In this thesis, I adopt the anti-essentialist cultural paradigm to explore the complexity within the processes of both cultural-making and personal acculturation that may occur in an interweaving way within a local cultural arena (Holliday, 2011; 2013).More precisely, I contextualise this study in student group work as the specific cultural arena to investigate the cultural-making process towards group cohesiveness and individual group member's acculturation process. A conceptual framework is suggested after synthesising both the debates between the essentialist and the anti-essentialist cultural paradigms in the field of intercultural communication and the discussions on acculturation in the existing literature. I conceptually argue that culture is constituted by various salient aspects vis-à- vis cohesive thinking and behaviours that are always forming and re-forming. Personal acculturation can be explored through tracing the changes of an individual's cultural realities (Holliday, 2011; 2013). Both of them occur in parallel in a cultural arena (in this case, student group work).Through analysing in-depth, narrative data from 15 participants about their group work experiences, I fine-tune and enrich this conceptual framework with empirical evidence (i.e. the findings) to demonstrate complexity (i.e. uncertainty and fluidity) in the cultural-making process as well as the dynamics and unpredictability of personal acculturation (i.e. an individual presents different trends of the key aspects of acculturation). Furthermore, I also identify four types of personal acculturation trajectories by comparing all the participants' acculturation trajectories. Using this fine-tuned conceptual framework, the author of the thesis strengthens the potential links between the two separate, in parallel, but interrelated processes (e.g. cultural-making process and personal acculturation), which seem not to have been paid enough attention in the existing literature vis-à-vis the study of culture and (personal) acculturation. More importantly, the author argues that the links can be interpreted as an interplay in student group work asthe specific cultural arena.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:754105 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Xu, Frank Hang |
| Contributors | Fischer, Mary ; Zhou, Vivien Xiaowei |
| Publisher | Edinburgh Napier University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/1255585 |
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