Short-Term Study-Abroad Experience in Ireland: An Exercise in Cross-Cultural Counseling

International exchanges or study-abroad experiences can have lifelong impacts on students from various disciplines. This article describes the integration of a short-term study-abroad program to Ireland into two socio-cultural courses. The experience also offers course credit for major requirements in two programs. Through this two-week travel experience students are brought into intensive contact with educators, scholars, and community activists in Ireland and Northern Ireland and weigh differences and similarities in the social issues and services among the three countries. While the course is aimed at students in the counseling field, it also appeals to students majoring in criminal justice, sociology, women's studies, international studies, and political science.     

英语课堂教学中的跨文化交际——一项对外籍教师与中国学生的调查

文章以一项对大学英语教学中外籍教师的调查为基础,探讨了外教的教学风格、教学方法和教学内容,他们的教学风格、教学方法和教学内容是否被中国学生所接受,以及他们的教学效果和课堂内的跨文化交际的效果如何。同时,还分析了外教的文化背景怎样对他们的课堂教学产生影响。最后,文章指出了外教教学上的一些不足之处,旨在促进外教和中国学生的相互理解,并且使英语课堂成为跨文化交际的一个有效的场所。     

Intergenerational Communication in Immigrant Punjabi Families: Implications for Helping Professionals

This paper is an extension of the primary author’s post-doctoral research on the Sikh diaspora in Vancouver, Canada. Drawing upon the orality, literacy and ‘analytics’ (critical inquiry) paradigm, the paper delineates the distinctive communication patterns that characterize each of three generations in the Punjabi community in that location. A sample intergenerational dialogue in the counselling context is provided to demonstrate the nature of fluidity in communication, and the implications for helping professionals are discussed.     

Conflicting road maps: cross-cultural professional development for Egyptian educators

This article reports on findings from a qualitative research study on overseas teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD). It seeks to explore the perceptions of a cohort of Egyptian teachers about their overseas training experience upon completion of a nine-month training programme in the UK. Data were mainly gathered through four focus-group interviews with a sample of 35 Egyptian teachers during the last week of their stay in England. Findings indicate that the CPD programme did not match teachers’ expectations. In particular, the teachers raised concerns about course content, lack of integration into university life and lack of opportunities for social interaction with other students leading to inadequate language development. The paper explores the clash of aspirations and locates them within a wider discourse of cultural dissonance.     

跨文化视角:香港陶行知研究的新取向——解读《陶行知——一个基督徒教育家的再发现》

本文通过解读香港中文大学哲学博士何荣汉的陶研新著,在回顾陶行知认信问题研究史的同时,试图说明什么是陶行知研究中的“跨文化视角”,以及它是如何助成人们摆脱长久以来在陶行知是“基督徒”、还是“非基督徒”等一系列信仰认知问题上的纠结的。     

跨文化语用学对翻译的指导作用

跨文化语用学与翻译研究密切相关。脱离了文化语境的翻译难以精确传达原文的精神与要旨,甚至会产生许多重大的失误与矛盾。跨文化语用学的研究对于翻译原则的把握、翻译特殊现象如不可译性等能做出合理的解释以及方向性的指导。因此,只有在跨文化语用学的视域范围内进行翻译研究与实践,才有可能将翻译研究引入更高的层次,也才能进一步拓展跨文化语用学的研究空间。     

大学英语短篇小说教学及其对学生跨文化交际能力的培养

英语短篇小说的教学,要首先认真预习课文,努力理解文章大意,在进行课文整体教学的同时,注重学生阅读理解能力、写作能力、跨文化交际能力及欣赏水平等方面的培养。     

Cross-cultural “distance”, “friction” and “flow”: exploring the experiences of pre-service teachers on international practicum

The focus of this paper is to illustrate Australian regional pre-service teachers' perceptions of an international practicum: their cross-cultural understanding, notions of privilege and teacher/professional identity development. Findings indicate that there were three overlapping dimensions of cross-cultural understanding for pre-service teachers: distance, friction and flow. At times students acknowledged the value of their placement, yet indicated a lack of empathy and engagement with the culture visited. At other times there was clear frustration at the cultural differences, alongside a growth in awareness. The fullest dimension was where pre-service teachers and their students learnt from each other, signalling a sharing towards cross-cultural understanding. Implications of these findings aim to inform how international practicums are designed in the future, as well as signalling directions for further research relating to these border crossings.     

Insider-outsider-inbetweener? Researcher positioning,participative methods and cross-cultural educational research

This article reflects on the use of participative techniques with final-year secondary school students in one rural community in Western Kenya as an enabling tool for an outsider to both gain insider perspectives and develop a more insider role in that community by privileging and legitimating participant-driven data. Conclusions put forward the concept of the ‘inbetweener’ researcher, neither entirely inside or outside, and consider how using such methods allowed the formulation of authentic participative knowledge (co-)construction and construction of meaningful relationships in the field.     

Fostering Distributed Science Learning Through Collaborative Technologies

TACTICS (French and Spanish acronym standing for Collaborative Work and Learning in Science with Information and Communications Technologies) is an ongoing project aimed at investigating a distributed community of learning and practice in which information and communications technologies (ICT) take the role of collaborative tools to support social construction of knowledge. This community is composed of researchers, graduate students, and high-school teachers and their students, from six schools and four universities in Canada and Mexico. It set out in fall 2000 to develop a community around the general topic of integrating concepts in science school subjects. Once a prototype community is established, it can become a terrain where different aspects could be studied. Subsequently, researchers could gradually take a back seat allowing as well as ensuring the autonomy of the school members involved and, thereby, the viability of the learning community. The set up of the proposed prototype distributed science learning community was therefore an essential yet far from trivial first step. This paper discusses the process of setting up the community and the lessons learned.