The presented exploratory case study precedes a larger investigation on class interaction and HE students’ intercultural learning. It aims to create a set of discursive and interactional features of intercultural relation management in elicited student-student discussions. Among other phenomena, strategies of conversational mitigation and practices of membership categorization are identified.
This paper reports on a small-scale exploratory case study, in preparation of a larger investigation on class interaction and students' intercultural learning. The aim of the overall research is to understand if and how classroom discourse can encourage or hinder the intercultural development processes of the learners. Proceeding from a definition of 'intercultural learning' as linguistic and discursive practice and assuming a non-essentialist approach to culture (Holliday, 2011), a large corpus of class interactions will be collected and analysed from a discourse and interaction perspective. The present case study has been set up to identify a preliminary set of discursive and interactional features of intercultural relation management. Despite some work has been done on this (Belz, 2003; Borghetti & Beaven, 2018; Harbon & Moloney, 2013), it is not clear what specific patterns (i.e., interactional features and clusters of features) can be associated with interculturality in discourse. This lack of analytical resources is possibly due to research design, as massive quantities of data are needed in natural settings for a specific language behaviour to be identified and categorised. To overcome this difficulty, we asked 4 groups of 2/3 university students (L1 and L2 Italian) to reach an agreement on three issues which were potentially controversial from an intercultural point of view. All interactions were audio- and video-recorded; data were analysed from an interactional perspective. Results show that students dedicated much interactional work to maintain harmony within the group, i.e., adopting strategies of conversational mitigation (hedges, etc.), even when members did not agree with each other. Besides these in-group alignment-oriented features, a number of epistemic stances towards diversity (Heritage, 2012) and membership categorization practices (Sacks, 1992) towards out-groups were identified. These preliminary results – obtained on elicited task-based discussions - will be tested against the natural setting of the classroom.
