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As the enrollment of Chinese international students (CIS) increased at a private institution in the Midwest, so did suspected cases of plagiarism. This study addressed the problem of how faculty members grappled with CIS' interpretation and application of Western-based views of plagiarism. The purpose of the study was to identify similarities and differences in the views of these 2 groups. Social cognitive theory, intercultural adaptation theory, and neutralization theory framed this qualitative case study. The research questions focused on how these particular CIS interpreted and applied the Western concept of plagiarism to assignments and exams, the impact of classroom practices and instructional processes on their view and experience, how the faculty members experienced CIS' interpretation and use of Western concepts of plagiarism, and respectively the differences in perceptions of U.S. faculty and of CIS. Eight full-time CIS and 8 faculty members who taught or currently teach CIS were purposefully selected. Data were collected using individual interviews, course syllabi, and plagiarism-related institutional policies. The interview data were analyzed using an ecological perspective to reveal themes; these data were triangulated with the data from course syllabi and institutional policies to ensure research credibility. The results of the study indicated a disconnect between student and faculty perceptions of Western-based contextualized plagiarism, the plagiarism ethos, and academic cultural differences between faculty and CIS that led to the creation of a faculty professional development plan using blended learning focused on cultural differences and teaching methods to deter plagiarism. The results may advance positive social change by improving faculty understanding of CIS and educational practices about plagiarism to better service these students.

In the 21st century, the mobility of world population has posed greater challenges to healthcare practitioners, since they are facing an increasingly diverse patient population from all over the world. At the same time, patients also find it difficult to access and utilize quality health care services in a culturally diverse context. This study examines the role of culture in Chinese international students’ health-seeking behaviours in Canada. The study explores any barriers/perceived barriers that Chinese international students may confront when accessing health care which can prevent them from obtaining quality health care services in Canada. To this end, an intercultural health communication model was employed as a theoretical framework, and semi-structured interviews were used as a data collection tool. While contributing to existing literature on health communication and culture, this study also hopes to contribute to providing Canadian universities and institutions important information regarding Chinese international students’ access to and utilization of health care services with the hope of enhancing the quality of ethnic health care and promoting better health outcomes.

In the 21st century, the mobility of world population has posed greater challenges to healthcare practitioners, since they are facing an increasingly diverse patient population from all over the world. At the same time, patients also find it difficult to access and utilize quality health care services in a culturally diverse context. This study examines the role of culture in Chinese international students’ health-seeking behaviours in Canada. The study explores any barriers/perceived barriers that Chinese international students may confront when accessing health care which can prevent them from obtaining quality health care services in Canada. To this end, an intercultural health communication model was employed as a theoretical framework, and semi-structured interviews were used as a data collection tool. While contributing to existing literature on health communication and culture, this study also hopes to contribute to providing Canadian universities and institutions important information regarding Chinese international students’ access to and utilization of health care services with the hope of enhancing the quality of ethnic health care and promoting better health outcomes.

In the 21st century, the mobility of world population has posed greater challenges to healthcare practitioners, since they are facing an increasingly diverse patient population from all over the world. At the same time, patients also find it difficult to access and utilize quality health care services in a culturally diverse context. This study examines the role of culture in Chinese international students’ health-seeking behaviours in Canada. The study explores any barriers/perceived barriers that Chinese international students may confront when accessing health care which can prevent them from obtaining quality health care services in Canada. To this end, an intercultural health communication model was employed as a theoretical framework, and semi-structured interviews were used as a data collection tool. While contributing to existing literature on health communication and culture, this study also hopes to contribute to providing Canadian universities and institutions important information regarding Chinese international students’ access to and utilization of health care services with the hope of enhancing the quality of ethnic health care and promoting better health outcomes.

Each year, thousands of Chinese international students come to the United States to further their education. Most of them need to adjust their identities in some degrees to adapt to U.S. American social and cultural contexts. One key transition that is significantly under discussed and often ignored is Chinese international students’ adjustment into a racialized system in the U.S. Because of different racial and ethnic contexts in China, Chinese international students have to disorient from the racial and ethnic identity of their home country and adapt to and accept the U.S. American hierarchy of race and ethnicity. Lacking sufficient social and intellectual support, this process often leads to struggle, depression, and ambivalence amongst Chinese international students in relation to their identity and communication in the U.S. society. As a Chinese international student myself in the U.S., my own experiences with the shifting of racial and ethnic knowledge, and the struggles these experiences have produced in relation to my identity (ies), leads me to investigate this topic further. Thus, in this study I examine how members of a socio-cultural group that I identify with, Chinese international students, negotiate and make sense of their/our new racial and ethnic identity upon entering the cultural space of the U.S. Race and ethnicity, as social categories of identity and power, play out differently on bodies located in different spatial, national/historical and cultural contexts. The meanings and hierarchies of race and ethnicity presumed to be commonsense in one national context are not so in others. At the same time, in today’s increasingly mobile and globalizing world, how we make sense of and communicate race are acted upon by complex transnational forces. In recent years, there has been a growing interest among critical intercultural communication scholars to theorize race and ethnicity as social constructions and relations of power, but this theorization has mostly happened in the U.S. and Western contexts. The transnational and globalized dimensions of race and ethnicity still largely remain under studied (Shome, 2010). Tomlinson (2007) points out that, under the conditions of contemporary globalization, the global-local dialectical relationship could be interpreted as the global’s entry into the local; the local’s identity in the global; and the “disembedding” of the local to the global. This global-local dialectical approach provides me with a conceptual lens to look at how race and ethnicity are constructed, understood, and communicated in the climate of today’s increasingly transnational world. In this dissertation, I use critical complete-member ethnography (CCME), as “an insider-looking-in-and-out-critical approach” (Toyosaki, 2011, p. 66), to study the racial and ethnic identity dis/reorientation process of Chinese international students in the U.S. Specifically, I used ethnographic observations, interviews, and autoethnographic journaling as my research methods to examine the direct, subjective, and embodied experiences of my 13 participants and myself, negotiate and make sense of their-our new racial and ethnic identities upon entering a global-local dialectical context in the U.S. I strategically categorize my analysis into “disorientation” and “reorientation” from a critical intercultural perspective, and use CCME’s consensual-conflictual and cultural-individual dialectical theorizations to study their-our dis/reorientation processes. My findings reveal that Chinese international students’ previous “Chinese” racial and ethnic identity become invalid and even problematic in the U.S. context. We often find ourselves struggling with sentiments of exhaustion, cynicism, and nihilism (Warren & Fassett, 2012), and interconnected yet ambivalent double consciousness such as insider–outsider, Chinese-–people of color, and majority–minority in the racial and ethnic identity dis/reorientation processes. In my findings, it is clear that Chinese international students have experienced and formed a similar sense of uncomfortable-ness, lost-ness, and struggle in our racial and ethnic disorientation process when we enter the U.S. context from the Chinese context. My participants all reported that after they were geographically relocated in the U.S., they have gone through the phase of being lost and confused because they were unable to find or construct a new racial and ethnic selfhood that made them immediately fit into the U.S. society. After their initial transition and adjustment, they reported experiencing certain forms of racial and ethnic discrimination in the U.S. that they had never faced in China. These lived and embodied discriminatory experiences in the U.S., which often turned out to be very direct, uncomfortable and stressful, forced them to consciously disorient their normative identity and reorient themselves to becoming a racial and ethnic minority for the first time in their lives. At the same time, they felt that the new and transformative outcome they reoriented to was a temporary state rather than a permanent identity. As a result, most of them became more open-minded, and felt the need to keep constantly reorienting their sense of their racial and ethnic identities, meanings, and presences in the U.S. My findings demonstrate that contemporary globalization not only produces different interpretations of race and ethnicity, it also constantly alters possibilities and conditions of our real racial and ethnic experiences in the world. As we try to respond to racial and ethnic issues and crises in today’s transnational world, simply recognizing that race and ethnicity are socially constructed rather than biologically innate does not make racial and ethnic conflicts and problems easier to solve. The relative nature of race and ethnicity in different local and global contexts are far more intricate than we ever imagined. Therefore, it is necessary and useful to study how race and ethnicity are understood and communicated through the direct, embodied, and performative experiences of non-Western and non-White bodies in transnational and globalized contexts. This study also shows the possibility that might lie in pushing the concept of race and ethnicity beyond the hegemony of the ways it is understood and deployed in the U.S. and other Western cultural and social contexts. In this regard, this study opens up a constructive approach for critical intercultural scholarship to more effectively engage in understanding and communicating race and ethnicity in the global-local dialectical context of globalization.

In the 21st century, the mobility of world population has posed greater challenges to healthcare practitioners, since they are facing an increasingly diverse patient population from all over the world. At the same time, patients also find it difficult to access and utilize quality health care services in a culturally diverse context. This study examines the role of culture in Chinese international students’ health-seeking behaviours in Canada. The study explores any barriers/perceived barriers that Chinese international students may confront when accessing health care which can prevent them from obtaining quality health care services in Canada. To this end, an intercultural health communication model was employed as a theoretical framework, and semi-structured interviews were used as a data collection tool. While contributing to existing literature on health communication and culture, this study also hopes to contribute to providing Canadian universities and institutions important information regarding Chinese international students’ access to and utilization of health care services with the hope of enhancing the quality of ethnic health care and promoting better health outcomes.

abstract: The purposes of this dissertation are two-fold. First, it aims to re-examine the new generation of Chinese students in the United States (U.S.) in light of the changing international and educational contexts. Second, the dissertation seeks to understand the new generation of Chinese students’ experience in First-year Composition (FYC) classes in a public U.S. university. A model of dynamic sociocultural approach is developed and applied to explore this new generation of Chinese students. Compared to previous generations of overseas students, the new generation is substantially different in their backgrounds and shares their own unique characteristics. Taking a sociocultural approach, this dissertation undertakes a systematic examination to delineate Chinese overseas students’ demographic trends over time, the backgrounds and characteristics of the new generation, the motivations for them studying in the United States, and the pathways these students take to come to the U.S. universities. Furthermore, this dissertation explores the experiences of 23 Chinese undergraduate student participants in FYC classes at a U.S. university. In the past decade, with a soaring number of Chinese undergraduate students, there is a dramatic rise in the number of Chinese students in FYC classes. Compared with their previous English education and learning experience in China, what these Chinese undergraduates are experiencing and how them adapting to in their FYC classes will shed light to better understanding of this new generation, as well as how their previous educational experience in China overlap, facilitate, or collide with their current studying in the United States. This dissertation enriches the literature on understanding the new generation of Chinese students, their background, and their adjustments to foreign countries and new educational environments. Using the dynamic sociocultural approach, the study provides teachers and administrators an approach for viewing Chinese and other second language (L2) students in a more holistic way. To a greater extent, the study has implications on how to meet the challenges of diversity in our universities and how to help students with different home cultural backgrounds to succeed in class. The results can also be used to improve the services and programs in the U.S. higher education institutions. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2020

Through the lens of dramaturgy theory, this study conceptualizes Israel as the stage, North American and Chinese students as two groups of actors, and social integration as their play, seeking to answer this question: how do the different roles North American students and Chinese students play in Israel lead them to different experiences of social integration? This study attempts to understand what roles American and Chinese students initially wanted to play and what shaped them, where, how and with whom they conducted their performances, and if the roles they played were adjusted during the process. Eight sets of semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with four American students and four Chinese students. The research findings and analysis reveal that although American and Chinese students do have different experiences of integration, they nonetheless share similar strategies that a dramaturgical framework can successfully elicit. Moreover, the analysis presented in this thesis, also, suggests that the experience of international students is likely much more layered than what is reflected in much of the literature that addresses the integration of international students.

Chinese international students’ difficulties in adjusting to the U.S. classrooms has long been overlooked. They have been stereotyped as not experiencing any problems as a result of their excellence at all levels of education, which also implies that they have been succeeding at handling cross-cultural issues. Research which focuses on Chinese international students are usually generated in the area of second language learning or pedagogical methods, Chinese international students’ cross-cultural experience has not been fully explored. The present study was hence conducted to fill the literature gap. Its results could lead to an improvement of Chinese international EFL students’ studying abroad experience, as well as provide directions for possible future studies. The study investigated the research question: how does a group of eight Chinese international EFL students studying STEM disciplines in doctoral programs at a large public research university make meaning of their cross-cultural classrooms/lab setting experiences? The study is a qualitative case study. Participants were recruited via purposeful snowball sampling. An interpersonal, semi-structured interview was used for data collection, and guidelines provided by Smith et al. (2009) were adopted for data analysis. The results show that all eight participants have been experiencing culture-shock since they arrived in the U.S., and they held many erroneous assumptions about studying in the U.S.. Their major difficulties were generated by adjusting to the U.S. classroom culture and using/understanding cultural English. Causes of their cross-cultural experience could be traced to differences between the Chinese and the U.S. curricula and pedagogical methods; and the teacher centered, textbook oriented teaching methods adopted in their Chinese schools for English teaching. Besides, since most of the participants were top students when they were in China, considering the demand for academic excellence in the Chinese culture, participants’ eagerness to maintain/obtain academic accomplishments severed the negative part of their cross-cultural experience. On the basis of my findings, I recommend re-examining (and corresponding change) of the curricula, avoiding the expert blind spot while teaching, and a change in schools in China regarding its English teaching method. However, because this is a qualitative case study, when facing a different group of students (other than my participants), these suggestions should be applied selectively.