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Insights into local Chinese teacher and student views of an international teaching practicum with Australian pre-service teachers are the focus of this paper. A qualitative content analysis was undertaken on teacher and student accounts captured through individual interviews with four teachers and questionnaire survey with 186 students. The paper uncovers how teachers and students perceived what they experienced in the practice of intercultural communication on teaching and learning. Emphasised in the analysis is the importance of situating discussions within the Chinese social cultural context, acknowledging the influence of traditional Chinese cultural values and educational conceptions on their teaching and learning practice. The findings reveal meaningful insights into intercultural comprehension involving teaching strategies, learning content and assessment and classroom management. The study's findings highlighted that this international teaching practicum was a beneficial and valuable experience for participant Chinese students and teachers. The study also highlighted a potential gap in the preparation of Australian pre-service teachers and the Chinese students and Chinese teachers, regarding culturally specific and culturally aware competencies.

Many universities in different parts of the world are seeking to enhance the cultural diversity of their staff and student body and yet repeated studies have shown that good integration can be difficult to achieve. Although several studies have examined the reasons why such integration is difficult, there has been very little research into the actual process of social integration. This paper addresses this gap through a qualitative study of intercultural learning. Students were asked to focus on a behaviour that was personally or professionally important to them but that they were having difficulty adapting to. The paper reports the varying, unfolding experiences of six of these students as they faced the affective, behavioural and cognitive challenges of adjusting to different greeting patterns and the strategies they used for gradually overcoming them. Drawing on the literature and the findings, an intercultural growth model is proposed. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of the findings for enhancing social integration at university.

Students' emotions during stays abroad have mainly been treated as "culture shock", where difficulties are interpreted as universal "stages" towards "adaptation". This paper explores how students from different cultural and educational traditions experience studying abroad differently. The study presents a qualitative study of 18 Danish and Chinese students in Chinese and Danish universities and situates itself within the literature on culture shock, student emotions and study-abroad experiences. The study exposes the students' complex emotions throughout their studies abroad and explains how these emotions relate to processes of self-formation, professional and academic development, increase or decrease in freedom, and student agency.

This paper introduces a new model to represent how individuals can develop a deepened understanding of both a foreign culture and of their own culture as a result of viewing and engaging with foreign media, and in particular foreign films and television series. The model emerged from data collected in a study of how Chinese university students based in China make sense of films and television series produced in the USA and the UK. The study involved a series of semi-structured interviews during which the students were shown clips from a number of films and television series. Five categories of sense-making activities emerged from the data, together with a number of variables, which influenced the activities, and a number of levels on which the activities could be performed. The proposed model captures all of these aspects.

Educational research in cooperative learning suggests that inequity based on perceived status may be an issue with heterogeneous cooperative learning groups. This paper explores issues of status based on race, ethnicity and cultural background in the New Zealand tertiary classroom where there is a diverse mix of domestic and international students. A four-year research project examined attitudes and perceptions of both domestic and international tertiary students towards cooperative learning. The findings of the research project indicate that initial assumptions of relative status and ability of group members have a major effect on the outcomes of the group. These assumptions, demonstrated by both domestic and international students, may be based on expectations of language ability and familiarity with the pedagogical environment, including the assumed norms and behavioural patterns of the host educational setting, and may disadvantage students from different cultural backgrounds. This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy limiting the effective interaction and participation in the group by international students and other students perceived to be of low status, and the development of trust and reciprocal interdependence among group members. Strategies to weaken the effects of status, promote more equitable interaction and foster productive group outcomes are proposed.

This paper introduces a new model to represent how individuals can develop a deepened understanding of both a foreign culture and of their own culture as a result of viewing and engaging with foreign media, and in particular foreign films and television series. The model emerged from data collected in a study of how Chinese university students based in China make sense of films and television series produced in the USA and the UK. The study involved a series of semi-structured interviews during which the students were shown clips from a number of films and television series. Five categories of sense-making activities emerged from the data, together with a number of variables, which influenced the activities, and a number of levels on which the activities could be performed. The proposed model captures all of these aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]