Students' Cultural Identities in Intercultural Classrooms: A Case Study from a Community College in Texas
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| Year of publication | 2010 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | Cultural identities are said to influence the process and outcome of intercultural communication. This work presents a study of cultural identities, communication and learning styles of a sample of students at McLennan Community College in Texas, USA. The college has over 9,000 students of various ethnicities - European Americans, African Americans, Hispanic, and others – who interact with one another and their teachers and thus create in their classrooms conditions for intercultural communication. Following the theory that defines individualist-collectivistic dimension of cultural variability as a main contributor to the content of cultural identities, the study was designed with the following objectives: to identify the students’ individualistic and collectivistic tendencies (1), determine which of the two tendencies predominates in each of the ethnic groups (2), and analyze if and how the students’ individualistic and collectivistic cultures affect their communication and interactions in the classroom context (3). The study also considered the influence of teaching methods and classroom discourse structures of the institution on the students’ styles of communication and learning. |