Developing intercultural competence in post-secondary students participating in short-term study abroad programs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There has been a steady increase in the number of international students studying in Canada over the last decade. As international student numbers increase, new demands for more innovative and flexible programming, including short-term language programs, have emerged to accommodate them. Aiming to respond to the demand for short-term language and culture programs, Vancouver Island University (VIU), a post-secondary institution based in Western Canada, launched the English Language and Culture Program (ELCP) in 2012 with the goal of offering quality English as a second language (ESL) and cultural programming that enhances the development of intercultural competence for participants. Consequently, the purpose of this study was to determine the degree, if any, that study participants developed intercultural competence after participating in a 3-week ELCP course at VIU in the summer of 2017, and to explore the effect that English language skills had on the participants’ respective development of intercultural competence. Study results indicated that participants developed a small degree of intercultural competence, and that although English language levels did not significantly affect the degree of development, high English levels at the beginning of the ELCP course were a predictor of higher levels of intercultural competence at both the start and end of the course. Results also highlighted there is more that could be done not only in relation to researching short term English language study abroad programs but also in how such programs could be further developed to support an increase in intercultural competence of participants.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".