How Chinese Students Develop Intercultural Competence to Ease Their Transitions to Higher Education (Poster 40)

• In Event: AERA Virtual Poster Session 4
  In Poster Session: College Student Learning and Development (Posters): Examining Individual Narratives

Abstract

In order to analyze Chinese students’ transition to the complex multicultural context of higher education (HE), we select a Sino-foreign cooperative university (SFCU) as the research setting. Besides HE institutional affordances, we take into account students’ intercultural competence (IC) and examine their influence on students’ academic and cultural transitions. The constructivist grounded theory methodology is adopted to gather and code the interview data from 55 Chinese undergraduate students. We generate four dimensions of IC in correlation with students’ transitions. Self-oriented proactivity and flexible adaptation couple with the academic transition, while multifaceted sensitivity and dialectic inclusivity relate to the cultural transition. Moreover, we discover that students’ IC plays a mediatory role between institutional affordances and students’ transitions.

Authors

• Yang Hang, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

• Xiaojun Zhang, Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University