Background

With increasing global mobility and the availability of cross-border opportunities, the number of international students has been ever increasing in U.S. institutions of higher education. The celebratory rhetoric of cultural and linguistic diversity has been prevalent on campus. At the same time, however, we have witnessed how the publicly celebrated diversity often clashes with the tendency toward cultural and linguistic homogeneity. Currently, the dominant discourse on diversity has been criticized for its contradiction and ambivalence in practice. While multilingualism and multiculturalism have been promoted as rich cultural and linguistic resources on U.S. college and university campuses, restrictive language policies and identity politics almost always require multilingual students to assimilate themselves and participate in mainstream activities if they want to feel a sense of belonging, such as cheering on the football team every Saturday in the fall.

Such tension has been increasingly heightened, primarily due to the inability of universities and colleges to effectively respond to challenges posed by increasing multilingualism and multiculturalism on campus. Despite the ostensible appearance of diversity in student populations, there has been a lack of effort to raise intercultural awareness of American undergraduates about working with multilingual and multicultural peers and faculty members. It is urgent to address how the diverse population of the university comes to terms with complex intercultural diversity along with the appreciation of the benefits of diversity. Given the existing tensions and limitations, a more nuanced approach is called for to advance the discourse on diversity. One approach is to reconceptualize ways of approaching the intercultural contact dynamics of cultural and linguistic diversity: There should be more investment in intercultural communication programs for domestic U.S. undergraduates to get them ready to interact with multiple-language users on campus.

Until this is accomplished, at The Ohio State University (OSU), we have another approach to harmonizing ever-increasing linguistic diversity on campus using new strategies grounded in intercultural communication disciplines for working with international students. Instead of adopting a remedial, deficiency-based model of ESL classes for undergraduates in our College of Business and College of Engineering, we are using a leadership model to build capacity and equip international students with the tools to acculturate. At the same time, we are working to promote cultural awareness in faculty and staff across campus. The goal is to push against the current problematic issue of linguistic and cultural diversity and stimulate dialogue between disciplinary practices, structure, and all the populations of the academy working with international students, so as to enable them to work with enhanced intercultural awareness.

Critique of Current Practices

English, as the official instructional language, is critical for all members of the university community to function successfully on campuses in the United States. Many universities and colleges provide support for language users, especially those learning English as a second or foreign language, through various intensive English language programs. However, a considerable body of research on such language educational practices (Rampton, Maybin, & Roberts, forthcoming) confirms that conventional practices in English language programs are fundamentally based on the the psychological model of teaching and learning. From this psychological stance, language is regarded as skills and competencies measurable against established standards or expectations, and proficiency in a language is understood as a matter of individual competence. Therefore, a second and/or foreign language (L2) learner is inherently defined as deficient in relation to his or her L2 in this model.

What’s more, the perceived deficit of the L2 learner engenders tensions between native speakers and nonnative speakers of English. The notion of native speaker becomes problematic in multilingual or intercultural communicative settings. In many cases of L2 education, a native-speaker’s accent is explicitly or implicitly used as a yardstick for assessing the intelligibility of L2 learners’ speech. Importantly, there is less recognition of the lack of intercultural communication competence of those who speak English as a first language. This hierarchy assumes that only the English language spoken by native speakers is legitimate; English spoken by ELLs is considered inferior and maybe even illegitimate. In addition, predominant English-only monolingual ideologies marginalize other languages and limit access to academic resources and opportunities for users of other languages. In this case, English is associated with exclusion (Blackledge, 2000).

International students are likely to be lumped into groups labeled English as second/foreign language (ESL/EFL), ELLs, limited English proficiency (LEP), and so on. Such representation is an ideological and political act categorizing them as other (Norton, 1997). What matters here is social power in relation to who is the labeler and who is labeled. The outcome of being labeled is that international students are indexed and positioned as a problem simply due to their ethnolinguistic multiplicity, which may be juxtaposed as a deficit (Marshall, 2010). While marked other by such labels, identities of international students are always predicated on discourses with the connotation of deficit in terms of their linguistic competence. In being labeled, they are represented as a monolithic category causing problems on U.S. college and university campuses, and as those in need of remediation by ESL specialists.

Those restrictive or suppressive instructional practices call for a greater emphasis on critical multiculturalism in educational programs for all the populations of the academy, including undergraduates, staff, and faculty as well as international students. We need to seek a way in which linguistic and cultural diversity is counted as equally valid and viable cultural capital in our multicultural and multilingual society. Most important, there should be a nonessentialist stance on language use, seeking forms of resistance, appropriation, and hybridity with caution against apolitical celebration of difference. Doing so may help to prevent well-meaning people from unwittingly contributing to the reproduction and maintenance of the status quo of linguistic homogeneity.

Strategies to Address These Issues

In the fall of 2013, the Combined ESL Programs at OSU piloted a new course for undergraduate business students—Cultural Communication and Leadership Practices—and have now extended course offerings to engineering students. We use Livermore’s (2009) Leading with Cultural Intelligence: The New Secret to Success, and the activities inside and outside of class are explicitly about promoting participation, encouraging involvement, and increasing overall international student engagement at the university. The first assignment is for each student to knock on the door of every instructor and introduce him- or herself; then, students are asked to ride the campus bus and ask at least five people their name and major. Students are also expected to have name-cards printed and create a professional profile on LinkedIn. The program aims to equip international students with the intercultural communicative competence necessary to work effectively and appropriately as competent members of their academic and professional communities.

It is our goal at OSU to eventually include domestic students in the intercultural training courses. By compartmentalizing international students in separate, intercultural communications courses, domestic students are missing an opportunity to build competencies that could prepare them for work in a globalized world. Currently, our course prepares international students to successfully adapt to and interact in a large U.S. university, and will hopefully also prepare them for internships and the workplace environments they might encounter here. Hopefully, this same course could also prepare domestic students not only for working abroad, but for working with their international classmates and with international coworkers when they enter the workforce. Only then will the larger goals of this intercultural communication course be fully realized in terms of student benefits.

Simultaneously with this intercultural communications course, there is a movement around campus to build intercultural competencies for faculty and staff. A comprehensive new plan called Be Our Guest (Eckhart, 2015) is being drafted, which includes a detailed plan for no-cost and low-cost intercultural communication solutions. This plan includes strategies ranging from strongly encouraging international students to take advantage of office hours to building faculty/staff intercultural dialogue through intercultural reading groups or informal, one-on-one lunches. Another goal is to take domestic faculty/staff to the primarily Asian countries international students are coming from. There is nothing that can help domestic collegiate personnel understand the courage of international students more than taking their first trip to China or Korea and sensing for themselves the physical and cultural distance these students have traveled to come to the United States to study. Sending faculty/staff on these trips should foster admiration for international students and build affinity for them. That should be the goal—to create faculty and staff members (and domestic students) who admire the courage of international students instead of criticizing how imperfectly they speak English or conform to U.S. cultural practices.

Conclusion

Meaningful interactions between domestic faculty, staff, and students and international students should be actively promoted to facilitate positive and successful cultural adaptation. Simply being in an intercultural context does not mean that successful intercultural learning automatically takes place over time. What is needed is to seek ways toward facilitating intercultural learning by active intervention that prepares students to work in a new cultural environment with confidence, preparedness, and ease. Facilitating these interventions will hopefully help students feel fulfilled and minimize the traumatic cultural shock that often causes students to retreat to their comfort zone or, in the worst-case scenario, give up their sojourn altogether.

Adapting to a new cultural environment poses many challenges for international students, whose primary concern is how to successfully function in their new culture. Students should build a repertoire of cultural knowledge, which leads them to intercultural growth and identity transformation by engaging in multiple intercultural encounters. Most important, their identities should be newly negotiated, transformed, or reconstructed in order to ensure full participation in discursive interactions in the new contexts.

The current dominant discourse on diversity only allows such multiplicity to flourish as long as it is congruent with the dominant discourse and not detrimental to social cohesion. A wider discussion of nonoppressive discourse on diversity should be made to cast aside the negative perceptions associated with variations and varieties of language, hopefully leading to a new perception that views these variations and varieties as linguistic assets, not deficiencies.

References

Blackledge, A. (2000). Monolingual ideologies in multilingual states: Language, hegemony and social justice in Western liberal democracies. Sociolinguistic Studies, 1(2), 25–45.

Eckhart, R. (2015). Be our guest: Immediate, short-term, and long-term strategies for making your campus more welcoming to international students. Retrieved from http://go.osu.edu/beourguest.

Livermore, D. (2009). Leading with cultural intelligence: The new secret to success. New York, NY: American Management Association.

Marshall, S. (2010). Re-becoming ESL: Multilingual university students and a deficit identity. Language and Education, 24(1), 41–56.

Norton, B. (1997). Language, identity, and the ownership of English. TESOL Quarterly, 31, 409–429.

Rampton, B., Maybin, J., & Roberts, C. (forthcoming). Methodological foundations in linguistic ethnography. In J. Snell, S.Shaw & F. Copland (eds) Linguistic Ethnography: Interdisciplinary Explorations. Palgrave Advances Series.

Jung Sook Kim is a doctoral candidate in Language, Education & Society at The Ohio State University, where she teaches intercultural communication. Her research considers language ideologies, linguistic diversity, and identity construction in multicultural and multilingual contexts. She received her MSc in intercultural communication from The University of Warwick, UK.

Bob Eckhart is the director of the Combined ESL Programs at The Ohio State University. He directs the IEP, Composition, and ITA programs, which serve 6000+ students. He also manages special programs such as the intercultural communications course described in this article. He holds a BS (economics) from Miami University, and an MA (comparative cultural studies) and JD from OSU.