Researching Intercultural Communication in a UK Higher Education Context

Abstract

In this chapter, we undertake four different kinds of analysis towards an understanding of intercultural communication in action. The action is situated in a context where intercultural encounters are common, namely contemporary higher education. Furthermore, the intercultural encounters are discipline specific. They take place in one-to-one tutorials in fine art, in a UK institution. The lecturers are British and the students are Japanese. In the first place, the tutorial interactions are analysed in terms of the tutorial as genre; second, certain recurring exchange types within the tutorial are isolated as examples of what we call epistemic principles, namely those underlying principles which motivate teaching and learning in the discipline. Third, and following on from the discourse analytic perspective of the students behaviour, students’ own accounts of why they were behaving as they were, and how they understood the tutorial interactions, are explored in a number of retrospective, semi-structured interviews. The stimulus for those interviews were video-recordings of the students tutorials, which had taken place one year earlier, and they were carried out in Japanese. This afforded a fourth kind of analysis, namely the extent to which the students had adapted to or resisted not only the interactional norms of the tutorial, that is behaving like students in a UK context, but also the disciplinary norms which lay behind those interactions.