Intercultural Networking and Storytelling: Constructing Multilingual and Multimodal Repertoires

Although the globalization of higher education has brought international students of different cultures, identities, worldviews, and knowledge systems to interact with local students and communities on various occasions using a variety of resources, relatively fewer studies have performed multilingual and multimodal pragmatic and discourse analysis to analyse intercultural networking and storytelling of international study-abroad students in Taiwan. In addition to tracking and documenting language socialization of international students through face-to-face interviews, inquiring about personal details, language experiences, study-abroad experiences, and online communication, the proposed project also includes follow-up surveys and interviews to explore international students’ evolving social network interactions and life stories in face-to-face and online contexts. The results of the study will be analysed and discussed in three aspects: First, based on social interactional linguistics, the researcher will discuss how the international study-abroad students’ multilingual and multimodal repertoires are constructed in socialization and why participants use particular languages and modes in intercultural communication. Second, the empirical pragmatic study of face-to-face interviews and online interactions with international students will present how participants express and adapt their identities in dialogue and body language. Further multimodal analyses of participants’ narratives in social network sites（e.g., Facebook) will help identify emergent and repeated intercultural expressions and participants’ uses of different genres, symbols, and multimedia resources (e.g., symbols, images, sounds) in social networking interactions. The longitudinal ethnographic investigations and analyses of international study-abroad students experiences involve their life stories and networks of practice, which can provide insight into multiple levels of socialization with local communities and global networks.