The Liminal Space for Intercultural Learning: an Empirical Study among Undergraduate International Business Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The field of Intercultural Communication has attracted attention of specialists from various disciplines, including such distant fields of research as linguistics and international business studies. Most authors, however, focus on the scope of knowledge and skills in terms of learning objectives. Students’ own perspectives and various conceptions they construct with ascribed meanings, as well as the “architecture” of their learning process remain under-researched. This study provides an example of a replicable analysis of the Intercultural Communication learning process, based on subjects’ perspectives. Most participants of this study are first- and second-generation immigrants. Serious issues present in a multicultural setting based on the perception of the “Other” emerged, with implications for communication, collaboration and potential conflict. Two main transformation patterns were identified in the intercultural learning process, conditioned by mono- and multiculturalism. This study reveals a range within the self-conception transition framework, as well as the deep ontological aspect of the phenomenon. The findings extrapolated into a wider context should contribute to a more conflict-free environment in multicultural societies in general. The phenomenographic approach, variation theory and the threshold concept were applied to explore the semantics, the syntax of the learning process and the critical aspects of the transformative learning experience. * This research was supported by the Institute for Environmental Sustainability, Mount Royal University (No. 2013–49a). Initial design was inspired and partly supported through collaboration with The Institute for Teaching and Learning at Mount Royal University. There has been no public presentation, nor publication of any part of this analysis. This is not part of a thesis or dissertation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".