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With the growth of internationalization in higher education, there is a need to examine students’ experiences in increasingly diverse classrooms. This study explores students’ academic discourse socialization (ADS), within a context where the majority of students are non‐native speakers, in a course designed to enhance intercultural communication skills by providing students with both theoretical knowledge and practical experiences to collaborate with a diverse group of peers. We aim to answer the following questions: (1) Does native‐speakerism ideology impact Japanese students’ comprehension of intercultural communication with non‐native speakers, and if so, how? (2) How does the understanding of intercultural communication affect students’ interactions and group work with international peers? We conducted qualitative semistructured interviews with Japanese and international students at a private Japanese university. Our findings show that despite the absence of specific language instruction in the course, the group work predominantly utilized English and Japanese. Furthermore, the results revealed a unique ADS process in this context, with no clear dichotomy between experts and novices. Instead, all students negotiated their participation and language use within the academic community, with native‐speakerism ideology influencing the ADS process. These results enrich the research on ADS in non‐English‐speaking countries and development of new conceptual frameworks to better comprehend its dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Easterners are assumed to have a high‐context culture, Yamashina found that Japanese believe the Chinese to engage in a low‐context cultural communication style. We interpreted her results as follows: the Chinese whom Japanese know are likely to engage in intercultural communication that is used in low‐context cultural situations (code‐switching). To test this interpretation, we used a 17‐item online questionnaire on context dependency for participants (Japanese university students, Chinese university students, and Chinese international students living and studying in Japan) to score the self, average Japanese, and average Chinese. Hence, the design was 3 (culture) by 3 (object). The results showed that both Japanese and Chinese students rated people in their counterpart countries as having a low‐context communication style, supporting our interpretation. However, this effect was not evident among Chinese international students. These results confirmed that low‐context cultural situations may arise when people engage in intercultural communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People who speak languages other than English face structural barriers in accessing the US healthcare system. With a growing number of people living in countries other than their countries of birth, the impact of language and cultural differences between patients and care teams on quality care is global. Cultural brokering presents a unique opportunity to enhance communication and trust between patients and clinicians from different cultural backgrounds during pregnancy care—a critical window for engaging families in the healthcare system. This critical review aims to synthesize literature describing cultural brokering in pregnancy care. We searched keywords relating to cultural brokering, pregnancy, and language in PubMed, Embase, and CINAHL and traced references of screened articles. Our search identified 33 articles. We found that cultural brokering is not clearly defined in the current literature. Few of the articles provided information about language concordance between cultural brokers and patients or clinicians. No article described the impact of cultural brokering on health outcomes. Facilitators of cultural brokering included: interprofessional collaboration within the care team, feeling a family connection between the cultural broker and patients, and cultivating trust between the cultural broker and clinicians. Barriers to cultural brokering included: misunderstanding the responsibilities, difficulty maintaining personal boundaries, and limited availability and accessibility of cultural brokers. We propose cultural brokering as interactions that cover four key aims: (1) language support; (2) bridging cultural differences; (3) social support and advocacy; and (4) navigation of the healthcare system. Clinicians, researchers, and policymakers should develop consistent language around cultural brokering in pregnancy care and examine the impact of cultural brokers on health outcomes. Synopsis: Cultural brokering, understudied and ill‐defined in pregnancy care, may present an opportunity to enhance communication and trust between patients and clinicians from different cultural backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary examines environmental conservation work as a site of climate (in)justice, drawing from fieldwork at a highly multilingual Cameroonian wildlife sanctuary, as well as prior work on linguistic diversity, language ideologies, and intercultural communication. Across the world, climate justice work is occurring in landscapes that are often linguistically diverse. Alongside indigenous languages, global lingua francas (predominantly (ex)‐colonial languages) play a central role in facilitating communication between government officials, foreign NGO workers and volunteers, and people living in areas undergoing conservation. In these contexts, beliefs about language and communication – as well as unequal access or fluency in particular languages — can serve to magnify racialized and (neo)colonial hierarchies. While work in environmental anthropology has taken an ethnographic approach to understanding conflicts and miscommunication between the different actors involved in environmental conservation, this commentary argues that the methodologies of sociolinguistics and related fields are uniquely situated to examine in detail the interactions, language choices, and ideologies involved in designing and implementing climate justice work, and the impact these have on how this work is carried out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multicultural personality traits have been shown to predict intercultural outcomes in a range of settings. However, how these traits affect behaviour during intercultural interactions remains an understudied area. A study was conducted among participants in intercultural training sessions, to examine whether scores on the five dimensions of the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire (MPQ) could predict how they performed in the intercultural simulation game "Barnga." Both a self‐rating and other‐rating of intercultural effectiveness were included. Furthermore, we examined whether perceived stress and pro‐active communication played a mediating role. Results of Latent Growth Curve Modelling (LGCM) show that emotional stability has a positive effect on mean scores (intercept) of both self‐rated and other‐rated outcomes, mediated through perceived stress. Social Initiative has a positive effect on the rate of improvement (slope) in other‐rated outcomes during the simulation, mediated through pro‐active communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral emotions shape the effectiveness of culturally diverse teams. However, these emotions, which are integral to determining ethically responsive patient care and team relationships, typically go unrecognised. The contribution of emotions to moral deliberation is subjugated within the technorational environment of healthcare decision‐making. Contemporary healthcare organisations rely on a multicultural workforce charged with the ethical care of vulnerable people. Limited extant literature examines the role of moral emotions in ethical decision‐making among culturally diverse healthcare teams. Moral emotions are evident in ethnocentric moral perspectives that construct some colleagues' practices as ‘other’. This article examines how moral emotions are evoked when cultural dissonance influences nurses' moral perceptions. We use a qualitative investigation of teamwork within culturally diverse healthcare organisations. We use Haidt's ( ) account of moral emotions to examine practice‐based accounts of 36 internationally educated and 17 New Zealand educated nurses practising in New Zealand. The study provides evidence that moral emotions are frequently elicited by communication and care practices considered ‘foreign’. The main implication is that although safe practice in healthcare organisations is reliant on highly functioning teams, collaboration is challenged by interprofessional power relations of contested culturally shaped values. We address practice‐based strategies that enable engagement with moral emotions to enhance effective teamwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a tendency to view conversations involving non-native speakers (NNSs) as inevitably fraught with problems, including an inability to handle topic management. This article, in contrast, will focus on effective topic changes made by non-native speakers during informal conversations with native speakers of English. A micro-analysis of ten conversations revealed several ways of shifting conversational topics; however, the article concentrates on those strategies which the participants used to effect a particular type of topic move, namely 'marked topic changes', where there is no connection at all with previous talk. The findings show how these topic changes were jointly negotiated, and that the non-native speakers' contributions to initiating new topics were competently managed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the way humor is co-constructed and negotiated in talk-in interaction among speakers of American English and Tunisian learners of English. Participants' audio-recorded data of natural conversations, and in-depth and playback interviews revealed that interactional difficulties in interdiscourse humor did exist. Those difficulties, however, did not lead to communication breakdowns and conflicts as much as they contributed to strengthening relationships and developing relational identities through the accommodation strategies participants made to their speech and to their interpretation of meaning. Accommodation strategies were found to be jointly used to facilitate and attenuate communication and to overcome differences and avoid misunderstandings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on intercultural learning by participants in an Internet chat exchange between prospective teachers studying English in Chile and graduate students from a distance learning practicum class in California. To highlight issues of identity in such exchanges, we present case studies of discussions in two online chat groups led by graduate students with contrasting linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In our discourse analysis of the chat transcripts from these two groups, we found differences in how participants oriented to local, national, and global contexts, with one group primarily discussing political and educational issues from a global perspective, while the second group responded to the same issues by giving local examples. We conclude by discussing pedagogical implications for future Internet exchanges that aim to foster intercultural learning within a transnational paradigm of foreign language education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the role of components of intercultural competence in the use of intercultural mediation behaviors. Through the use of the Revised Intercultural Mediation Measure, an instrument revised by the authors, 291 Anglophone and 161 Francophone participants in Canada were asked to indicate their likelihood of employing various mediation strategies to reduce a conflict between two linguistic groups. The results demonstrated that involvement as an intercultural mediator is likely to be initiated by individuals who are members of the same linguistic group as the perpetrator. By virtue of their xenophilic representations of the victimized group, these individuals take on the role of mediator to reduce tension. In contrast, participants from both linguistic groups were unlikely to become involved as a mediator when witnessing members of the in-group being victimized. Furthermore, path analyses revealed that the use of mediation strategies when the in-group was being discriminated against was, at most, limited to endorsing fewer avoidant mediation strategies. The findings are interpreted within the context of research on intergroup relations and discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined whether a short training in grounding strategies could improve intercultural communication. Forty intercultural dyads (Anglo-Canadians and Mainland Chinese) were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. Prior to their conversations the experimental groups received 10–15 min training on grounding while the control groups received no training. The trained dyads performed significantly better than the untrained dyads in grounding, speaker presentation and listener recall, thus documenting that the 10–15 min training on grounding was fruitful in improving intercultural communication. Grounding training may open a new avenue for reducing intercultural miscommunication, thus improving information transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates level of formality in international students’ emails sent to academic staff. National cultures have different traditions when it comes to adopting an egalitarian or a more distant student–professor relationship. Hofstede's cultural dimension of power distance (PD) is used to distinguish between relatively high and relatively low PD cultures. The students’ choice of initial greeting and complimentary close is discussed with respect to PD ranking, rapport management and the sociopragmatic conventions set out in business communication literature. The analysis is based on 344 emails written by 110 students in Norway, a low PD culture. The findings indicate that students from relatively high PD cultures are more likely to opt for formal alternatives, concluding that national culture is an aspect to take into account when analysing lingua franca English communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A dearth of literature focuses on the relationship between acculturation, power distance and liminality for migrant nurses entering foreign workplaces. Expectations are for migrant nurses to be practice‐ready swiftly. However, this aspiration is naïve given the complex shifts that occur in deeply held cultural beliefs and practices and is dependent on an organisational climate of reciprocal willingness to adapt and learn. This exploratory study identified that although a plethora of literature addresses challenges migrant nurses face, there are limited data that link these transitional processes to concepts that might usefully guide transitions. This study draws from the overarching concept of acculturation, together with Hofstede's (2011) notion of power distance and the theory of liminality to explore the experiences of eight migrant nurses. Data highlighted that adjusting to altered hierarchical relationships took many months because negotiating power distance challenged deeply held beliefs and assumptions about professional and organisational hierarchies. Migrant nurses' accounts indicated a paucity of organisational processes to address these difficulties; therefore, they navigated this liminal space of adjustment to power distance differences in an ad hoc manner. Their acculturation experiences, arguably unnecessarily prolonged, indicate the value in workplace commitment to exploring a collaborative, critically reflective approach to optimise transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]