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Asian Students’ Intercultural Preparation for Academic Mobility: Getting Ready for Diversities or Reproducing the Expected?

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Abstract

Many academic contributions on Asian students abroad focus on their lack of interactions with the local population and their unpreparedness for intercultural encounters. Asian students appear as socially deficient and unfit for the new environment. These assumptions are problematic because they do not take into consideration the input prospective students receive prior to their departure through institutional training and unsupervised research on the host country under the student’s own initiative or a mix of both. Representations are also based on cultural differentialism which locates individuals in distinct, boundary-making categories, thus silencing most forms of individual diversities in the home and host societies. The main question arising thus deals with the kind of input that Asian future mobile students acquire, which is susceptible to impact their intercultural experiences. Data used for this article come from three different sets of interviews with Asian mobile students. Using a critical discourse approach, the discourses of these students are analysed from the perspective of their preparation to move to the host destination. Recurrent othering processes—both from institutional actors and from the students themselves—appear prior to departure, independent of the students’ origin and destination. Rather than blaming students, it would be more significant to look at what materials are available for them prior to their departure.

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Consent

All participants had volunteered for the respective research projects. No participant was minor at the time of the interview. All participants had been informed of the nature of the research and their consent was sought. They accepted to be recorded. They were informed that part of the interview may be included and published in a research paper. As mutually agreed, all names have been changed to guarantee their anonymity.

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The author declares that he has no competing interests.

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  1. Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), 43400, Serdang, Malaysia

    Regis Machart

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  1. Regis Machart
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Correspondence to Regis Machart.

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Machart, R. Asian Students’ Intercultural Preparation for Academic Mobility: Getting Ready for Diversities or Reproducing the Expected?. East Asia 33, 59–72 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12140-015-9241-7

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