*4.2. Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity*

The Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) is a six-stage process of intercultural learning. It is a journey from resistance to openness and from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism. It assumes a linear development—that is, having a beginning, an intermediate point, an end. However, it is important to note that, regarding sojourners, the model also considers the possibility of "retreat" or "regress" in the process of cross-cultural adaptation.

The first three stages of the model—denial, defense, minimization—are conceptualized as ethnocentric, by which one's own culture is experienced as a center of reality. In the denial stage, one's own culture is experienced as the only real one, which could be because of isolation or wholly deliberate separation from other cultures. In the defense stage, one's own culture is experienced as the only good one, thus categorizing experiences into "us and them" and generating a concept of "we"-superior and "they"-inferior in cultural perspectives. The last stage of ethnocentrism is minimization in which elements of one's own cultural worldviews are experienced as universal and differences are accepted only at face value.

In ethnorelative stages—acceptance, adaptation, integration—a resident's own culture is experienced within the context of other cultures. These stages represent a journey of the individual from an unknown cultural difference to a known or from the unfamiliar to the cultural difference.

In the acceptance stage, one's own culture is experienced as one of complex worldviews. People at this stage are curious to know about the cultural differences and have respect for other cultures, yet cultural differences do not mean "agreement" and may be judged negatively. At the adaptation stage, one's own worldview is expanded to include constructs from other worldviews and people are able to look at the world with "different eyes", thus changing their behavior to accommodate effectively new and different cultures. This shift of mindset is not an artificial one, but one based on cognitive, affective and behavioral skills of adjustments to a new cultural environment.

The last stage of the Bennett model is integration, in which one's experiences of oneself have become so multicultural that she or he can move into and out of other cultures freely and comfortably. Individuals often confront matters associated with their own "cultural marginality", which Bennett further classified into two: encapsulated and constructive cultural marginality. Encapsulated refers to one's separation from culture and experiences alienation, while constructive acknowledges cultural differences and becomes a necessary part of one's identity and thus a person becomes bicultural, transcending cultural boundaries while maintaining her or his cultural identity.

Ethnorelative orientations are a way to acknowledge cultural differences, either by accepting their significance by adapting to or incorporating cultural differences into one's own personality. Thus, development of intercultural sensitivity is a shift from a narrow, self-centered worldview to an open, mature one that emerges by engaging oneself in meaningful relationships with members of diverse cultures.

#### **5. An Instructional Communication Framework for China's University Classrooms**

This article focuses on misunderstandings in intercultural settings in which international students' difficulties with the dominant language of instruction could lead to negative learning outcomes. As both instructional models indicate, several variables determine the students' learning outcomes; however, because of the focus of this article is on students' perceptions of the oral proficiency of their professors vis-à-vis the students' language limitations, the conceptual framework for enhancing instructional communication in the classroom is a linear relationship among three variables: Chinese professor's oral proficiency as perceived by the international students whose instructional beliefs (e.g., the students' instructional ability in Chinese-language) influence learning outcomes (Figure 1). In classrooms, the relationship becomes all too apparent. Why? Because such settings can engender limited understandings that emanate from, among other factors, what Thomas [58] labelled "cross-cultural pragmatic failure" to describe exclusively misunderstandings that arise from the hearer's "inability to understand 'what is meant by what is said'" (p. 91). And she uses "pragmatic competence" to describe the hearer's "ability to use language effectively in order to achieve a specific purpose and to understand language in context" (p. 92).

**Figure 1.** Conceptual Framework for Enhancing Instructional Communication (in China's Universities).

Two approaches to the study of instructional communication dominate the research literature: the relational and the rhetorical [17,24]. In the relational approach, teachers and students exchange information and share understandings mutually. In the rhetorical approach, which is consistent with China's high-context, implicit-communication style, instructional communication is a teacher-controlled process that views the teacher as the primary source of information (in additional to selected readings) and students as receivers and learners.

The framework presented in this article has two first-order variables: oral proficiency and student characteristics, both of which influence students' instructional beliefs about their professors' communication proficiency. Student characteristics include the five elements outlined in Byram's [59] model of intercultural communicative competence:

• attitudes (savoir être), that is, one's openness and readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures and belief about one's own;


In other words, students arrive in China with various levels of intercultural competencies and "different orientations or predispositions that influence their approach to and performance in the instructional setting" [45].

Studies on intercultural sensitivity and cultural adaptation of international students indicate that intercultural sensitivity (e.g., language proficiency) has a positive effect on the sociocultural adaptation of international students [30,31,60]. Thus, this article integrates the theories of intercultural sensitivity and of the six-stage cross-cultural adaptation to develop a framework that explains the importance of instructional beliefs of international students on university campuses in China. Additionally, it should be noted that, within the context of the two intercultural sensitivity models, this is the first comprehensive framework on the sociocultural and academic experiences of international students in China vis-à-vis instructional communication in the classroom.

The importance of students' cultural characteristics as a first-order variable was established by Akhtar and Pratt [61], who reported that intercultural sensitivity had a significant positive effect on sociocultural adaptation, but a weak effect on academic adaptation. Bringing that strand of research to bear on this proposed conceptual framework means that for international students to overcome academic barriers, a new perspective on sensitivity needs to be adopted and their competencies in the host language assessed. That study described that sensitivity as academic intercultural sensitivity in the Chinese context, which can help to enhance the level of academic adaptation of international students in China. The rationale behind that view is that general intercultural sensitivity only helps in sociocultural adaptation, but seldom offers a solution to the challenges of academic adaptation.

Second, Akhtar and Pratt [61] reported that sociocultural adaptation had a weak impact on academic adaptation while academic adaptation had a strong impact on sociocultural adaptation, which meant, on the one hand, that if international students were satisfied with their academic environment, they could adjust with relative ease to the sociocultural environment. If, on the other hand, they were satisfied with their sociocultural environment but were not satisfied with their academic environment, their overall adaptation to China could be undermined. Furthermore, the students' satisfaction with sociocultural adaptation and with their academic adaptation could enable them to adapt better to a new society. Failure in either case could negatively affect their adaptation to China.

Unlike in Western higher-education institutions, where most international students already have language skills to immerse themselves in the mainstream academic environment, a majority of international students in China's universities arrive without any academic language competency and understanding of China's educational system. Consequently, this lack of academic intercultural sensitivity creates significant problems for international students as they seek to adapt academically in China's universities. Thus, a rationale for the conceptual framework presented in this article is predicated on the broad range of the importance of students' cultural characteristics as precursors to their instructional experience. In other words, if the international students' language competency were minuscule, then instructional barriers would be apparent, undercutting their instructional competence and compromising their overall classroom experience and their adaptation to a new environment: China's universities.

The second-order construct, instructional beliefs, include the students' expectations for success, self-efficacy and empowerment [45], and their Chinese-language instructional competence.

This framework is based on the proposition that a higher proficiency in host-country language will manifest itself in enhanced instructional communication that reduces the likelihood of cross-cultural pragmatic failure and enhances the likelihood of pragmatic competence. It is assumed that those learning outcomes—that is, products of a process—will inform future rhetorical activities of Chinese professors, making instructional communication an action, an interaction, and a transaction: "Instructional communication is the process by which teachers and students stimulate meanings in the minds of each other using verbal and nonverbal messages" [19] (p. 5). It must be noted here that if (Chinese) instructional faculty are tethered to the rhetorical process in a manner that disregards student needs and motivations, then the likelihood that the students' communicative competence will be stymied becomes feasible. Earlier studies (e.g., [38–44]) indicated only English-medium programs' instructional issues and evaluated their challenges; therefore, our conceptual framework presents a more integrated approach to reducing misunderstandings between Chinese professors and their international students in classrooms. This present study is an effort to provide a more culturally sensitive instructional communication in the Chinese context to better accomplish a knowledge-based economy under BRI.

#### **6. Conclusions and Implications of Framework for Sustaining BRI**

What are the implications of instructional communication in China in an intercultural context for an innovative, synergistic sustainability of BRI? This article is the first attempt to conceptualize the key elements in students' understanding of classroom material within the context of China's growing multiculturalism in higher education and of its Belt and Road Initiative. Our discussion suggests five major implications of the instructional settings of China's multicultural classrooms for sustaining and broadening BRI.

First, it is important to acknowledge the asymmetrical discourses or unequal encounters between native and nonnative speakers [58] in China's multicultural university classrooms. The implications of such outcomes for learning outcomes need to be better addressed within the context of China's dominant high-context culture. That calls for using the results of an initial assessment of students' awareness of speech acts to develop programs that demonstrably acknowledge the conceptual framework proposed here. But perhaps more than those, the administrators of BRI can be more aware of skills and expertise readily available regionally, if not internationally, as they develop projects for the mutual benefit of BRI partners.

Even though a stock-taking of resources for managing long-term projects is being undertaken by various BRI partners with the collaboration of career-development offices on various university campuses and research centers in China, there is a crucial need to develop programs that specifically require, as Cruz [62] noted, role plays under pragmatic pressure and model dialogues with authentic discourses appropriate in communities of partners. Such participation can place a premium on honing international students' expertise for BRI support and as an indicant of BRI effect in its own right; on enhancing international students' communicative competence; and on reducing, if not avoiding, pragmatic failures that emanate from unequal, asymmetrical instructional encounters. As Bennett's [48,49] linear development model states, there will be a progression in such enhancement, even as it is apparent from Figure 1 that extraneous factors influence the outcome of such a process, ensuring that communication interculturality, which varies from person to person, is not entirely a discretely linear process. Student participants could be provided feedback on their role plays to make them better aware of speech acts and better recognize potential areas of difficulties between their own knowledge and that of a native speaker. But, more important, "students may become aware that their participation in communicative activities may be influenced to some extent by their ... knowledge [of a nonnative language] and sociocultural expectations" [62] (p. 38).

Second, international students need to be more cognizant of the salient features of Chinese culture (e.g., differences in communication habits and in modes of thinking), the environment, and the educational system *before* arriving in China. Inarguably, China's higher-education system is "highly stratified" [63] (p. 30): there are the more powerful and the less powerful universities, the leading

and the ordinary universities [64]; the private and the public [25]; the more than 600 universities of applied technology, which have long been engines for research and development, and are being transformed to focus them on "regional economic development by cooperating with local small and medium enterprises in applied innovation projects" [63] (p. 30), consistent with BRI mission; the higher-distance-education programs [65,66]; and the new, all-research university, the Westlake University, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. The latter institution, "a cradle of innovative talent in advanced science and technology" [67] and China's first private institution approved to award doctoral degrees, emphasizes team-building and team projects that revolve around discovery through advanced basic research and applied, problem-solving, interactive approaches that are not nearly as embraced by other types of China's universities. Such an institution, can, as Jin [27] observes in private universities, "help usher in new opportunities for social and economic development" (p. 401), consistent with BRI's infrastructural goals and with those of its other development programs.

Granted, even though instructional behaviors in China's university classrooms are not monolithic, they tend to perpetuate characteristics of China's higher education: hierarchical, authoritarian relationships that tend to cast professors as all-knowing and superior to their students, to favor professor-to-student knowledge transmission and to limit teacher–student classroom interaction [68–71]. Such characteristics, therefore, require orientation classes and training workshops offered in and encouraged by China's embassies and consulates worldwide on how to engage Chinese professors dialogically within much-vaunted cultural practices. Additionally, such embassies can provide videoconferencing and computer-assisted training to help incoming students to better adapt to their new cultural milieu. Because most international students are on financial support provided by the China Scholarship Council, it is also recommended that such a government agency, through China's embassies and consulates worldwide, become involved in programs such as orientation sessions that better help students to adjust to their new environment. That way, international students' over-expectations, often based upon misinformation, could be upended, giving way to realistic expectations that would make the students better prepared sociopsychologically for environmental demands and adjustment.

Third, university management of the international student experience [72] and cultural sensitivity training for faculty members are critical to fostering an academic environment that some students perceive as restrictive culturally. BRI, at bottom, is multiculturalism extraordinaire. Consequently, instructional communication—that is, communication for the purpose of engaging students academically and reducing problematic understanding significantly—a bane of the educational experience of international students in China, must be more forcefully addressed head-on from a policymaking perspective. As Chiang [37] notes, "Given that intercultural communicators do not possess the same stock of linguistic and cultural knowledge, problematic understanding is bound to occur" (p. 463). And such problems can engender discontent of international with academic programs. For example, Western students, as noted in a preceding section of this article, usually do not like their Chinese professors' public reporting of student grades, their professors' in-class criticisms of students who fail to answer professors' questions, and their professors' tendency to compare publicly students' grades or learning outcomes [35]. Chen and Starosta [45,46] aver that intercultural awareness, sensitivity and adroitness will enable interactants to reach their communication goals. Thus, training Chinese professors as a matter of academic expediency in a global context requires that they demonstrate knowledge and skill in nuanced communication with other cultures. For example, nonnative speakers of Mandarin Chinese are always advised to slow down considerably in their English-language presentations to their Chinese hosts. Part of that exhortation is justified in part by the time necessary to have a translator on hand navigate between two disparate languages.

Fourth, universities with substantial international student enrollments should provide on-campus orientations in several languages, including Chinese, English, French and Arabic, to incoming international students. Through such activities, the university staff should be able to answer student inquiries effectively. Students should know more about, say, the registration procedures, the local rules, conventions, practices, the environment and the educational system. Universities can provide profound opportunities for domestic–international student interaction and create a friendly classroom atmosphere for international students. One possibility is having rotating theme classrooms: one month, the theme may be Germany; another, England; and yet another, Egypt. Rotating themes can also be campuswide or schoolwide, providing enormous opportunities for students to connect much more easily with one another, to build friendships, and to foster better understanding and to communicate more in, say, Mandarin Chinese.

Finally, it is imperative that China's universities have, as a matter of policy, annual university-wide events that showcase their international stature and interest, but strictly within the BRI context. As of today, such events occur, palpably absent BRI themes. Such events—say, "Global Instruction at Wuhan"—will include domestic and international students' testimonials on personal exchanges on curriculum-related projects, classroom engagements between students and professors, in-class dialogues between international students and their Chinese faculty. Furthermore, partnerships and initiatives will highlight international students' classroom engagement on a multicultural scale.

It is expected that, absent of empirical evidence, the prescriptions outlined here will require additional government support to participating universities. Such investment is justified by the growing and increasing presence of China on the global stage and by the expanding reach of BRI. The Communist Party of China understands full well that the country has expanded its global influence well beyond the Pacific Rim. As Callahan and Barabantseva [73] observe, the country's enhanced global role is being manifested in part in its model of international relations. That model, which informs China's higher-education policy, intersects with BRI, which, in turn, ensures a pivotal role for China's international higher education in sustaining and projecting BRI and for the latter in providing a vast network of resoures to the former.

**Author Contributions:** N.A. contributed to the literature review, conceptual framing and formatting of this article in accordance with journal requirements. C.B.P. initiated this article, edited and proofread the final copy after receiving coauthors' contributions. Y.H. worked on the literature review and contributed significantly to the entire article, making it more focused and better structured.

**Funding:** This research was funded by a grant awarded to the first author's India-Pakistan Research Center, South China University of Technology, by the Ministry of Education under grant number [2017] 1606.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
