Capturing nonlinear intercultural development via student reflective writing

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Sims, Rebekah and Tran, Phuong and Banat, Hadi and Panahi Lazarjani, Parva and Dilger, Bradley (2024) Capturing nonlinear intercultural development via student reflective writing. Written Communication. ISSN 1552-8472 (In Press) (https://doi.org/10.1177/07410883241303916)

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Abstract

This article reports on a qualitative assessment of intercultural competence (IC) in U.S. first-year writing courses designed to increase intercultural exposure and interaction among domestic and international students. To measure students’ intercultural development via a series of reflective writings, we designed two innovative qualitative analysis tools: a grounded-theory coding scheme and a mapping procedure aligned to the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity. Our results show that qualitative assessment of reflective writing reveals dynamic, complex IC development trajectories, displaying non-linearity, non-discrete phases, and development within phases. Specifically, we noted that reflective writing helped students engage with and become attuned to aspects of cultural difference. Affordances of the FYW context indicated that students strongly engaged the cognitive domain of IC, and this domain appears to be activated by reflective writing.

ORCID iDs

Sims, Rebekah ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3151-7315, Tran, Phuong, Banat, Hadi, Panahi Lazarjani, Parva and Dilger, Bradley;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)