Abstract
The study examined international and home students’ perceptions of intercultural collaborative learning in an English as a medium of instruction (EMI) environment in a Chinese university. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews, the findings showed that international students held a positive view, reporting gains from the cultural, subject knowledge and language learning dimensions but also hurdles which impeded intercultural communication and content learning in the EMI curriculum. The Chinese students were less positive, viewing such a mode of learning somewhat as a ‘burden’ due primarily to the differences in their and international students’ academic goals and expectations. In response to the negative experiences, the Chinese students demonstrated resilience and ingenuity in devising strategies for achieving their own academic goals. This article concludes with practical implications for EMI teachers and curriculum designers regarding how to improve EMI instruction and intercultural learning in higher education.
Keywords
I Introduction
In the fields of applied linguistics and intercultural education, existing studies have examined English as a medium of instruction (EMI) curriculum design at policy and organizational level (e.g. Hu, Li, & Lei, 2014) and the social and academic experiences of students in EMI environments (e.g. Gu, 2009; Soruç & Griffith, 2018). While such a line of inquiry has shed light on the structure, implementation, and influences of EMI programs, there is a dearth of research on how students from different linguistic and socio-cultural backgrounds engage in collaborative learning in EMI curriculums. As many higher education institutions are becoming ever more international and cross-cultural, collaborative learning on campus is ubiquitous and it is a promising pedagogical approach which enables peers from different backgrounds to mutually learn from/with each other in EMI programs (Poort, Jansen & Hofman, 2019). When students are working in groups of two or more, mutually searching for understanding, solutions, and meanings, or creating a product in their specialized area, they are afforded with opportunities and support to discover alternative ways of thinking, enhance linguistic and communicative competence, as well as promote content comprehension and application (Sun & Yuan, 2018). Despite all the benefits, collaborative learning does not occur easily, particularly in internationalized university contexts where students may hold different and even conflicting beliefs, values and goals due to their individual histories and backgrounds (Cotton, George, & Joyner, 2013). In light of such complexities and potential challenges, a focus on international and local students’ collaborative experiences in EMI programs is thus warranted.
The present study, informed by a phenomenological approach, sought to examine international and local students’ collaborative engagement and its potential impacts on their learning in an EMI business program in China. Situated in the qualitative research tradition, phenomenology aims to provide a deep understanding of a certain phenomenon as experienced by individuals (Starks & Brown Trinidad, 2007). It has been widely employed to explore the lived experiences of various stakeholders (e.g. students, teachers, and administrators) in higher education (e.g. Cilesiz, 2011; Saddler & Sundin, 2020). By studying various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, and emotion to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social interactions (Smith, 2008), phenomenology can shed light on the essence derived from the ‘common experience’ shared by individuals in the social world (Creswell, 2007; Van Manen, 2017). A phenomenological approach thus aligns well with the purpose of the present research, which focuses on the subjective experiences and perspectives of international and Chinese students regarding their intercultural collaborative engagement through EMI. By comparing and contrasting their experiences and perceptions, the study can generate a situated and nuanced understanding about students’ co-constructed learning processes and outcomes in culturally mixed groups in an EMI environment. Practically, it can also offer useful implications for course instructors, curriculum designers and university administrators on how to effectively design, monitor, and promote collaborative learning for all students through EMI in higher education.
II Literature review
1 Defining collaborative learning
Collaborative learning can be seen as an educational approach (Barkley, Cross, & Major, 2014) with its roots in social constructivism in which learning is, in essence, collaborative since knowledge is co-constructed among individuals (Udvari-Solner, 2012; Vygotsky, 1978). Interdependence is hence a core feature in collaborative learning as it can help students form joint goals and make collective efforts to solve problems in concrete situations (Udvari-Solner, 2012). Group size is a noteworthy consideration since the likelihood of diffusion of responsibility rises as group size increases (Gokhale, 2012), thereby potentially jeopardizing individual accountability, which is another notable characteristic of collaborative learning (Barkley, Cross, & Major, 2014; Gokhale, 2012). This is because collaborative learning is not collaborative per se if the condition of every participant engaging actively and contributing approximately equally towards a shared goal is not fulfilled (Barkley, Cross, & Major, 2014).
Over the past years, there have been a large number of studies on collaborative learning in different subject areas such as English and mathematics (Lowrie, 2011; Tsang & Yuan, 2021). Their findings show that students can have opportunities to express their own ideas, engage in higher-order thinking (e.g. reasoning and evaluation), and exchange feedback in a collaborative environment (Mercer & Dawes, 2014). Such dialogic and supportive engagements are likely to promote students’ learning motivation, content comprehension, and cognitive growth (Alexander, 2018). In Lowrie’s study (2011), for instance, the primary school students worked in groups to solve mathematics problems with the support of genuine artefacts (including brochures, menus, bus timetables, and photographs). Their collaborative experiences not only helped them make sense of a range of spatial concepts, but also sustained their motivations to address challenging problems in the classroom.
2 Collaborative learning in EMI environments
EMI refers to ‘the use of the English language to teach academic subjects (other than English itself) in countries or jurisdictions where the first language (L1) of the majority of the population is not English’ (Dearden, 2015, p. 2). Research on EMI has increased rapidly over the past years, primarily addressing students’ learning perceptions and outcomes as well as teachers’ classroom practice and continuing development in EMI programs (for a detailed review, see Macaro et al., 2018). Evident in this line of research is a strong focus on the integration between content and language in EMI classrooms, where students, supported by their peers and teachers, explore effective ways to use language and other relevant semiotic resources (e.g. diagrams and visuals) to construct and negotiate meaning about specific subject matter (Alhassan, 2019; Wannagat, 2007). This understanding largely differs from the traditional, teacher-centered approach to EMI teaching characterized by a knowledge transmission style (Lo & Macaro, 2012; Yip, Coyle, & Tsang, 2007); rather, it advocates the social and collaborative nature of learning through students’ active participation and engagement in communities of practice at the task, classroom and disciplinary level (Evnitskaya & Morton, 2011; Macaro, 2019). On the other hand, engaging students in collaborative learning in EMI courses is a cognitively and emotionally difficult task. Previous studies in different regions, such as China (An, Macaro, & Childs, 2021) and Turkey (Soruç & Griffith, 2018), have reported students’ inability to engage in meaning negotiation in EMI environments due to their low English proficiency and limited social competence, which could further result in negative feelings such as embarrassment and anxiety with a heightened sense of resistance towards EMI teaching.
In addition, as EMI programs often involve a mixture of students from diverse linguistic and socio-cultural backgrounds, students need to engage in intercultural communication, which can further cause difficulties for their collaborative engagement and learning (Ippolito, 2007; Yuan, Li & Yu, 2019). Hennebry and Fordyce (2018), for instance, conducted a study investigating students’ views based on their cooperative learning experiences with students from other cultures in an UK university. They found that perceived cultural differences (e.g. in terms of learning styles and habits) was a source of frustration and breakdown in intercultural communication. The participants in the study pinpointed it was the Chinese students who were not engaged orally, leading to some frustration on the part of non-Chinese students. God and Zhang (2018) conducted a similar study examining Chinese and Australian students’ intercultural learning experiences. Many participants were found to have encountered obstacles in their intercultural collaboration due to potential cultural bias and stereotypes.
Due to the cultural differences, overseas students often felt as ‘unwelcome outsiders from a foreign land’ (Sato & Hodge, 2015, p. 216) and they were often marginalized in classrooms and isolated in group discussion conducted in English. Cotton, George and Joyner (2013) corroborated this by reporting the home student participants in the UK tended to dominate discussions while overseas students contributed little. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that learners tend to display a high tendency to work with those sharing the same culture (Volet & Ang, 2012). To address such challenges and promote collaborative learning in internationalized, EMI programs, scholars (e.g. de Hei et al., 2019; Fang & Baker, 2018) have argued for the need to provide deliberate and systematic guidance at the classroom and curriculum level with a view to fostering students’ intercultural communicative competence, i.e. a set of intercultural awareness, sensitivity and strategies that can facilitate effective intercultural communication (Munezane, 2019). More specifically, previous studies (Poort et al., 2019; Walker, Cardon, & Aritz, 2018) have provided some pedagogical recommendations, such as the explicit training of intercultural communication strategies in content learning tasks, followed by students’ self-reflections on their collaborative processes and performance. In this way, students can incrementally learn to navigate potential cultural barriers and engage in meaningful collaboration to seek their language and content learning in EMI classrooms.
3 EMI in Chinese higher education
China has taken a proactive approach through ‘vigorous engagement with the outside world, especially with Western societies’ such as importing Western knowledge into China (Yang, 2014, p. 154). From circa 2000, China also began to export Chinese knowledge to the world (Yang, 2014), leading to an unremitting increase in international student enrolments. According to the Ministry of Education (2018) in China, there were 489,200 international students coming from 204 countries and territories worldwide furthering their studies in China, which is not far from China’s goal of recruiting 500,000 students in 2020 (Larbi & Fu, 2017). The rapid expansion of internationalization of higher education has brought about a large number of EMI programs in various disciplines. As observed by Jiang, Zhang and May (2019, p. 107), EMI has evolved ‘from being a Chinese–English bilingual teaching experience in well-developed socio-economic areas to being used right across the country’ in university settings.
The development of EMI in the Chinese higher education sector, however, is not without problems. As many university teachers are institutionally required to provide EMI courses, they often feel unprepared with limited contextual support for their teaching improvement (Macaro & Han, 2020; Yuan, 2020). This is particularly the case when they teach culturally mixed groups. Facing students from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, they reported great challenges regarding how to organize collaborative activities to overcome cultural barriers and enhance content learning. Against such a background, this study set out to explore a group of Chinese and international students’ perceptions about collaborative engagement in an international business program in a Chinese university. Adopting a phenomenological research design in a naturalistic setting, the study can shed light on the complexities of collaborative learning in EMI programs and offer useful pedagogical implications for EMI teachers in China and other similar educational contexts which are undergoing internationalization of higher education.
III The study
1 Research question, approach and context
This study is part of an ongoing research project focusing on students’ learning experiences and identity construction in EMI programs (Yuan et al., 2019). One research question guided the present inquiry: How do Chinese and international students perceive their collaborative learning in the EMI program?
To answer the research question, we adopted the approach of phenomenology to explore the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of individuals’ experienced phenomena in complex and fleeting social reality (Callary, Rathwell, & Young, 2015). The uniqueness of phenomenology is its focus on structures of conscious experience as experienced from the first-person point of view, along with relevant conditions of experience (Smith, 2008). In other words, phenomenology seeks to recover the lived meanings of ordinary experiences ‘without objectifying these faded meanings and without turning the lived meanings into positivistic themes, sanitized concepts, objectified descriptions, or abstract theories’ (Van Manen, 2017, p. 812). By exploring the raw moment of everyday experiences and the meanings that arise in the experience, phenomenological researchers can generate rich reflective texts with experiential concreteness, vividness, and descriptive detail, which can induce the reader into a wondering engagement with the research topic (i.e. intercultural collaborative engagement in this case) for authentic and in-depth understanding (Van Manen, 2017). In the present study, the use of phenomenological approach also aligns with the existing EMI research (e.g. Li & Ruan, 2015; Yu, Wang, Jiang & Wang, 2020), which, informed by a socio-cultural perspective, highlights the interactive relationship between students’ learning perceptions and their situated complex ecological system influenced by a range of contextual factors such as university policy, EMI curriculum, instructional practice, and learning culture.
The participants in the study include eight Chinese students and five international students, who were studying in a 4-year BA program (International Business) in Q University (anonymized name, referred to as QU in the following paragraphs) in China. QU is one of the top Chinese universities which has made great strides in its internationalization over the past decade. For instance, while it has made efforts in recruiting international teaching staff and promoted English as the medium of instruction (EMI) in most of its programs (except some language majors such as French and Japanese), it also offers both short and full-time programs for international students with scholarships. As a result, QU has evolved into a multilingual and multicultural campus with about 170 international teachers and over 2,000 international students. In its four-year international business program, great emphasis has been placed on students’ professional learning (e.g. in terms of business-related knowledge and skills) as well as intercultural communicative competence. For instance, it has been made mandatory by the program that international and Chinese students need to take most courses (e.g. Finance, Accounting, and Marketing) together through EMI, and they also need to engage in intercultural collaborative tasks in different forms (e.g. group discussion, presentations, and small-scale research). In this sense, we believe the international business program provided by QU can serve as an intensity case (Patton, 1990) which can offer rich information and insights into students’ collaborative experiences in mixed cultural groups in EMI curriculums.
The participants were recruited from a major EMI course (regarding business negotiation) offered in the second year of the program. We chose this course because it held a diversity of students from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, hence allowing us to explore their intercultural interactions within this course and in other settings on campus. At the beginning, the research team sent out invitations to all the students in the course. Eight Chinese students (named from CS1 to CS8) and five international students (named from IS1 to IS5), with ages ranging from 19 to 22 years, agreed to participate in the study on a voluntary basis. The Chinese students, four males (CS3, CS4, CS5 and CS8) and four females (CS1, CS2, CS6 and CS7), have been learning and using English as a foreign language in China for over ten years. Since they joined the program (i.e. BA in international business) in the university, they have also taken a minor in English offered by the Faculty of English (as required by the university). Thus, they are believed to possess strong English abilities for EMI learning and intercultural communication.
The international students, one male (IS2) and four females (IS1, IS3, IS4 and IS5), come from Europe or North America (for their biographical information, see Table 1). According to the information provided by the university, the majority of international students in QU (around 75%) are from these two regions while the rest (around 25%) from Africa and East Asia. Therefore, we believe our sample can to some extent represent the general international population in the university. However, as a qualitative, phenomenological study, we do not intend to seek generalizability with our findings. Instead, we hope the information gathered from the participants can generate in-depth insights into their lived experiences as international students in the situated EMI program. At the time of the study, the international participants were all in the middle of their undergraduate study in overseas EMI universities and came to QU for a short-term exchange program (around 3 to 6 months). Their English proficiency is considered high (as their first/second language) as they have been learning and using English in their academic study (e.g. their own undergraduate program) and daily life since a young age (as reported by the participants in the interviews). The participants were all informed about the nature and process of the study before it commenced with their consent obtained.
International students’ biographical information.
Note. IS = international student.
2 Data collection and analysis
Informed by the phenomenological approach, the first and third author conducted individual interviews with the participants in a semi-structured, conversational manner to examine their intercultural engagement in the EMI program. According to Smith (2008), phenomenology is concerned with diverse aspects of individuals’ experience, covering their temporal awareness (within the stream of consciousness), spatial awareness (notably in perception), self-awareness (awareness-of-oneself), embodied thinking and action, linguistic activity (involving meaning and communication), social interaction (including collective action), and so forth. Therefore, the interviews started with a broad scope by inviting the participants to share their personal background and general experience in the program (e.g. their expectations, goals and interactions with course instructors and other students), and then zoomed in on their collaborative engagements with international/Chinese students in a range of task forms (e.g. presentations, discussion, role play tasks, and research projects) in different courses. Specifically, the interviewers invited the participants to openly describe their collaboration arrangement (e.g. their individual roles and responsibilities) and process in different tasks, as well as reflect on the benefits and challenges they encountered as well as their emotions in culturally mixed groups. Special attention was paid to the critical incidents or people (i.e. collaborators) in their previous and ongoing collaborative experiences. While English was used in interviewing the international students, the interviews with the Chinese students was conducted in Chinese as the participants found it easier to converse in their mother tongue. The interviews, each lasting around 100 minutes, were audio-recorded for transcription.
The data analysis process drew from the phenomenological method as a guiding analytical framework (Moustakas, 1994). All the interview transcripts were reviewed by the first author to obtain a general feeling about the participants’ lived experiences in their collaborative engagement in the program. Then, he searched for and listed codes that reflected the participants’ perceptions about their intercultural collaboration in each case (also known as horizontalizing in phenomenological analysis; Moustakas, 1994). In particular, he identified the original terms, statements and anecdotes embedded in the data, which might contain a unique moment of experience with personal meaning related to the phenomena under study (Creswell, 2007). For example, IS1 mentioned she was impressed and inspired by the ‘proactive and serious learning attitude’ of her Chinese partners, which was coded as ‘enhanced learning motivation through intercultural collaboration’. In CS1’s case, she reported her frustrations about collaborating with international students who came to China mainly for culture exposure rather than academic learning, and this was coded as ‘conflicting learning goals and expectations’.
The step of initial coding then led to an individual textural descriptions of each participant with emergent codes capturing the essence of his/her intercultural collaborative experience (Starks & Brown Trinidad, 2007). Afterwards, the narratives derived from all the international students were subject to a cross-case comparisons, leading to two major themes (i.e. ‘enhanced cultural, content, and language learning’ and ‘rigid language and invisible wall’) about their shared perceptions about collaborating with Chinese students in the program. A similar approach was also applied to the data from the Chinese students, which resulted in two main themes (i.e. ‘a lack of sustained collaboration with different goals and expectations’ and ‘learning to be tough and play tricks’). Table 2 presents the key themes and codes derived from the data analysis process. To enhance the trustworthiness and validity of the study, while the first author conducted the analysis, he invited a second coder (a qualitative researcher with a PhD in education) to analyse the data, followed by rounds of discussion until a consensus was reached. The participants were also invited to comment on the preliminary data analysis results and their comments were brought into consideration in the refinement of the final interpretation.
Data analysis results.
Notes. CS = Chinese student. IS = international student.
IV Research findings
The data analysis demonstrates that Chinese and international students engaged in collaborative work through different tasks (e.g. presentations, discussion, role play tasks, and research projects) as prescribed by the program policy. Their collaboration, conducted through English, took place in classroom settings, e.g. through negotiation, debate and discussion tasks, while it also extended to their course assessment (e.g. group presentations, reflections and research reports). Normally their collaboration involved around four to six members with different cultural backgrounds and they were free to form a group based on their own preferences. While the two parties reaped some benefits from their culturally mixed group collaboration, they shared different and sometimes conflicting views based on their group work experiences in the EMI program. In the following part, we present the findings from the international and the Chinese students’ perspectives respectively to answer the research question.
1 International students’ perspectives: ‘A close look behind the curtain’
In general, the phenomenological analysis shows the international students’ appreciation of the intercultural collaborative experience, which was vividly described as ‘a close look behind the curtain’ (IS3) with positive impacts on their content, cultural, and language learning in the EMI program.
If we just take the courses in the formal classroom settings, what we learn would be very limited, like one-dimensional . . . Working with Chinese students helps us see what is behind the curtain to understand how Chinese students think and study, and what their university culture is like. (IS3)
However, while the international students got opportunities to ‘look behind the curtain’ through different collaborative activities, they encountered ‘an invisible wall’ due to linguistic and cultural differences in the EMI program. Below we present the two main themes of international students’ intercultural collaborative engagement with illustrative quotes and examples.
a Enhanced content, cultural, and language learning
Through different collaborative tasks within and outside the classroom, all the international students expanded and transformed their perceptions about Chinese students, which further added to their learning motivations in the EMI program. As some participants (IS2, IS3 and IS4) recalled, when they first arrived at this university, they were worried that they might lack opportunities to interact with Chinese students, who ‘often seem to be very shy and like to stay in their own circle’ (IS2). IS3 further shared, Before I came to China, I met some Chinese students in my university. They were always shy and preferred to work with other Chinese students in the courses. I was thinking maybe their English was not very good and they lacked confidence (IS3).
Upon their arrival, however, three international students (IS1, IS3 and IS5) were surprised to find that their Chinese classmates not only exhibited a high level of English proficiency, particularly in terms of their speaking fluency and listening skills, but also actively engaged in interactions with their teachers and peers in EMI courses. For example, in the course about business negotiation, both international and local students were randomly assigned to different groups for simulated negotiation tasks in each session. This task hence provided opportunities for international students (e.g. IS2, IS4 and IS5) to develop a deepened understanding of their Chinese peers through ongoing and intensive interactions: In each session we need to conduct business negotiations for around one hour in different scenarios with different students. At the end of the course, I think I have got to know all Chinese students in the course. I am amazed by their fluent English, quick thinking and serious attitude. (IS4)
A similar observation was made by IS5 who also enrolled in this course.
I changed my views about Chinese students . . . They are nice and polite as we used to think, but they are also proactive, confident and critical. I think they are very western now. (IS5)
IS5 described the Chinese students as ‘western’ because they shared ‘a similar style’ (e.g. ‘being proactive, confident and critical’) to her peers back in France (IS5). At the same time, IS5 was also impressed with the proactive and serious stance of Chinese students in the courses, which gave them ‘a nudge’ in their own content learning in the program (IS5).
I guess I was not very serious about the program at the beginning. My goal was mainly to learn about China and study Chinese. By interacting with the students in the course, I became impressed by their academic performance and abilities, which motivated me to work harder in the program. (IS5)
IS5’s view was echoed by the rest of the international participants who believed that interaction with Chinese students exerted positive influences on their learning motivations. As IS1 reflected, At first, I thought I just came to China to learn Chinese and learn about its culture. Later on, I tried to work harder in the courses . . . When you see how hardworking they (Chinese students) are, you will feel a bit embarrassed to slack off. (IS1)
Given the practical nature of the business program, the participants all believed that their engagement with Chinese students helped them put various business strategies (e.g. in terms of marketing and business negotiation) in practice and contributed to their professional knowledge about the complex rules and culture in Chinese business settings. IS2, for example, shared his collaborative experience with three Chinese students in a presentation task in a marketing course: We played different roles in the task. I designed the presentation outline and allocated the work, and they (Chinese students) searched for different sources of information about this Chinese company we focused on in the task. Since some materials were in Chinese, they did some translation for me. I learned a lot about this company and its marketing strategies . . . We worked out the details and prepared the PowerPoint slides together. In the end, we got to present the part we like. (IS2)
Though not explicitly defined, IS2 and his group members took on different roles in their collaborative work with IS2 being the facilitator (i.e. designing the outline and allocating the work) and other students being information collectors (i.e. gathering and translating useful materials). Then they shared the responsibilities in preparing and presenting the results of their analysis of the company’s marketing strategies. Such a collaborative process helped IS2 contextualize the content knowledge and strategies he had acquired from his current business coursework and added to his professional competence about conducting business in the Chinese society.
By working with Chinese students in the tasks, I understood better how to apply the marketing strategies in the Chinese context. This is obviously valuable as I want to do business with Chinese companies in the future. (IS2)
IS2’s views were also shared by other international students who unanimously spoke to the value of intercultural collaborative engagement in promoting their content learning. In IS5’s case, she collaborated with different Chinese students to conduct mock business negotiation in a course. According to her observation, her partners were ‘responsible and well-prepared’ for the tasks. As they needed to engage in discussion to prepare for the negotiation with the other side, her partners’ perspectives and input helped her ‘process some difficult knowledge’ (particularly those related to Chinese business culture and system) and ‘form a better understanding about the negotiation strategies taught in the course’ (IS5).
Apart from their motivation growth and content/professional learning, two international students (IS3 and IS4) also gained some incidental opportunities for Chinese learning through their collaborative work. As IS4 described, when she worked with Chinese students in different projects, she always tried to practice Chinese and asked them questions about Chinese learning and culture. Such informal interactions to some extent complemented the Chinese courses provided by the university, thus boosting her communicative abilities in Chinese.
I picked up some daily language from interactions with the Chinese students in our group work. When I used them in the Chinese class, the teacher was quite impressed. (Laugh) It is more effective to learn Chinese through communication. (IS4)
b ‘Rigid’ language and ‘an invisible wall’
The international students encountered some challenges in their collaborative engagement with Chinese students in EMI courses. While they acknowledged the high level of English proficiency of Chinese students, they reported some instances of language barriers in their group interactions. For example, some participants (IS3, IS4, and IS5) mentioned the ‘rigid’ language used by Chinese students, which impeded their collaboration in different tasks in the program (IS3).
Her English is very fluent and she is not shy in expressing herself . . . The way she spoke was very formal as if we were conducting a formal and serious business meeting. It made the task quite difficult. We struggled about how to apply the negotiation strategies in the task. (IS3)
In a similar vein, IS5 shared a collaborative writing task she conducted with Chinese students in a marketing course. In the task which required them to jointly discuss and write their reflections about different marketing strategies, IS5 came to realize that her Chinese peers ‘had difficulty in drafting an appropriate reflection’ (IS5). She further elaborated, Each of us wrote about one marketing strategy. They (Chinese students) were very efficient, but their reflections were more like a summary of the textbooks. I mean we were supposed to talk about our own learning and reflections. One student did not even use the first-person pronoun in his writing. (IS5)
As a group assignment, IS5 had to take the initiative and helped her groupmates revise their parts in order to produce a linguistically coherent and appropriate reflection in the end. In IS1’s case, she found that the Chinese students sometimes could not understand her ideas when they held group discussion in English. Thus, she had to wait while the local students switched to Chinese for discussion in order to figure out her meaning. This code switch act to some extent made IS1 feel ‘confused’ and ‘isolated’ in the group: IS1: Sometimes I feel confused because I think they should be able to understand what I was saying. Interviewer: What do you mean? IS1: I mean their English is quite good. I do not know what the problem is. I am also part of the team. They can just check with me if they have any questions. It made me and my friend (another international student) feel isolated when they all suddenly talked in Chinese.
Therefore, in some collaborative tasks reported by the participants, there seemed to be an ‘invisible wall’ (IS4) between international and Chinese students despite their shared goals and efforts in completing the course task. As IS4 elaborated, They are nice and friendly, but it always feels like we are very different from each other. I do not feel a sense of community . . . Quite distant sometimes. (IS4)
Despite the emotional challenge, the participants (IS1, IS2, and IS5) also faced some obstacles due to potential cultural differences. IS5 shared a critical incident in which one Chinese student suddenly turned aggressive in a business negotiation task.
We were negotiating the price and she raised her voice and got worked up. I was shocked and did not know what to do. I was confused about why she acted in this way because it was different from other Chinese students. Was it because she’s actually very western? Or was it because of Chinese culture? Like I said something that offended her? I did not know. (IS5)
As shown by the above quote, IS5 tried to analyse and resolve the conflict in her interaction by adopting a binary lens which characterized Chinese students as either ‘western’ or ‘Chinese’ (as suggested by her questions in the quote). Such a view, however, did not effectively help her handle the conflicting scenario and she had to give up with confusion in the end. In other words, while our data suggest that the international students developed an expanded understanding of Chinese students (e.g. being active and confident), this example to some extent suggests their insufficient intercultural communicative competence in real life situations.
2 Chinese students’ perspectives: ‘Reluctant hosts’
As opposed to their international counterparts, the Chinese students generally felt ‘unwilling’ and even ‘forced’ to engage in collaboration with international students in the EMI environment (CS1 and CS5). A metaphor ‘reluctant hosts’ mentioned by CS7 captured the essence of their self-perceptions in the collaborative experience, which was fraught with complex meaning negotiation and potential tension: It is a requirement of the courses and we all have to do it. I actually prefer working with Chinese students if I can choose . . . They are like our guests and we are their hosts. Though reluctant, we have to be nice and work with them in the program. (CS7)
On the other hand, such experience brought unexpected learning outcomes, i.e. enhanced intercultural strategies, as the Chinese students learned to become ‘tough’ and ‘play tricks’ in the collaboration process in the EMI program (CS2). Their complex experience and perceptions are illustrated below.
a A lack of sustained collaboration with different goals and expectations
Compared to their international counterparts, the Chinese students held a relatively negative attitude about the intercultural collaborative engagement through EMI in the program. When asked about the reasons behind their negative views, all the participants pointed out the limited opportunities for sustained collaboration with international students in the program.
Most international students come here through short-term exchange programs. They come and go, and there are always new faces in our courses. Even though we work together, it is difficult for us to bond and develop a true partnership. (CS3)
Therefore, when the program required students to engage in intercultural collaboration through English, their collaborative engagement tended to be short-lived with a frequent change of partners, thus exerting negative impacts on their motivations towards collaboration: Normally after we finish a task together in one course, we say goodbye and will not see each other again. What is the point? In our group work, what we do is to assign the tasks and get it done. Just like business. (CS8)
More seriously, most Chinese students (CS1, CS3, CS5, CS6, and CS8) attributed their negative attitudes to the different expectations and goals between international students and themselves. Studying in the business program of QU, the Chinese students expressed their strong willingness to strive for academic excellence and develop their professional competence in international business. However, their academic goals to some extent clashed with those of international students who came to China mainly for cultural exposure and Chinese learning. As CS5 and CS6 shared, Most international students come here to learn Chinese or just for fun. I think we want different things in the courses. I really need an A, while they may just need a pass for their exchange program. (CS5) They showed up for discussion, but when we needed them to search for materials and do analysis, I could tell they did not really make efforts. I understand the courses are not important for them, but we are under great pressure to get a good GPA. (CS6)
The students’ different learning goals hence led to different levels of engagement in the collaborative tasks, and according to many local participants (CS1, CS2, CS4, and CS7), they ended up taking major responsibilities in the collaborative tasks. For example, CS7 shared her collaboration experiences with two international students in writing a business report. As the international students seldom replied to her emails promptly or attended their discussion meetings, she and the other Chinese student had to play the role of ‘babysitter’ (CS7) by taking care of most of the writing task including formatting and proofreading. Therefore, due to their divergent expectations and goals, the involvement of international students did not bring academic benefits for the Chinese students, but added to their workload and pressure.
We (Chinese students) felt very tired and stressed especially at the end of a semester. I think it is not a healthy way of learning. (CS7)
As seen above, CS7 encountered some negative emotions due to a lack of shared goals and uneven distribution of labor. This can be further exemplified by the metaphor ‘burden’ used by CS4 in the interview: It can be very frustrating, especially when they did not meet the deadline we had agreed on at the beginning. I know it is not very polite, but sometimes I think they are really a burden to us. (CS4)
b Learning to be ‘tough’ and ‘play tricks’
Despite their overall negative attitudes towards previous collaborative experiences, interestingly, most Chinese students (CS1, CS2, CS4, CS6, CS7, and CS8) expressed a sense of pride about their increasingly multilingual and multicultural program and campus, which reflect the growing influence and attractiveness of China at the global stage. As shared by CS2: I think it is a positive sign that we have many international students here. It shows that our country is becoming more influential and attractive to people in other countries. We should welcome this. (CS2)
Some participants (CS4, CS7, and CS8) further emphasized the need to show their hospitality towards international students as part of the Chinese culture: I think we should be considerate and generous towards our international guests. This is our culture. As Confucius once said, ‘it is such a delight to have friends coming from far away.’ (CS4)
The Chinese students’ national pride and cultural values thus helped alleviate the negative emotions (as reported above) derived from their collaborative work and develop a sense of academic resilience in their continuing study. As shared by CS6 in the interview, since the collaboration with international students is ‘inevitable’, they had to ‘get out of comfort zone’ and learn how to collaborate with different students.
Sometimes, it is not fair as we have to do more . . . We (Chinese students) often complained about them (international students) in our dorm, but then we told each other to practice positive thinking. This is the reality and we have to accept it and be more resilient. (CS6)
A similar observation was made by CS2 who described how she became ‘a tough person’ by working with different international students in the coursework.
I worked with students from different countries. This is a good training for my future work. I am a tough person now. I learned how to cope with different people and situations in order to get a good grade. (CS2)
With their growing academic resilience, four Chinese students (CS1, CS4, CS5, and CS8) also developed their intercultural communicative strategies, especially in situations when they engaged in meaningful interactions with their international peers. For example, similar to the international students (e.g. IS1 and IS4) as reported above, three local participants benefited from their collaborative learning in the business negotiation course. Through the weekly simulated negotiation tasks, not only did they receive opportunities to apply their course content in practice, but they also engaged in communication and negotiation with different international students from diverse backgrounds. In this way, they broadened their understanding about the use of English as an international language and increased their self-confidence and practical competence in using English for professional purposes: For most students, English is not our first language, but we are trying to communicate through it. It further boosts my confidence in speaking and using English as a business major. (CS5) There are students from Europe and South Asia, and they all have different accents in their speaking. Sometimes it is challenging for us to understand each other. We try to slow down, ask questions and even use body gestures to negotiate. It is interesting and useful because we may need to work with people from different countries in the future. (CS8)
Furthermore, two participants (CS1 and CS4) described some ‘tricks’ they learned to navigate conflicting situations and achieve their goals in intercultural collaboration. For instance, when CS1 and her peers could not reach an agreement in the business negotiation task, CS1 sometimes pretended to ‘lose patience and act aggressive’ to ‘scare’ her international classmates (CS1). As she elaborated, I know they normally think Chinese students are friendly and shy, and will avoid making conflicts. Therefore, I would put up a show by turning aggressive and even a bit hostile in our business negotiation. (laugh) This can throw them off their game and give me what I want in the task. (CS1)
CS1’s sharing aligns with the incident mentioned by IS5 who was shocked and confused about the aggressive stance of a Chinese student in a negotiation task (see above). Interestingly, while IS5 believed there might be some cultural misunderstanding or confrontation, it might just be a ‘show’ orchestrated by the Chinese student to ‘win’ the negotiation task. Another example was given by CS4 who shared how he and his Chinese peers tried to ‘outsmart’ international students in a presentation task (CS4).
The international students we worked with were active and responsible in this task, but they had too many ideas, some of which were off-topic I think. When we had discussion meetings, sometimes we would ‘play dumb’. I mean we might pretend that we could not understand what they were saying if we did not like their ideas. They might think we could not follow because our English was not good . . . Then we (Chinese students) switched to Chinese and discussed how we could reject their ideas. Sometimes we just stalled and they would give up . . . We know what the teacher wanted most in the task and we needed to do it right and get a high grade. (CS4)
The above quote reveals the ‘playing dumb’ and ‘stalling’ strategies utilized by Chinese students to gain control over their collaborative engagement in order to achieve a good academic result in the EMI courses. This somehow confirms the sharing of IS4 who experienced a feeling of isolation due to the code-switch act of her Chinese partners in the middle of their discussion. However, different from IS4’s speculation that the Chinese students’ low English proficiency led to a communication breakdown, it might be a deliberate attempt of the Chinese students to direct the collaborative work in their preferred way.
V Discussion and implications
Informed by a phenomenological research design, the study investigated Chinese and international students’ perceptions about their collaborative learning experiences in an EMI program. The findings of the study have revealed a variety of instances (e.g. presentations, business negotiation tasks, and written assignments) where the local and international students engaged in collaboration to enhance their content learning and intercultural communicative competence. As shared by IS2, the members in her group played different roles (e.g. facilitator and information collector) and made concerted efforts in the presentation task, which deepened their understanding and application of marketing knowledge and strategies in the Chinese business setting. In a similar vein, IS5 also benefited from her collaboration with the Chinese students who were responsible and well-prepared for the business negotiation tasks. Echoing previous studies (e.g. Barkley, Cross, & Major, 2014; Gokhale, 2012), the success of the students’ intercultural collaboration could be attributed to the collaborative nature of the tasks, their equal distribution of work/roles, and individual accountability of group members. Furthermore, the students’ disciplinary background might also play a role in promoting their collaborative and intercultural engagement. As business majors situated in a highly interconnected and shifting world, they were likely to see intercultural communication as an essential part of their professional learning and future work (e.g. as reported by CS5 and CS8). Thus, they became more willing to explore and invest in the collaborative activities provided by the EMI program in order to enhance their intercultural competence.
However, in most cases reported above, there was a great disparity in terms of their perceived goals, benefits and challenges between local and international students. While the international students reaped many benefits including enhanced learning motivation, increased understanding of Chinese students, as well as incidental opportunities for Chinese learning, their Chinese partners seemed to hold a negative attitude towards their collaborative experiences, partly due to their differing and even conflicting learning goals in the EMI courses. When the Chinese students desired for a good academic result and international students put more emphasis on Chinese learning and cultural exposure, it was difficult for the two parties to engage in genuine collaboration characterized by a joint enterprise and mutual engagement (Gokhale, 2012). Behind such a disparity was the EMI program design and requirement, which inherently placed Chinese and international students on different learning modes and tracks (e.g. full-time vs. short-term). This reflects a widely shared problem in the process of internationalization of higher education which may overly pursue the expansion of scale at the expense of quality. In the face of an increasing number of international students in the international business program, while efforts had been made in promoting EMI teaching and intercultural collaboration (as a program policy), there was a lack of a clearly defined and mutually shared curriculum objective as well as coherently designed courses and activities, which hence posed obstacles for students to engage in collective learning in mixed cultural groups.
It is interesting to note that despite their negative experiences and attitudes, the Chinese students tried to hold an open and accepting stance towards their ‘international guests’ (CS4) in the EMI program. This finding, on the one hand, reflects the strong influence of traditional Chinese culture in mediating students’ thinking and actions in intercultural communication (Gu, 2009). On the other hand, it also derives from the Chinese students’ enhanced resilience and agency in coping with potential challenges and seeking their academic development. By emphasizing the need to stay ‘tough’ and ‘get out of the comfort zone’, for instance, the Chinese students exhibited a strong sense of academic resilience which consists of important personal attributes such as confidence and persistence (Martin & Marsh, 2006). As a result, some of them benefited from their cross-cultural interaction in terms of a broadened view about the role of English as an international language (Fang & Baker, 2018) and increased self-efficacy in using English for professional purposes. More importantly, some participants also learned to play ‘tricks’ to ‘outsmart’ their international peers and achieve their individual goals in the EMI courses. As illustrated in the findings, CS1 adopted reverse psychology by acting aggressive in the business negotiation task, which shocked her international partner who was bound by certain cultural stereotype about Chinese students (i.e. being shy and quiet). Such tricks (e.g. ‘stalling’ and ‘playing dumb’) added to our understanding of the ingenuity employed by Chinese students to achieve their personal goals in interacting and collaborating with others from various socio-cultural backgrounds.
The findings to some extent suggest that the international students held a dichotomized view about Chinese students. Specifically, by characterizing Chinese students as either ‘Chinese’ or ‘Western’, they might miss the intricacies and complexities embedded in intercultural communication in reality, which could explain why they felt confused, isolated or shocked in some scenarios reported above. With the rapid globalization that promotes knowledge exchanges and cultural integration, students of various backgrounds need to adopt a more fluid and open perspective in understanding and collaborating with each other (Hennebry & Fordyce, 2018). Instead of using certain prescribed labels to understand their collaborators, it is important to delve into concrete situations and view others as individuals with personal histories and multiple identities at social, national, and cultural levels. This point contributes new understanding to EMI instruction, which is not just a language or pedagogy matter, but also involves complex cultural exchange and negotiation within and outside the EMI classroom. In this sense, apart from a focus on content, it is also important for EMI teachers consider how to help students develop their intercultural awareness and communicative competence in linguistically and culturally diverse EMI classroom settings.
Furthermore, the presence of the course instructors seemed to be weak in the process of collaboration between the international and Chinese students in the program. Apart from course teaching and task assignment, neither party mentioned the direct involvement of their EMI teachers in monitoring or facilitating their collaborative engagement, even in the case of disagreement and conflicts. As shown by previous researchers (e.g. Ryan, 2011; Yuan et al., 2019), teacher guidance can play a positive role in promoting smooth and effective collaboration between students. Although both the international and Chinese students reported in the study tended to be linguistically and socially competent, the EMI teachers can take pedagogical, social, and managerial actions to maximize the potential of students’ intercultural engagement. For instance, as reported by the international students, their Chinese peers lacked a discourse/pragmatic awareness and used ‘rigid’ language in different social contexts. This might require special attention from EMI teachers to introduce contextually appropriate language use on top of content teaching in order to prepare students for effective communication for specific purposes in concrete situations. Additionally, in view of the conflicting learning goals shared by the participants, while teachers may not be able to make immediate changes at the program level, they can try to monitor and encourage students to negotiate and develop new objectives (e.g. by introducing an element of competition to the task) to guide their collective engagement and mutual learning in EMI programs.
To conclude, by exploring Chinese and international students’ experiences and perspectives, the study sheds light on the linguistic, social and cultural complexities of intercultural collaborative engagements in EMI environments. The limitations of the study need to be acknowledged. The study focused on students majoring in international business in a Chinese university, and hence the findings do not represent student experiences in other disciplinary and educational contexts. Additionally, while the use of interview data from a phenomenological perspective generates insights into students’ lived experience in intercultural collaboration, the study could not fully reveal the participants’ actual collaborative engagement.
VI Conclusions
The study contributes to the burgeoning field of EMI research by generating insights into the congruence and disparity between local and international students’ perceptions and experiences in their collaborative engagements, influenced by various individual (e.g. linguistic and communicative competence) and contextual factors (e.g. program policies and the Chinese culture). The complex mix of positive and negative experiences both parties in the study described can, in a way, be construed as a friend-or-foe relationship. Yet, whether they be friends or foes, they facilitated each other’s development in multiple ways such as incidental language learning and resilience as presented above. Even for hurdles they have yet to overcome (e.g. the ‘invisible wall’), the learners enhanced their awareness of the potential issues and challenges embedded in their intercultural collaborative engagement.
In light of the research results, the study suggests several avenues for further research. First, pedagogical attempts can be made to maximize the gains for both groups of students despite existing gaps (e.g. differences in goals and expectations). These can be trialed and investigated in the form of an intervention study or action research conducted by EMI teachers. Second, it is worthwhile conducting field observation and stimulated recall interviews to gather detailed information about how students engage in intercultural collaboration with their immediate reflections on their collaborative experiences. Third, future research can continue to explore intercultural collaboration in other disciplinary backgrounds (e.g. science, engineering, and technology). Also, as the study reports relatively positive views held by the participants (especially the international students), it may be interesting to investigate the perspectives of students with strong negative experiences in intercultural learning.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in Beijing Foreign Studies University (No. 2019JT004) obtained by the corresponding author, Sifei Li.
