Exploring intercultural communication awareness and competence in different EMI contexts

1.     Introduction

To analyse the model of intercultural communicative competence (ICC), the notion of ‘culture’ has experienced three waves of evolution: (1) culture as a geographical and national concept (Bowe et al., 2014); (2) culture as a psycholinguistic construct (Bolden, 2012; Whorf, 1956); and (3) culture as a critical and complex process against structuralism paradigm (Baker, 2011; Kaur, 2011). Although the third philosophy proposes a dynamic model, empirical research to confirm this model is not enough.

The present essay will focus on Chinese EFL students who are attending or have attended the English as Medium Instruction (EMI) education model. Three contexts will be discussed, including the Native Context (the teachers are English-native speakers), Non-Native Context (the teachers are foreign non-native English speakers), and Chinese Context (the teachers are Chinese non-native English speakers). This project, therefore, will explore what the perceived difference is among these three contexts.

2.     The Study

2.1.    Research Questions

RQ1: What is the difference between intercultural communication awareness in the three selected contexts?

RQ2: What is the relationship between intercultural communication awareness and willingness to communicate in each of the three selected contexts?

RQ3: What is the relationship between intercultural communicative competence and willingness to communicate in each of the three selected contexts?

2.2.    Instrument

To ensure the validity of the data collection process, the instruments used in this study were all localised into Chinese. Echoing the suggestion to back-translate the questionnaire (Dörnyei & Taguchi, 2009), the author invited one translator with the Chinese Accreditation for Translation (Level 3) to help finish the process. Also, all the Likert-Scales were modified to be seven-point due to its increased variability (Dawes, 2002). After developing the questionnaire, four EFL students were involved in a focus group discussion about the face validity of the instrument. Finally, all the negative items were highlighted in the online questionnaire to remind the participants, and some examples of the three contexts were provided in the bracket for references (see Appendix for more).

To measure Willingness to Communicate (WTC), the instrument used is from very recent research (Dewaele & Dewaele, 2018) which identified a positive correlation between foreign language students’ WTC and attitudes to teachers. The 12-item Likert Scale used to examine the Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) is adapted from a 22-item instrument from a study exploring the relationship between ICC and foreign language learning motivation (Mirzaei & Forouzandeh, 2013). After running the reliability analysis, it was found that one item is negatively influencing the internal consistency of the whole construct which should be deleted (Larson-Hall, 2016). Therefore, the 11 items left will be combined for later analysis (Cronbach’s alpha = .737). Three self-developed questions were designed to ask the participants to rate the level of intercultural elements they perceived in each of the three contexts. Due to the single factor structure of these self-developed instruments, the reliability may be lower than the two scales mentioned above, which should be refined in future research.

2.3.    Procedure and Participants

The questionnaire was entered into an online survey platform ‘Wenjuanxing.com’. The author has informed every respondent the right to terminate the survey process at any point they want. Also, anonymity was ensured during the data collection procedure. After spreading the link of this questionnaire in a snowball sampling manner, between 6^th and 7^thJune 2020, a total of 67 cases were collected. With this small-scale dataset, four cases were identified to be invalid ones because of the violation of the theoretically minimum completing time.

In the end, there are 63 cases (26 males, 35 females, and 2 other genders) imported into the data analysis software IBM SPSS 22.0. Over 90% of them (N = 57) have experiences attending the class taught by the selected three kinds of teachers. The missing data of the other 10% (N = 6) was handled with Bayesian imputation (Buhi et al., 2008). Three participants were invited to involve in a short interview (approximately 15 minutes, see the following section for more).

2.4.    Data Analysis

To answer RQ1, the descriptive data analysis method was used to compare the perceived intercultural communication element in the three contexts. To answer RQ2 and RQ3, the author employed linear regression to assess to what extent the independent variable(s) can predict the dependent variable(s). After the data analysis, three participants were involved in a short interview as their intercultural communicative competences were in the low (3.9, lower 20% of the sample), medium (5.4, 50%), and high level (6.3, 80%), respectively. Limited by time, the interview data were coded by the automatic transcribing tool iflyrec.com without cross-validation, which should be refined in future research. The transcript was analysed using the emotion analysis function in Nvivo 11 and validated by the automatic searching function of corpus tool the Prime Machine.

3.     Results and Discussion

Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics of the intercultural awareness (ICA) in each of the three contexts. The Bootstrapmethod was used to provide a confidence interval, based on which the lower and upper bound of the average score can be observed (Larson‐Hall & Plonsky, 2015). It could be identified that the Non-native teacher setting was recognised as the most intercultural one, whereas the Chinese teacher setting was the least.

Together with the interview data, it seems that the participants rate the ICA based on their perception of the distance between the teacher and them. All three interviewees claimed that nationality and perceived language competence are the bases when they judge the interculturality existing in the context. For instance, the first two foreign nationality settings are regarded as ‘more intercultural’, but the English native speakers are comparatively less intercultural because the participants are ‘cultivated with a lot of English culture’ or ‘much easier to be understood by native speakers’. Differently, the Chinese teacher context is perceived to be comparatively ‘less intercultural’.

To answer RQ 2 which focuses on the relationship between ICA and WTC, Table 2 was generated to show the correlation among all the seven constructs covered by the present study. The effect sizes[1] of Native context (Spearman’s r = .299) and Non-native context (Spearman’s r = .382) are around the ‘medium’ level strength (Cohen, 1988), while this index is much lower in the Chinese teacher context (Spearman’s r = .193). This result is not expected, because it is hypothesised that the intercultural level perceived in a context will negatively predict students’ WTC, that is, students would be more willing to speak in a class with lower intercultural level.

Additionally, from Table 3, it could be observed that the sample’s WTC (descriptive data) in Chinese teacher context did not surpass the other two contexts. To explore the reasons behind the two conditions discussed above, in the interview data, student B with medium level ICC claimed that Chinese teachers might demise those students who presented their ideas a lot. Student C with higher-level ICC reflected that, when attending the ‘less intercultural’ context, he will avoid himself to be ‘outstanding’ and ‘assertive’ which is undervalued by the other Chinese students. In these respects, it seems that the perceived cultural value of both the interlocutor and the peers will significantly influence the speakers’ WTC.

Another interesting finding is that WTC is the highest in non-native context, which is the most intercultural one. In the interview, student A and B demonstrated that they are freer to speak in the non-native teachers’ class, due to the mediation of the lingua franca. To compare, in the native context, they are afraid of making mistakes which will be easily spotted by the teacher. The results above all lead to a tricky but valuable conclusion, that the learners in the EMI class inclined to communicate with more intercultural or ‘unfamiliar’ interlocutors, because they prioritised the purpose of not making mistakes. Especially for Chinese learners[2], they also avoid being perceived as self-assertive, which was reported to be culturally degraded.

To answer RQ 3 which is about the relationship between ICC and WTC, the result presented in Table 4 is quite surprising as it contradicts almost all of the previous research findings, which identified a general positive linear relation between intercultural communicative competence and willingness to communicate (Clément et al., 2003; Matveev, 2017; Morreale et al., 2001; Spitzberg & Cupach, 1984). However, in the present study, if the collected data is valid, it seems that ICC does not statistically significantly predict Native WTC (Adjusted R² = -.001, p = .334), but Non-native WTC (Adjusted R² = .112, p = .034) and Chinese WTC (Adjusted R² = .183, p = .008). To confirm whether this inconsistent result is valid requires more replications in the future. If it is valid, the author assumes that the previous paradigm which recognises ICC as a variable directly predicting WTC needs to be refined.

Table 4: Linear Regression exploring the relationship between ICC and WTC

In a new model, this relationship between ICC and WTC may be strongly moderated by situational factors. Invoking the concepts of ‘face’ from pragmatics (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Goffman, 2005), it is hypothesised that students in the EMI class have a dual focus on being ‘acknowledged’ (positive face, requiring connectedness) and ‘not wrong’ (negative face, requiring separateness). In the non-native class (the most intercultural) representing high separateness, ICC positively correlates with WTC as it could ensure the success of communication. In the Chinese class (the least intercultural) representing high connectedness, this correlation reappears as high ICC could equip the students with higher openness and risk-taking (Kraemer et al., 2001; Liu & Fang, 2017) to fight against the pressure to be ‘correct’. However, in the native class, perhaps this context simultaneously represents a lower level separateness and connectedness, resulting in a low correlation between ICC and WTC.

4.     Conclusion

The present essay explored the Chinese EFL learners’ profile of intercultural awareness, intercultural communicative competence, and willingness to communicate, in three selected contexts in EMI education. The Chinese teacher context was proved to be the least intercultural setting, whereas the non-native was the most. Interestingly, the participants’ WTC is the lowest in the Chinese environment partly because they perceived that a low-level self-assertiveness is valued. Also, they reflected that a higher-level English proficiency of teachers might negatively influence the students’ WTC, due to the high transparency in mistake-making. Surprisingly, the ICC level positively predicts WTC in non-native and Chinese contexts, but not the native one. The implications for it were discussed with reference to face theory.

Limited by length, the essay did not develop a new model discussing the dynamic interaction among the constructs covered in this project. In the future, more studies should be conducted to confirm the current findings and further explore the situational nature of the selected variables.

5.     Bibliography

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6.     Appendix: Questionnaire

1. 您的性别： [单选题] *

2. 您是否接受过英语作为教学语言（英文授课）的教育。 [单选题] *

3. 在这种教育模式中，您是否有以下经验 [多选题] *

4. 在“以英语为母语的外国教师用英语讲课（如英国教师、澳大利亚教师）”这种情况中，请选择在以下几种情况中，您的交流意愿如何。[矩阵量表题] *

5. 在“不以英语为母语的外国教师用英语讲课（如西班牙教师、希腊教师）”这种情况中，请选择在以下几种情况中，您的交流意愿如何。[矩阵量表题] *

6. 在“不以英语为母语的中国教师用英语讲课”这种情况中，请选择在以下几种情况中，您的交流意愿如何。[矩阵量表题] *

7. 在这三种情况中，您认为各自有多少跨文化交流的元素呢？最后的选项为不适用。[矩阵量表题] *

8. 请选择最符合您的选项，1为非常不同意，7为非常同意，最后的选项为不适用。[矩阵量表题] *

[1] As the present project only approached a small scale of participants (N = 63), the significance level (p-value), which associates with sample size, is invalid to provide enough information (Wei et al., 2019). Therefore, effect sizes indexes were employed to interpret the data. It should be noticed that future research should involve more respondents to obtain higher statistical power.

[2] It should be noticed that the notion of ‘Chinese learner’ per se is plausible. Therefore, in the future research, a more comprehensive design should discuss the concept of culture in a more dynamic and even deconstructivism approach.