Intercultural awareness at home and abroad: a retrospective study of snapshot compositions

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine study abroad in relation to intercultural awareness. If a key goal of study abroad is to generate an interculturally conversant workforce, is there clear evidence that this is actually happening? It is obvious: students on study abroad programmes have more opportunities to engage with people from another culture(s) than if they had stayed at home. If learning the target language in location is also thrown into the mix (providing a linguistic key with which to unlock additional/naccess to individuals from other cultures), how could they possibly fail to be more interculturally aware than their peers who stay at home? However, not all study abroad students choose to seize opportunities for intercultural contact, and not all choose to learn the language of the country they arrive in. Some go through a period of culture shock (Zhou, Jindal-Snape, Topping, Todman, 2008). Indeed, recent research has blown wide open the idea that the process of acquiring intercultural awareness is an automatic/nconsequence of simply being present in another culture, and calls for appropriate modifications to study abroad programmes. Not so obvious after all then. Given the need for interculturally aware workers in our global knowledge economy, and the/nlevel of investment in facilitating the mobility of students, there is a clear and present need for empirical evidence that study abroad students are or are not, as the case may be, benefiting interculturally from their sojourns in other countries. This study therefore investigates intercultural awareness amongst a group of students (n=30) enrolled in various faculties at a Catalan university and seeks to understand whether, in a snapshot in time in May 2012, there was a significant difference in their cultural attitudes and/nbeliefs (expressed in compositions written in English), depending on whether or not they had experience of study abroad, whether they were studying abroad now or had studied abroad in the past, and also whether they were studying a language as a second language or as a foreign language. Whether their level of English was associated with their level of intercultural awareness is also considered, as arguably this would allow them to express themselves in more subtle ways.