Strengthening intercultural skills in international students

A CEHD PhD student and PhD alum have teamed up to write a textbook to help international students get the most out of their experience in the United States. Intercultural Skills in Action: An International Student’s Guide to College and University Life in the U.S. (University of Michigan Press 2021) is designed to create meaningful opportunities for students to reflect on and practice intercultural skills in ways that are relatable in their daily lives and that can lead to a more satisfying academic experience. 

The book is the brainchild of Bethany Peters, a 2018 PhD graduate from Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development and now adjunct faculty at Greenville University in Illinois, and Darren LaScotte, a current PhD student in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and teaching specialist in the Minnesota English Language Program.

Both have several years of experience teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) at the University of Minnesota, which provides support to international students as they further develop their academic English for personal and professional goals.

“Equally important to students’ language learning goals is culture learning, which is often a supplementary goal of many ESL courses and textbooks,” Peters said. “Culture learning is assumed to occur for students both inside and outside of the classroom, but meaningful opportunities to understand and process cultural experiences may prove difficult as international students are navigating a lot of new experiences and different types of stress.”

The desire to write the book emerged when Peters and LaScotte were looking for a book that emphasized cultural learning for a specific course both taught in the Minnesota English Language Program.

“After some time searching through major publishers’ available texts at the time at the 2017 TESOL International Conference and World Language Expo, one acquisitions editor joked that if we couldn’t find exactly what we were looking for, we should write it ourselves! So that’s what we did,” LaScotte said. “Essentially, the book was written to meet the need for a textbook that focuses on intercultural learning as a central focus for international students while they are studying abroad in the U.S.”

The book helps students explore their cultural identity, navigate different cultural communication styles, better understand U.S. academic culture, consider strategies for building intercultural friendships, and engage in exercises for developing intercultural competence. Each unit opens with a discovery activity that serves as a springboard for the unit and introduces the topic in an engaging way. The units close with an activity that requires students to use higher-order thinking skills to create, evaluate, and analyze cultural information gathered from college and university settings in the form of surveys, interviews, observations, or internet research and then report on what they have learned.

“We keep a focus on language learning while pragmatizing content from intercultural theorists,” Peters said. “This intentional focus provides international students a valuable opportunity to maximize their time studying in the U.S. as they engage in critical reflection on their culture learning experiences.”  

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