The Management of Intercultural Academic Interaction: Student Exchanges between Japanese and Australian Universities

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 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.