As university student exchanges provide participants with increasing opportunities to involve themselves in different academic cultures, it has become crucial to gain a better understanding of cultural contact between academic systems and to recognise how exchange students with diverse academic backgrounds interact in a host academic context. This book provides insights into this research area by undertaking a one-academic-year ethnographic examination of six Japanese exchange students’ management of intercultural academic interaction at an Australian university, as well as analysing the impact of the structural arrangements of the student exchange program on their participation.
In this book, the theory of language management is utilised alongside of the concept of legitimate peripheral participation and a socio-constructionist genre theory to investigate the cognitive and situated nature of the management processes. The theory of language-in-education planning is also applied to examine the policies and practices of student exchanges between Japanese home universities and an Australian host university. Focussing on Japanese exchange students’ responses to various academic tasks as well as on their everyday participation in class, the present study mainly analyses the students’ negotiation of norms, awareness and evaluations of contact situation phenomena, planning and implementation of management strategies, discontinuation of academic management, and the developmental processes of their academic participation. This study also investigates various types of tensions in structuring student exchanges among policies, practices, educational needs and goals of Japanese exchange students, their motivational investments, and accessibility of current exchange systems to the students.
Based on the findings, this book provides important theoretical implications for sociolinguistic research and SLA studies by discussing the detailed mechanisms of academic management, and by reconsidering the importance of the integration of sociocultural perspectives into the cognitive processes of intercultural academic interaction. The theoretical inquiries which this study conducts will, furthermore, promote our understanding of linguistic minority exchange students’ management of participation in various academic contexts and suggest the ways home and host universities support these exchange students’ transition between the two different academic cultures.
