The social practice of silence in Chinese international students’ multicultural group work experience at a UK university

• In Event: Confluence of Cultures: Discussing and Decoding the Experiences of Chinese Students and Researchers

Proposal

Abstract:
Chinese international students’ (CISs’) prevailing silence in multicultural group work in UK higher education has been widely reported, and problematised, as academic deficits. Taking an inclusive stance of silence, this research re-evaluated the dichotomy between talk and silence and acknowledged their potential equal contribution to knowledge generation. Employing the Actor-Network Theory as the theoretical framework, this research conducted narrative interviews on 16 CISs at a UK university. The result showed that silence is not equal to soundlessness but could be verbalising behaviours, minimal talk, and regretting for talking /messages sending during group communication and thus could sometimes be a way of engagement. Embodying the fluid-construct nature of CISs’ silence, the research extended the dominant narrow understanding of CISs’ silence from cultural and linguistic explanation, pointed out the necessity of a contextual-oriented investigation, and call for taking silence into the consideration of pedagogy.

Full paper:
Multicultural group work in the higher education settings can be defined as a collaboration of two or more individuals from different cultural backgrounds who are assigned interdependent tasks and jointly responsible for the final results (Behfar et al., 2006). As the main way to get students from diverse backgrounds to work alongside each other (Wang et al., 2012) and create authentic intercultural encounters (De Vita, 2007), it is perceived as the ideal vehicle to foster intercultural learning (ibid), and bring academic, educational, and social benefits to both home and international students (Volet & Ang, 2012). However, such benefits do not automatically result from the diverse cultural composition of the student body (Yu & Moskal, 2019) and are ‘still very much that, an ideal’ (De Vita, 2007: 165). The unsatisfactory group working experience between domestic and international students is continually reported in relevant empirical studies (Sawir, 2013), especially the lack of intercultural interaction (Huang, 2022) and the interactions at a very superficial degree, where CISs’ prevailing silence has frequently been attributed (Volet & Ang, 2012).

Since the Western orientation values talking much more than listening and tightly connects talking to thinking, CISs’ silence is often assumed equal to an absence of speech and disengagement (Kim et al., 2016) and CISs are frequently depicted as passive, uncritical, and rote learners (Wang et al., 2012). However, the interpretation of CISs’ silence tends to be more controversial (Shao & Gao, 2016). Some academics highlight that neither talking nor silence is a proxy of engagement or disengagement (ibid) and CISs’ silence can also mean engagement in thought sometimes (Mclean & Ranson, 2005). Meanwhile, silence has increasingly been looked at in more complex ways (Bao, 2023), including some verbalizing behaviours (e.g.writing), linguistic thought (inner speech), whispering to him/herself (private talk), and talking to a peer without the intention to share with other peers (insider talk) (Bao, 2012; Remedios et al., 2008). In this way, silence is not perceived as the absence of talk but as the absence of ideas shared in public but more evidence supporting this argument is required (Bao 2020).

While the dominant cultural and linguistic explanation of CISs’ silence has been critiqued as over-generalized and too decisive (Ha & Li, 2014) in that there is no guarantee that Confucian value still affects contemporary CISs studying in Western contexts in the same traditional manner and CISs linguistic proficiency is not always poor or static (Ha & Li, 2014), more recent studies propose to view silence as a fluid construct and call for a contextual-orientated or situation-specific analysis. Meanwhile, as group work is sometimes digitally mediated through, for example, google doc and WeChat, silence can also occur in online communication rather than being unique to face-to-face contexts (Zembylas & Vrasidas, 2005). Thus, the non-human actors, such as laptops and mobile phones, should also be regarded as elements in the group context.

To better understand CISs’ silence in multicultural group work, with a view to offering suggestions for further pedagogical practice, following the theoretical framework of Actor-Network Theory, this research specifically took the group task, peer dynamic, and non-human actors into the research consideration and focused on two research questions:
1. What are the multi-faced forms of Chinese international students’ silence in multicultural group work?
2. How is Chinese international students’ silence co-constructed with relevant actors in multicultural group work?

To answer these, a qualitative single case study was conducted in MA Education programmes at a UK university and was embedded by two sub cases, two education-related course units carried out at the second semester of 2022-23 academic year. Both were with a summative collaborative group assignment while showing visible differences in task load, group sizes, group formation and working duration. Qualitative individual narrative interviews with 16 CISs were conducted after they submitted group assignments. Taking individual CISs’ silent practice as the unit of analysis and employing interpretative phenomenological analysis, at current early data analysis stage, the result found the various forms of CISs (corresponding to the first research questions) as:
(1) verbalizing behaviours like noting taking or information searching during group discussion;
(2) replying by memes in WeChat group;
(3) chatting privately with a group peer;
(4) talking/sending messages in public of the whole group but
regretting/ withdrawing.

This result could be seen as evidence critiquing the dichotomy between talk and silence. However, due to the uncompleted data analysis of this research, the result answering the second research question could not reported now but the fluid-construct nature and potential contribution to learning of CISs silence could be expected and might imply ways approaching CISs’ silence for maximizing its learning capacity or take silence into consideration of pedagogy.

Author

• Yilan Guo, The University of Manchester