Scale making in intercultural communication: experiences of international students in Chinese universities

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study investigates the lived experiences of interculturality among international students enrolled in a top-rated comprehensive university in Shanghai and a key provincial university in China’s hinterland. Based on an analysis of narrative interviews with 20 international students from different sociocultural backgrounds, the study examines how the international students’ intercultural experiences are simultaneously constrained and facilitated by the linguacultural resources distributed among interactants in the universities and cities. The results suggest that the international students’ intercultural experiences differ in substantial ways, mediated by varied distributions of sociolinguistic resources which are closely associated with their academic socialisation through English, local interactional norms, relevant career opportunities, and linguistic norms for everyday interaction with both Chinese students and local residents in the two universities. It is also found that international students play agentive roles to construct and negotiate scales among the sociolinguistic resources at their disposal, in order to create meanings for and reflect upon their lived experiences of interculturality in relation to their previous and prospective life trajectories.

KEYWORDS:

• Space
• scale making
• intercultural communication
• international students
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 University A is enlisted in two leading national higher education projects, i.e. Project 985 launched in 1998 and the ‘double-first-class’ project launched in 2015. Both projects deliver strong national support for the development of leading Chinese universities with international competitiveness in terms of funding and allocation of educational resources. In contrast, University B is not enlisted in any national projects of this kind.

2 The Chinese tiered city system is widely used for city classification, and is based on an average score of each city’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product), level of political administration (i.e. directly controlled by central government, provincial capital cities, and sub-provincial capital cities, prefecture capital cities, and county level cities), and population (South China Morning Post, 2016). The city tier has been a frequently used indicator of differences across cities in China in terms of consumer behaviour, income level, politics, and other aspects of local conditions.

Additional information

Funding

The present study is part of the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Young Scholars Project entitled ‘Intercultural identity formation of international students enrolled in EMI Master’s degree programmes in a ‘Double-First-Class-Project’-enlisted university in China’, which is supported by a research grant from the National Office of Educational Sciences Planning (Project No. EIA180488).