Peripheral Ritualized Practices—Threads Connecting Decorations to the Cloak of Identity

This is an ethnographic study which investigates the practices of language maintenance and ethnic identity affiliation for immigrant/migrant Nepalese families with primary to middle school children in the United Kingdom. The study presents a comparative case study analysis of three Nepalese immigrant/migrant families. Participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and historical narrative interview were used. The study investigated prior exposure to home country, ethnic, cultural, and social literacy practices that occurred in various contexts during a nine-month period. This analysis revealed a phenomenon I termed peripheral ritualized practices. Exposure to peripheral ritualized practices over time creates positive changes in attitudes toward multilingualism and diversity.     

Intercultural Communication Training for English Language Teachers: A Case Study of an Immersion Program for South Korean Teachers

Little research has been conducted that explores connections between the fields of intercultural communication and English-language instruction. To address this gap, we report on an intercultural communication course delivered as an integral part of a short-term professional development immersion program for English-language teachers from South Korea. Study results indicate that intercultural communication training served to enhance participants’ pragmatics awareness along with sensitivity regarding sociocultural influences on communication that they experienced in situ. After the four-week course, most of the participants expressed desire and readiness to integrate intercultural communication into their teaching in South Korea. Intercultural communication training promises to complement pragmatics instruction aiming at improving English-language learning and teaching.     

Intergroup Contact,Media Exposure,and Racial Attitudes

The present investigation uses intergroup contact and media systems’ dependency theories to illuminate the relative significance of various sources of information in shaping Caucasian-American attitudes toward African-Americans. It uses empirical data from an exploratory survey of college students to build a chain of related variables that link primary sources of information (face-to-face versus mediated) to stereotypical beliefs, perceived internal causal attributions for African-Americans’ failures, and prejudicial feelings toward African-Americans. Results suggest that face-to-face sources of racial/ethnic out-group information are more effective than mediated sources in prejudice reduction. The discussion includes theoretical and practical implications of the findings.     

Somewhere in the Middle: The Measurement of Third Culture

This study explores the concept of “third culture,” which has not been tested by quantified measures since it was introduced. This study develops the 10-item measurement of third culture based on three dimensions—equality, commonality, and transcendence. Two hundred and fifteen international married individuals from 42 countries participated in a self-administered email survey. The findings indicated that the new scale is reliable and functions as a single dimension instead of as three subdimensions. Suggestions for future study as well as several implications on theory and methodology are discussed, drawing on the experience of this study.     

Cultural Diplomacy,Branding and the American Film Institute's Project: 20/20

The Global Cultural Initiative (GCI) was a flagship cultural diplomacy effort introduced by the Bush Administration in the mid-2000s; one project of this initiative was the American Film Institute's Project: 20/20, a program of 19 films from five continents scheduled to tour the United States and abroad. This paper is a historical exploration into how the Bush Administration reconstructed American identity and culture through framing, and how that framing was embedded within cultural diplomacy initiatives like the GCI. This paper contributes to an understanding of how intercultural dialogue is often based on key messages and constructed ideas.     

Business communication as cultural text: Exchange and feedback of promotional video clips

Our research is a response to the need to improve the understanding of the complexity of global professional communication. To investigate the complex cultural interpretations that producers and audiences apply to professional texts, we developed a two-year interactive project. Business students in New Zealand and Israel produced promotional “texts” – video clips to promote a university program – which they exchanged with their counterparts overseas to receive feedback. We adapted models of home-made visual communication and advertising which used the categories of participants, settings, topics, and style, to analyze the eight clips. Emergent findings suggested two more categories – information and language – as important analytical tools. Variables of age, gender, intra- and intercultural differences, and (cultural) context also resulted in student audiences’ multiple interpretations of the texts. The outcomes indicate the need to extend the culture-in-context approach for a “situation focused communication approach,” where the primary focus is a group of producers and their audience as they produce and interpret a professional text. This approach also foregrounds contextual variables and a plural understanding of culture to accommodate the potential for miscommunication of business and professional texts in pluricultural contexts.     

Biculturalism and self-construal

Evidence on the dimensionality of self-construal points to the coexistence of both an independent and an interdependent self-image. Drawing on conceptualizations of the acculturation process, this study is a preliminary examination of the distinctiveness of four hypothesized self-construal patterns: Bicultural, Western, Traditional, and Culturally-alienated. Different types of individuals, having experienced varying amounts of cultural contact and having made different choices in adjusting to cultural groups, might portray distinctive self-construal patterns. Especially intriguing was the notion that those with a well developed sense of interdependence and a well developed sense of independence could be described as bicultural. To test this, persons from four a priori identified groups were selected to represent the four patterns of self-construal. We predicted that on a measure of self-construal, the mean scores of the respondents in the four groups would differ in strength with the bicultural experience group, in particular, exhibiting both a high independent and a high interdependent score on a measure of self-construals. Our hypotheses were supported. In terms of independent self-construal, the Bicultural and Western groups scored significantly higher than the Traditional and Alienated groups. For the interdependent self-construal, the Traditional and Bicultural groups scored significantly higher than the Western and Alienated groups. The bicultural group was the only group to score significantly higher on both types of construals. The availability of both types of self-construal would likely facilitate communication and adaptive behaviors for persons interacting in multiple cultures.     

Does cross-cultural training in tertiary education enhance cross-cultural adjustment? A systematic review

The increasing cultural diversity within tertiary education and workplace environments requires students and graduates to be knowledgeable and effective in cross-cultural adjustment and managing potential acculturative stress. One of the ways to increase their cross-cultural adjustment is via cross-cultural training (CCT). Given the predominantly business-oriented nature of previous reviews, this paper systematically examined whether CCT was effective when applied to tertiary students. The analysis of different types of CCT and its outcomes was guided by Ward, Bochner, and Furnham’s (2001) ABC (Affective, Behavioural, and Cognitive) model that comprehensively explained the affective, behavioural, and cognitive facets of cross-cultural adjustment. We reviewed 35 CCT studies published post-1990 with control group design or pre-post training evaluation. CCT in tertiary education has become increasingly multi-method and experiential. CCT programs with behavioural components had the most consistent evidence of effectiveness. Programs with both behavioural and cognitive components were more effective than cognitive- and didactic-alone programs. CCT appeared to be particularly effective in enhancing tertiary students’ academic and career performance. Practical implication and suggestions for future research directions are discussed.