An Exploration Of Intercultural Sensitivity Development Of Mainland Chinese Students In A British University

Development Model of Intercultural Sensitivity was first innovated and proposed byMilton Bennett in1986. It is a framework consisting of six different stages to describepeople’s reactions to cultural difference when they are situated in a new cultural environment.These six stages are Denial, Defence, Minimisation, Acceptance, Adaption and Integration.According to Bennett (1986;1993), for each individual, these six stages are not necessarilyexcluded from one another but are understood as a chronological development pattern toshow people’s cultural difference awareness shifting from the lower level to a relatively highlevel.In this study, first and foremost, I presented a review of the Development Model ofIntercultural Sensitivity and considered that model together with the ABC framework and theSmall Culture Approach. Based on my conceptualisation in literature, I produced the researchtopic and detailed it by using three research questions. Guided by the research questions, Idecided to adopt a qualitative research methodology through narrative interview as a concreteresearch method because they could help me to explore the nuances in terms of the personalintercultural sensitivity development. Informed by both the research questions and theresearch methodology, I selected four overseas mainland Chinese students as my participantswho were non-English major student having completed their Bachelor’s degrees in theChinese educational context and then began their academic sojourning life in a Britishuniversity as master’s level students between the year2012to2013. Through the selectedresearch method, in my study, the four participants’ intercultural sensitivity was explored andanalysed thoroughly. Afterwards, I discussed their intercultural sensitivity stages inaccordance with their own narrative accounts.The results demonstrated that mainland Chinese students’ intercultural sensitivitydevelopment was relatively individual and affected by each person’s own culturalbackground. However, some commonalties were noted, such as mainland Chinese studentslikely situated in the defence stage when they compared the academic performance with othernon-Chinese students. On the basis of the results and discussion, I provided somerecommendations to assist the university to enhance its services. There are still some limitations of this study. I conducted the interviews with the fourparticipants when they nearly completed their one-year sojourning life and they reflectedtheir year-long personal experience which sometimes was not sufficiently “accurate” due tothe vague memories. In addition, I only relied on the narrative interview to generate data. Ifpossible, more research methods could be considered, such as observation, for the purpose ofgenerating data from multiple perspectives in order to enhance the validity.