and flirt with the waitresses. It was the maleness of the café that allowed the place to embrace the seemingly opposed discourses of consumerism and revolution – the two major components of China’s cultural modernity. The paper ends with Michel de Certeua’s analysis of the ‘habitable,’ and it demonstrates that the Shanghai café is habitable to male intellectuals because it both promises and rejects the consummation of the libido, in the same way as it promises and rejects modernity.     

Facilitating or Impeding Acculturation: A Qualitative Study on Mobile Social Messaging in First-Generation Chinese Immigrants’ Everyday Lives

ABSTRACT

Previous research indicated that communication through media has been intertwined into immigrants’ everyday lives and become an essential part of their acculturating practices. However, no research has been conducted to examine how innovative, ethnic social media play a role in Chinese immigrants’ acculturation process in terms of social capital. In order to fill the research gap, a qualitative study was conducted to explore how Chinese immigrants use social messaging to accumulate social capitals to facilitate their acculturation process. Thirty face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted among Chinese immigrants to collect data. Findings revealed that Chinese immigrants tend to consider acculturation as a complex and long process in which they navigate through and position themselves in the unfamiliar cultural system. The ethnic social medium – WeChat, and in particular, its social messaging plays an essential role in shaping Chinese immigrants’ acculturation experiences by assisting them in garnering both bonding and bridging social capitals.     

Rethinking the Role of “Culture” in Educational Equity: From Cultural Competence to Equity Literacy

“Culture” has tended to play a central role in the nomenclature and operationalization of popular frameworks for attending to matters of diversity in education. These frameworks include multicultural education, culturally responsive pedagogy, culturally relevant teaching, cultural proficiency, and cultural competence. In this article, I argue that too tight a focus on “culture,” the meaning of which remains intensely contested, stunts the possibility of real progress toward educational justice. As I will show, although some culture-centric frameworks are grounded in commitments to educational equity, they often are implemented in ways that essentialize marginalized students and mask the forms of structural injustice that feed educational outcome disparities. I argue for a new commitment to centering equity rather than culture in conversations and practices related to educational justice—recommending the equity literacy framework as one way to enact that commitment.     

Chinese and Japanese Cultures Displayed in Wuyutai’s Flagship Store

An outstanding enterprise must be an enterprise with cultural pursuit.Wuyutai has developed a unique corporate culture through its chain store operation.Wuyutai treats each of its franchised stores as its partner and friend,with an aim to continue and promote the time-honored brand.