[Conference Paper] Exploring intercultural communication using Holliday’s small-culture approach: The case of (some) Chinese students in a particular English-speaking university context

During the past decade, there has been an interesting strand of applied linguistics literature in the West, led by Adrian Holliday, in which a paradigmatic divide has been identified regarding research studies on intercultural communication and other cross-cultural phenomena. This divide is between a “large-culture” and a “small-culture” approach (e.g. Holliday, 1999). Whereas large-culture-oriented researchers tend to essentialise and otherise, small-culture-oriented researchers tend to explore intercultural communication or other cross-cultural phenomena in all their complexities. The latter approach resonates with a strand in the intercultural communication literature, represented by Singer’s (1998) work on individuals’ cultural-complexity and cultural-uniqueness. We consider the small-culture approach to be more appropriate for exploring intercultural communication, as it is fundamentally a complex phenomenon taking place at the interpersonal level, where individuals come into contact and interact for particular purposes. However, research literature in this area, whether in the West or in China, is still dominated by the large-culture approach. In this paper, we aim to do three things. First, we introduce Hollidays’ distinction between the default large-culture approach and his preferred small-culture approach to understanding the interculturality of particular contexts, varying from nation states to university seminar groups. Second, we discuss the literature on the intercultural aspects of Chinese students’ academic experiences in English-speaking universities with view to showing how this literature is dominated by a large-culture approach. Finally, we present some data from our own studies to illustrate how the same research context can be explored using a large-culture approach and a small-culture approach.