Foreign language study abroad, even if it is just over a short period of several weeks, afford language learners the opportunity to immerse themselves and to participate in the target language communities, and thus to get to learn about other cultures at first hand. While trying to interpret and make sense of the myriad of new cultural experiences in the course of study abroad programmes and their interactions with the target language communities, learners engage in vital mediational activities that enable them to construct new cultural meanings (i.e. knowledge of other cultures) as well as to re-construct existing cultural knowledge (e.g. one's cultural values, beliefs and identities). Through the intercultural mediational process, they often also engage in reflections that will, in turn, help them to see and appreciate cultural differences, to recognise and decenter from their existing cultural frameworks, and to become pluricultural individuals with a greater awareness of the multicultural world we live in. Intercultural mediation thus constitutes a key process in learners' intercultural development.
This presentation draws on a study that sought to identify, describe and classify instances of intercultural mediation in journal and interview data collected from participants of foreign language study abroad programmes in France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand to create a comprehensive taxonomy of intercultural mediations. It will report the findings from the analysis of the distribution, sequence and concurrence of the different classes of mediation from this taxonomy to shed light on the interrelationships between these classes of mediation. The results suggest that there is a typical developmental sequence to the mediations of a learner – from observing/learning about new cultural practices, mean-making, critical appraisal and decentering to processes of reflexivity. They provide insights on how these intrapersonal mediations interact with interpersonal mediations (e.g. informational inputs, scaffolding and support from more knowledgeable others, and strategies to establish and maintain relationships with other cultures). A model of intercultural development for foreign language study abroad based on the interplay of intercultural mediations will be presented and elaborated with examples from the dataset.
