Xiaowei Zhou & Richard Fay
School of Education, University of Manchester, UK
April 25th 2011, Peking University, China
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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
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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)
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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) ….
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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)
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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)
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Large and small (neat binaries?)
Large
•Culturist, collectionist,
•essentialist/ reductivist approach &
culture seen as relatively fixed
•focus on societal culture
•national-level construct
•Stereotyping / otherising &
prescriptive
•top-down & product-focused
•culture-as-a-noun (Brian Street)
•associated with quantitative /
positivist research paradigms
•studied diachronically
Small
•operationalist & interactionist
•Culture seen as emergent and
relatively amorphous
•focus on anthropological culture
•small group construct
•Interpretive & descriptive
•bottom-up & process-focused
•culture-as-a-verb (Brian Street)
•associated with qualitative /
ethnographic research
•studied synchronically
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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)
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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B-level CMIC -- Ways of engaging with ‘culture’
Societal
(large, relatively stable culture)
[I]
[II]
Objective
(above the
water)
Subjective
(below the
water)
[III]
[IV]
Personal & Interpersonal
(small, emergent culture)
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Doctoral -- Mapping Narrativity and Reflexivity
Juup
reflection
self-monitoring of the process and
progress of the research study
Maria
Eljee
1. reflexivity
2. narrativity
research
narrative
researcher
narrative
Hiromi
presence of the researcher’s identity /
autobiography in the research text
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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
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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.
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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)
因地制宜？
因材施教？
因人而异?
 Shift of attention from “Chineseness” to emergent
cultural phenomena at the group level (non-sizeoriented)
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The notion of culturally-unique and culturally-complex
individuals…(Marshall Singer, 1998)
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 …
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…
Xiaowei as a member of
the Chinese Society
Xiaoming as a member of
the Chinese Society
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The broad focus of my PhD research
(Academic) acculturation, involving -- second (academic) culture acquisition / learning
 changes in the affective, cognitive and behavioural
dimensions
development
 the sojourner’s positioning betweene.g.
the
home of intercultural
sensitivity (Bennett 1993 & 1998):
(academic) culture and host (academic)
culture
denial -> defence
-> minimization ->
acceptance -> adaptation ->
integration
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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,
'Passive recipients of knowledge',
acculturation strategies etc.
'lacking in critical thinking', 'given to
rote learning without developing real
understandings', and 'quiet/reticent
Also, there are not many studies addressing
learners'.
acculturation as a dynamic process longitudinally.
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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.
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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:
Not just about terminology, but,
I wanted to learn about the phenomena
of academic
acculturation
by
more importantly,
about
belief!
exploring the understandings ofNow
some
students from
I understand
whymainland
a PhD is China with
regard to their academic experiences
an Economics-related
calledon
a Doctor
of Philosophy! 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.
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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
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Research design and some data (II)
21 2007-02-09
心情还不错，一切顺利
这周学习还比较尽然有序，选课也已经定下来，上课进入正规。
Mood data
 numerical比较糟！前几天心里乱七八糟的，这几天还算好些了！
and verbal
22 2007-02-16
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我最担心的事情发生了：前天得知了上学期考试成绩，虽然绝对数字也过
得去，但是和别人一比就差了好多，由此联想到一连串关于论文选题的事
情，所以心情很不好！
由此看来，考试还是很大程度上影响了我的心情，我真的做不到其他人所
谓的“50分万岁”
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2
23 2007-02-23
1
最近心情还不是很好
好像还老是在考试的阴影中，尤其是一想到23号就要交FINANCE的论文的
选题，就觉得难受。
0
-1
0
5
-2
-3
24 -42007-03-02
-5
比起前两周，稍微好了很多
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15
20
25
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心情平复了很多，反思过后是新一轮挑战的开始。其实我还是很喜欢学习
的，所以能在学习中寻找乐趣，一度的失落不代表未来，只要找准方向继
续努力一定会有收获。另外，我1月中旬的时候报名了6月的CFA考试，先
从LEVEL ONE考起，这是我一年多以来的梦想，只是一直在关注并没有付
诸行动。这个星期真正开始着手准备，觉得离自己的梦想一步步近了。所
以心情就好了许多
压力即是动力，目标是助推器
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Research design and some data (III)
Narratives
 four tellings of the “same” experience
 participants deciding on the beginnings and ends
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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):
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Key findings (II)
 Some responses to the U-Curve:
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4
3
2
1
0
-1
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
-2
-3
-4
-5
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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. lecturecomprehension 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
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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)…
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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…
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Concluding remarks 9
(Xiaowei and Richard)
Large-culture approach:
Prescriptive
small-culture approach:
It is not a matter
Interpretive
of SIZE!
Top-down
Bottom-up
Essentialist
Non-essentialist
Culturist (culture determines human
thinking and behaviour)
Operationalist (culture emerges through
human interaction)
Ruling out explanations other than
explanations based on (supra)national
cultures
Open to all possible explanations,
including explanations based on
(supra)national cultures
Intercultural communication, narrativity, reflexivity …
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谢谢
THANK YOU
Contact:
leazxw113@hotmail.com
richard.fay@manchester.ac.uk
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