Intercultural communication of the international officers of Utrecht University

Abstract

This thesis reports on a study on intercultural communication between international officers and students at Utrecht University. Utrecht University started the Intercultural Competence for Utrecht University project, which aims to advance intercultural competences of students, teachers and staff. An important aspect of this project is professionalization of the international office staff, study points and study advisers through intercultural training. This thesis aims to contribute to this training by analyzing the institutional interaction between international officers and local and international students. This interaction was recorded and subsequently transcribed. To investigate this interaction, a functional pragmatic approach was used and speech action patterns of different institutional purposes were reconstructed. Two institutional purposes were analyzed; the legitimation of an institutional position pattern and the counselling pattern. Three phases were identified in the analysis of the counselling pattern for international offices to give correct advice; authorization, verification and classification. A comparison of the conversations with the local and international students showed that the steps of these phases were more often skipped in the conversations with the local students. This can be explained by considering that the international officers might overlook cultural differences between them and the local students because they are from the same country. Altogether, these findings suggest that the intercultural awareness trainings should start with an explanation of the structural organization of the institutional patterns and take a dynamic viewpoint on culture by not only focusing on interaction with international students, but also on interaction with local students.