CIICPD 2023

4. The Study: analysis and stimuli for pedagogical use

4.1 Corpus The subject of this contribution is a corpus of 12 written CI-narratives, 8 written by students and 4 by academic staff, all of which were narrated within the EU Project CIICPD (Critical Incidents in Intercultural Communication and Promoting Diversity), in two intercultural workshops (Appendix I). Eleven of the participants use English as a lingua franca, which is also the chosen project language. One CI-narrative was written in Czech. The first workshop, with the staff, took place in February 2021 and another workshop with the students in February 2022. The main aim of the workshop with the interdisciplinary staff was to introduce them to the work with CIs in intercultural communication from a critical perspective. In the workshop with the students, we foregrounded the aspect of narrating their experiences in culturally diverse student project groups. In both settings, the CI-narratives were collected in the same way. The first task consisted of a prompt to tell each other in groups about one or more CIs. To be able to do this we presented an example of a CI only to the students 13 , as the staff members were already familiar with the form. In the next step, the participants should enter their narratives into the web-application NiLS (Network for Intercultural Learning and Sensitivity), which is a knowledge base for written CI narratives. 14 In addition to the text, the platform requires the creation of a title. After the submission of the text, it is necessary to enter further meta-data, e.g. information about the narrator and the actors involved. As our focus is on the narratological approach, we consider it legitimate to bring the narratives of both groups together in one corpus, obviously without neglecting the differences of previous knowledge of some staff members about common formats of CI applications in intercultural learning. In a previous study, Fetscher (2022) examined 14 CI-narratives of German students. Using the same categories for the analysis of the lingua franca corpus will offer the possibility to find out whether narrating CIs in a lingua franca has a remarkable influence on the various aspects of representation. It will be of further interest to see whether or in which way the very homogenous German corpus differs from a highly diverse corpus in terms of previous knowledge about CIs, different levels of English competence, different native languages and the provenance from different fields of study. 4.2 Analysis The subsequent analysis distinguishes between the CI-narratives representing scenic episodic fragments of autobiographical narration and those representing reporting fragments. Following the respective categories, this distinction can be made without difficulties. The corpus can be divided into seven CI-narratives with a mainly scenic 13 See Appendix II “Business before pleasure?” Source: www.nils.fh-zwickau.de/overview 14 The knowledge base was developed as part of an interdisciplinary research project at the West Saxon University of Applied Sciences in Zwickau. The Critical Incidents are collected in the web application via a guided, multi-stage recording process and can then be browsed in an overview and organised using search and filter functions. As part of the ongoing development of the platform, an English version of the platform was financed with project funds from the EU project CIICPD.

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