SITUATED INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDENT INTERACTION

As higher education continues to internationalize, more institutions are making it an educational priority to increase intercultural competence among all students. Despite this goal, institutions regularly place students in intercultural programs without facilitating training and reflection on intercultural learning, with the expectation that students will learn from contact alone. There is a need for investigation into situated intercultural communication, for the limited studies that do examine interactions between international and domestic students do not look at the interactions themselves, do not situate the interactions in a specific context, and often examine only the students‘ international/domestic statuses or countries of origin as the differences having the most influence on their communication. This study examined intercultural interaction in-action, through exploring students‘ experiences and interactions in a Conversation Partner Program pairing U.S. domestic students and Chinese international students to meet for weekly conversations over a ten-week period. Framed theoretically with critical intercultural communication (Halualani & Nakayama, 2010) and a discourse approach to intercultural communication (Scollon, Scollon & Jones, 2012), the focus was on the discourse-specific, relational, and situated dynamics involved in the conversations between domestic and international students, underscoring the power dynamics that were present in the interactions. The interview data and conversation data were triangulated to explain what transpired in the communication between conversation partners and what participants said about their experiences in the Conversation Partner Program. Intercultural competence development and shifting power dynamics between participants were explored in depth. Based on students‘ comments during the interviews and their conversations with their partners, there seemed to be a lack of intercultural competence among all of the students, with the exception of one student some of the time. There was not a clear dichotomy between domestic and international students in terms of the power they held in these interactions, and there were a variety of powerladen issues such as gender, race, socioeconomic status and language differences, which seemed to influence the interactions.


Internationalization and the Conversation Partner Program
In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on internationalization in higher education. One dimension of internationalization of higher education involves increasing the enrollment of international students with the expectation that intercultural learning will be enhanced campus-wide (Altbach & Knight, 2007).
However, this focus on internationalization and the growing numbers of international students have not translated to more effective programming for language and culture learning, and there is not yet a well-developed research base for understanding what takes place when students engage with one another across differences.
One strategy in higher education to facilitate intercultural learning is to create conversation partners, pairing international and domestic students to explore various topics and learn from cultural differences and similarities (Wang, Harding & Mei, 2012). In this exploratory ethnographic study, framed theoretically with critical intercultural communication (Halualani & Nakayama, 2010) and a discourse approach to intercultural communication (Scollon, Scollon & Jones, 2012), I examine domestic students' and international students' experiences in the Conversation Partner Program at a private university in the northeastern United States. This particular Conversation Partner Program matches one international student with one domestic student for one term, a ten-week period; the two students are expected to meet for at least one hour every week to discuss course-related topics and to learn about each other's cultures.

Statement of the Problem
According to Institute of International Education (2012)(2013) Open Doors research which features surveys of campuses regarding their international students, international enrollment at colleges and universities across the United States increased by 7.2% in 2012-2013, bringing the international student population to 819,644. In reality, much of this growth is economically driven by institutions seeking to boost enrollments, and their support for international students often lags behind, if it exists at all. Many institutions, however, are now making it an educational priority to strategize and create opportunities for all students to engage in intercultural learning and to learn from the diversity around them with the goal of having them become increasingly interculturally competent individuals (Bennett, 2009).
Despite the fact that increasing the intercultural competence of students, defined in the literature review below, is becoming an educational priority for many institutions, there has been little research into how intercultural interaction should best be facilitated (Jurgens & Robbins-O'Connell, 2008). Rather than focusing on how to increase meaningful intercultural interaction for both international and domestic students on university campuses to live up to the internationalization rhetoric, the international student literature tends instead to focus on adjustment issues for international students. A variety of studies does suggest that communication with domestic students is needed to foster adjustment, intercultural friendships, and mental health for international students (Sumer, Poyrazli & Grahame, 2008). While the studies often suggest a need for more interaction between international and domestic students, analysis of the specific interactions and how to guide these experiences so they lead to engagement and a meaningful exchange of ideas remains to be done.
Research has found that discrimination and prejudice often shape the way that international and domestic students interact with one another in a group context (Lee and Rice, 2007;Leki, 2001). This study will investigate the students' experiences of interactions and the interactions themselves over the course of the 10 week Conversation Partner Program.

Definitions: Discourse Specific, Relational, Situated
Instead of identifying the presence of discrimination in intercultural encounters or trying to identify generalizations about what is taking place in these interactions, this research was more specific and relational, looking at the conversation between individuals and their unique experiences of that interaction. Throughout this study, I refer to the need for an analysis of interaction from a discourse specific, relational and situated perspective. It is critical that I define those main themes guiding the way that I approach the interaction between the partners. Scollon et al. (2012) argue that it is necessary to be specific about discourse communities when discussing intercultural interaction, explaining that there is too often a lack of specificity regarding overlapping, conflicting communities. For example, I have noticed a tendency in international student literature to refer to international students as a homogenous group rather than looking specifically at their cultural identities and other community memberships. In this study, the international students are all Chinese, but they are from different areas in China, a very large and diverse country, and speak different dialects of Chinese and they also have differing interests and experience bases that must be taken into account. When a Chinese student and American student interact, their national identity is not necessarily going to be the difference that has the most impact on the conversation. Scollon et al. (2012) begin their book with an example of a Chinese university student interacting with an American university student on a social media website. These two students have a lot in common, such as their ages, their online community, their interest in animation and their familiarity with English; they also have some differences, such as their nationalities, their majors and their sexualities. For the most part, these students' differences do not have much influence on the interaction and the students communicate well with one another. The only difference that does cause a little confusion is the fact that the Chinese student is Christian and the American student is

Discourse Specific Perspective
Buddhist. The Chinese student from Hong Kong is one of the country's 80% majority race issues that emerge in their interaction together. These issues and other power dynamics are likely to have an impact on the interaction, and thus their communication is going to be inherently unequal across a variety of dimensions. I refer to these power issues often and incorporate them into my framing of the study and analysis process.

Research Questions
In order to explore these issues, this study investigates the situation and the interaction between conversation partners in the Conversation Partner Program at a private university in the Northeast to understand what happens when domestic students from the United States and international students from China interact with one another. The following questions are examined: 1. What transpires in the interactions between conversation partners?

What do participants say about their experiences in the Conversation Partner
Program?
Initially, there was a third research question exploring how the Cultural Intelligence assessment was reflected in the interactions between participants, but this question was eliminated because as this study progressed, it became apparent that the Cultural Intelligence framework did not fit with my ethnographic methodology. As will be explained in much greater depth in the analysis sections, when I tried to structure the analysis of interviews and conversations using Cultural Intelligence as a frame, it seemed as though I was forcing the data artificially to fit into a pre-existing mold. As an exploratory ethnographer, I wanted the participants to speak for themselves and for categories to emerge from the data; Cultural Intelligence was used to focus the conversations between conversation partners on issues of intercultural interaction, and the other two questions came to the forefront in my analysis. Furthermore, as will become clear in the explanation of the analysis below, issues of intercultural competence development were addressed within the first two questions, so the purpose of question number three, delving into intercultural competence in a relational context, became unnecessary.

Personal Connection to Study
Given that this is an ethnographic study, the researcher's role in the study should be as transparent as possible, for my role and how I conduct the interviews and facilitate the study has a significant impact on what happens in the study. Blommaert and Jie (2010) discuss the error that a lot of researchers make, namely, -That the interviewer had a tremendous influence on what was said and how it was said (in other words: that nothing the interviewee said could come about without the interviewer's active input) escapes the attention of the researchers‖ (p. 49).
Thus, I am going to explain my role at the university as well as my personal connection to the study and the strengths as well as limitations that follow. I am an Assistant Professor at this university; I teach English to English Language Learners and also coordinate a variety of programs for our department designed to foster intercultural communication amongst members of the student body. One of the programs that I coordinate and organize is the Conversation Partner Program. In this work, I have a lot of close relationships with students. Within the international community, students see me as an authority figure, as I am often the teacher or the facilitator of their programs. While I try to be as helpful and as open as possible, I know that many students see me in a professorial role, so they try to say things to please me. While the students in this study were not my students, they knew that I was teaching at the university and saw me in that role. For the study, I tried to ease their nerves about talking with a professor about personal matters, by providing snacks and a comfortable environment in my office as well as explaining confidentiality and my project openly, but I know that my role always played a part in conversations with these students.

Conclusion
This exploratory study aims to tackle a pressing problem for the internationalization of higher education: intercultural competence development needs to be situated in specific context, beginning from a knowledgeable place. There is a need to know what happens when international and domestic students come together and interact with one another in order to know how to best structure and design intercultural programming. In the chapters that follow, the literature review will show why this study is needed and then the methodology chapter will explain how data collection and analysis were conducted. Finally, in the concluding chapters, the setting and the results of the analysis will be presented and discussed, drawing connections to the research literature.

Introduction
This discussion begins by providing key definitions, followed by an examination of internationalization efforts and intercultural competence research.
Next, there is an exploration of what is missing from the international student literature: specifically, there is an overemphasis on adjustment issues and very little attention paid to discourse-specific, relational, and situated dynamics of those engaged in intercultural interaction. Finally, this review of the literature explores the theoretical underpinnings of the study: primarily Scollon et al.'s (2012) discourse approach to intercultural communication and critical intercultural communication (Halualani & Nakayama, 2010), informed by my feminist perspective as a reflexive researcher (Collins, 1990;Harding 1991Harding , 2004Weber, 2004)

Definitions: Intercultural Competence and Cultural Intelligence
Intercultural Competence Deardorff (2011), a widely published researcher on intercultural competence and assessment, suggests that, in postsecondary institutions, scholars often do not define intercultural competence with reference to the research literature, and instead base definitions on discussions among faculty and others involved in intercultural development efforts. It is critical to begin this discussion of intercultural competence with the definition I will be using throughout this study. For this study, Deardorff's (2006) model of intercultural competence will be used because of its research base. Deardorff (2006)  The only point that all intercultural experts agreed on was the ability to see from others' perspectives and thus this point is critical to understanding intercultural competence development. Despite the value of this model, one criticism is that it draws from research of individuals out-of-context, rather than in relations with others. Spitzberg and Changnon (2009) explain that this lack of relational dimensions is a common problem with intercultural competence models and the problem of -where competence is located‖ (p. 44) is one that needs further examination. Thus, an exploration of the relational dimensions to intercultural competence is a research priority (Spitzberg & Changnon, 2009).

Cultural Intelligence
Coupled with

model of intercultural competence, Cultural
Intelligence (CQ) will be used in this study as a tool to guide students to discuss issues of culture and interaction across differences in conversations with one another. This is a quantitative assessment tool that provides feedback to participants, and thus it is a concrete way to focus students' conversations around issues of intercultural ability.
There is a variety of assessment tools to gauge intercultural competence, but as  explains, no one tool is sufficient to do so alone. Thus, this tool will not be used to provide a final and comprehensive assessment of an individual's ability to interact across cultures, but it has been chosen to complement Deardorff's (2006) model as it is a relatively -cleaner construct‖ that has a strong theoretical foundation as compared to other instruments (Ang & Van Dyne, 2008). Cultural Intelligence is also distinct in that it is related to intelligence research, which brings an individualized approach into notions of culture. There are four different capabilities that are assessed in the Cultural Intelligence assessment; they are CQ Drive, CQ Knowledge, CQ Strategy, and CQ Action. Drive is one's -interest and confidence in functioning effectively in culturally diverse settings‖ (Livermore, 2011, p. 6-7), and it has been shown that if one is lacking this critical motivational piece, one is not likely to be successful in communication across cultures. Knowledge is -your knowledge about how cultures are similar and different‖ (Livermore, 2011, p. 7). Strategy is -how you make sense of culturally diverse experiences‖ (Livermore, 2011, p. 7) and specifically how one is able to judge one's own thought processes and then plan accordingly for encounters. Lastly, CQ Action is -your capability to adapt your behavior appropriately for different cultures‖ (Livermore, 2011, p. 7).
Internationalization Efforts: Lagging in Intercultural Competence Development Altbach and Knight (2007) explain that the internationalization of higher education is an effort to respond to the global economy. Internationalization includes the academic policies and practices created in response to the global economic environment. As mentioned above in the problem statement, many institutions depend on internationalization efforts to bring in revenue. Despite the linguistic and cultural learning objectives woven into internationalization plans, there is often an absence of institutional support to ensure that those objectives become a reality; many faculty, staff and students do not get the support or guidance required to foster such learning in a meaningful way. Faculty commitment to internationalizing the curriculum varies widely across universities in the United States, but overall there are significantly fewer committed faculty members working on internationalization efforts as compared with counterparts in other countries. Furthermore, it has become apparent, through examination of universities' relative levels of success with internationalization, that piecemeal approaches, simply adding one course or requiring a particular program of students, are not effective. Institutional support and campus-wide engagement, including faculty, staff and students, are necessary if internationalization plans are to succeed (Engberg & Greene, 2002).
In reality, faculty and staff are often not engaged in fostering intercultural competence partly due to the lack of institutional support and partly due to the reality that our society perpetuates power imbalances, and it is not common to question the status quo and engage in critical intergroup dialogues (Goodman, 2001;Smith, 2009). Smith (2009) discusses the importance of engagement in difficult discussions, rather than avoiding them. Goodman (2001) also discusses this tendency for people to avoid meaningful discussions, particularly regarding our social identities. Goodman (2001) states, The publicly perpetuated norm encourages avoidance of honest, meaningful discussions about our social identities, about social inequalities and about our experiences of them. People enter workshops with this internalized taboo and a lack of skill or comfort in having these types of discussions. (p. 70) The inequality perpetuated in our society is reflected and perpetuated in higher education, and internationalization efforts often lack critical intercultural competence development necessary to make effective intercultural communication a reality.
Thus, although developing students' intercultural competence is becoming an educational priority for institutions, included in internationalization plans and mission statements, the reality of intercultural learning on college campuses seems to be lagging behind the rhetoric; examination of what leads to intercultural competence development and how intercultural interaction can be best facilitated in specific contexts is needed (Deardorff, 2011;Jurgens & Robbins-O'Connell, 2008 Each of the interviewees stated that not only were they unable to comment on the frequency of such programming or activities, but also that no current method of determining the level of such need, nor for determining the success of current programming and activities had been developed or utilized by their respective departments or the universities in general. (p. 72) Developing intercultural competence is an ongoing process that must be actively fostered throughout one's lifetime. While many institutions are still just putting students together and expecting them to learn from their differences, it has been widely acknowledged that more intentional programming and curriculum development are necessary for intercultural competence to develop. Bennett (2009) explains, -In the past, many professionals assumed that any contact across cultures was useful contact and would reduce stereotypes and prejudice, allowing intercultural competence to synergistically evolve‖ (p. 133). In reality, intercultural competence development has to be actively facilitated, including training, ongoing reflection, meaningful interaction and critical assessment of specific measurable objectives. In a higher education context, this intercultural competence development can happen through courses, service learning opportunities, education abroad or on campus learning (Bennett, 2009;Deardorff, 2011). While there is research on what needs to happen in order to facilitate intercultural competence development, there has been little investigation into intercultural competence development in action and in a specific context. As was mentioned previously, a close examination of interaction across discourse communities needs to be conducted (Scollon et al., 2012). Thus, this research, aiming to be discourse-specific, relational and situated, will address a gap in the current research on intercultural competence development.

Research on Intercultural Competence Development
The research on intercultural competence development has mostly focused on specific programs aimed at increasing intercultural competence, examining whether those programs succeed at achieving that goal. There has also been some research on other factors, such as identity and previous intercultural contact, that lead to the development of intercultural competence.

Program Effectiveness
The research on intercultural competence development often examines the effectiveness of particular programs in increasing intercultural competence among participants. Spooner-Lane, Tangen, Mercer, Hepple and Carrington (2013)  Additionally, missing from this study is an analysis of the participants' thoughts about their own intercultural competence at the outset of the program. The reader is left wondering whether the Patches' program actually had an effect on their intercultural competence or whether they already had these ideas previously. This study also does not discuss any specific differences within the communities that might have effects on their relative levels of intercultural competence. As was mentioned previously, Scollon et al. (2012) discuss how national identity is not necessarily going to be the difference that has the greatest impact on communication and this study focused entirely on national identity, and the international/domestic student statuses, as the only points of difference in their identities. There is no mention of other factors in this study, such as race and gender, which could have an impact on communication.
A different study addresses some of these problems. Wang (2013) examined the intercultural competence at both the outset and completion of participants' participation in a course aimed at increasing intercultural competence. Wang (2013) used the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) to assess students before and after the program in order to show any progress in the development of intercultural competence. Initially, the students were mostly in the minimization stage, deemphasizing the importance or the presence of cultural differences. Then, they were led through a course aimed at defining culture, increasing cultural self-awareness and drawing connections through culture and communication. After taking the course, the students began to see the impact that cultural differences have on people and were less likely to negate their potential impact. This was determined through a post-test of the IDI in which students' scores increased; while students were still in the minimization stage, the increase in their scores was determined to be significant, when compared to other similar studies and what happened in regard to their students' increases in IDI scores.
This study did not, however, look at the specific context of interaction for these students; through a pencil and paper instrument, it primarily looked at intercultural

Contact Hypothesis
In addition to intercultural competence development research, research using Allport's (1954) Contact Hypothesis is another area where there has been some examination of factors influencing interaction dynamics. Allport's (1954) hypothesis proposes four criteria necessary for intergroup contact to lead to prejudice reduction: equal status of the people involved, common goals, acquaintance potential, and the involvement of authority. Many of the most current studies suggest that more research into the complexity of interaction dynamics and the factors involved in successful and unsuccessful contact are necessary.
For example, Pettigrew and Tropp (2008) reviewed research using the contact hypothesis and suggest directions for further research. As Pettigrew and Tropp (2008) explain, intergroup contact alone does not always lead to intercultural learning. Some students actually feel frustrated by communication challenges and this frustration may be associated with an increase in prejudice (Spencer-Rodgers & McGovern, 2002). Pettigrew and Tropp (2006) explain that more research is needed to examine the processes involved in successful intergroup contact and to explore negative group contact where prejudice is increased. In their meta-analysis of mediators impacting prejudice reduction, Pettigrew and Tropp (2008) also indicate that more work on empathy and perspective taking is necessary considering how their analysis pointed to those as being areas that influence successful group contact.
Halualani ( In contrast, situations where students were able to express their feelings about culture and reflect critically on their own culture through dialoguing with their partners led to culture learning and positive attitudes about culture. O'Dowd (2003) also analyzed the specific components of the emails in situations where learning occurred and the components of the emails where learning did not occur. For example, intercultural learning was associated with emails in which participants brought in personal connections, asked questions of their partners' beyond just the required tasks and took into account the socio-pragmatic rules of their partner's language when writing in that language. This study, however, focused primarily on email exchanges and did not examine communication taking place orally. A study looking at the specific components of intercultural conversation, modeled after this research on email exchanges, would provide insights into the discourse-specific, relational and situated context of intercultural contact.
Thus, the research on the Contact Hypothesis shows that the exploration into intercultural contact in action has been quite limited and there is a need for a close investigation into the interaction dynamics of intercultural contact.

International Student Literature: Lack of Depth into Social Interaction
While the international student literature points to a need for more interaction between international and domestic students, there has been little investigation into specific, contextual interaction dynamics and how to best guide the interactions.
Additionally, in the limited research on conversation partner programs, more exploration of interaction dynamics is needed.

International Student Adjustment: Social Network Needed
While there are some studies about the factors thought to be involved in promoting intercultural competence development as well as some research exploring and extending the implications of the Contact Hypothesis, much of the literature on international students in higher education focuses on adjustment issues for students.
This research on adjustment suggests that international students need more interaction with domestic students in order for adjustment and intercultural learning to occur.
Specific guidance as to how such collaborative learning should be facilitated is lacking. Li, Fox and Almarza (2007) interviewed international graduate students about common challenges that the international students face. Learning English, adjusting to a new culture and not having established social networks were three of the common issues that emerged; in order to learn English, students recommend seeking out opportunities to practice English and interact with native speakers whenever possible. Similarly, Hinchcliff-Pelias and Greer (2004) used focus groups and interviews with international students, along with narrative analysis of their reflective writing, to analyze how international students approach communication. One suggestion that international students had to improve communication is for the university to offer more opportunities for meaningful engagement between international and domestic students. Sumer, Poyrazli and Grahame (2008) also looked at international student adjustment and they conducted a correlation analysis looking at a variety of variables, including gender, age, length of stay, race and social support, and whether they were predictors of anxiety and depression among international students. They found that social support was critical in terms of fostering mental health for participants and one of their recommendations was peer programs pairing American and international students. They explained that domestic and international student interaction was important in order to expand the international students' social network and to facilitate English language acquisition. Lastly, Khawaja and Stallman's (2011) discovery, in their qualitative study of international student coping strategies, that international students find interaction and social support from domestic students to help ease stress reflects the existing literature on easing adjustment stress (Lee, Koeske, & Sales, 2004). Through comments during focus groups, students in the study actually recommended having international students make efforts to interact with domestic students so that they benefit from these interactions, but they did not propose how to do this. These studies and others point to the need for more social support and opportunities for interaction between international and domestic students.

Need for More Interaction: How to Guide It?
Thus, while some of these studies point toward the need for more interaction, implying that this will be beneficial to both groups, there is scarce analysis into how to best structure and guide those interactions for international and domestic students. Zhao, Kuh and Carini (2005) conducted a quantitative study on international and domestic student engagement in educational practices and found, among a variety of other findings, that increasing numbers of international students on campus does not immediately lead to more learning from diversity and the increasing enrollment of international students must be accompanied by programs and social opportunities that integrate domestic students and international students effectively. Zhao, Kuh and Carini (2005) state, -A campus cannot simply recruit a critical mass of international students; it must also intentionally arrange its resources so that international and American students benefit in desired ways from one another's presence‖ (p. 225). Just placing domestic and international students into a group together does not guarantee that they will learn from one another, as the program development needs to foster learning for the students, taking into account the perspectives of all students involved. Wang, Harding and Mei (2012) conducted interviews with international and domestic students engaged in teamwork and came to the conclusion that there needs to be more well-facilitated and structured culturally-mixed teamwork in order to facilitate meaningful relationships between international and domestic students.
In order to foster this meaningful dialogue, Tas (2013) explains some of the best practices associated with hosting international students and explains that diversity training is critical for faculty, staff and students to learn from and facilitate the intercultural interaction on campus. Additionally, he explains the need to transition to a more international culture. Learning from the diversity on campus is not going to happen without intervention and there needs to be a structure in place for how such learning is going to be facilitated. Tas (2013) states, -Diversity does not just happen and planned change must occur to meet diversity challenges and opportunities.
Organizational and individual commitments are part of the mix. These commitments involve participation and leadership at all levels‖ (p. 16).

Conversation Partner Experience: Interaction Dynamics Need Exploration
The limited studies of the conversation partner experience point to a need for a closer examination of the interaction dynamics involved. Wilson (1993), in his exploration of a conversation partner experience, learned that the partners acquired much knowledge, such as substantive knowledge and perceptual understanding as well as personal development and interpersonal relationships, from one another in this situation. Wilson's (1993) study, however, was based solely on reflection papers of students involved in a conversation partner program and did not take into account the actual interactions themselves. The study was also limited in that it only briefly alluded to challenges such as time and language, but did not explore these issues or others in much depth. Gresham and Clayton (2012)  Thus, much of the international student literature is focused on adjustment issues for international students, pointing to more interaction with domestic students as one of the methods to ease adjustment challenges, and the limited literature that does explore programs similar to the Conversation Partner Program examined in this study do not take into account the specific context or the content of the learning reported by the students.

Perspectives
One area where there has been some research on intercultural communication between international and domestic students is literature on group work. This overview of the group work literature begins with a discussion about international students being viewed by domestic students as barriers to group work success and facing discrimination in a group context. Then, there is an exploration of the limited research available on domestic student perspectives.

International Students: Barriers to Group Work Success and Targets of Discrimination
Chinese international students are often perceived to be a barrier to group work success because of their cultural backgrounds. Studies have analyzed the cultural characteristics of the students involved and their experiences of discrimination. Baker and Clark (2010) in their mixed methods study of cooperative learning in multicultural groups in New Zealand found that the international students were often unfamiliar with cooperative learning teaching methods coming from teacher-centered learning environments and thus there needs to be structured training for faculty and students with a cultural focus, getting students ready for this type of learning. Similarly, Li and Campbell (2008) in their interview study of Asian students studying in New Zealand found that while international students felt they benefited from in-class discussions, they did not see value in the group projects and found them to be a much less effective means for learning as compared to independent work assignments. Li and Campbell (2008) suggest that faculty take into account these students' cultural backgrounds, including work and learning styles, while constructing their assignments. Lee and Rice (2007) conducted interviews with international students and found that many international students reported feeling as though the domestic students were ignoring them because they did not value their opinions. They talked about experiencing discrimination from other students, faculty and local community members. Students explained their experiences of having been ignored, verbally insulted and confronted by domestic students in the groups. Sometimes this discrimination was founded in the American apathy to understand other cultures.
Thus, these international students did want to engage in group work, but they felt like the discrimination they encounter limited their ability to do so. Lee and Rice (2007) explain, -Though perhaps unintentional, such indifference to other ways of life can marginalize anything not American, anything not understood. Such apathy and unwillingness to attempt understanding translates to the rejection of international students' cultural identities‖ (p. 399). However, much of this research has focused entirely on international student perspectives, ignoring the intercultural dynamics at play and overlooking the contextual and relational factors. Leki (2001) conducted a study of nonnative-English-speaking (NNES) students in group projects and also found that these international students faced discrimination in the group context. She found that international students felt ignored by the domestic students and they felt as though the domestic students saw them as less capable of participating in a group dynamic. Leki (2001) references the linguistic, cultural and racial power imbalances that are at play in a group context, suggesting that the native English speakers express their dominance through control of the group dynamics. Other studies looking specifically at Chinese females show that they struggle in their identity negotiation and adjustment to the American context due to disempowerment. Hsieh (2007), in a narrative study of a female Chinese international student's experience of feeling silenced, found that the silence of the non-native students was due to a power clash between the domestic and Chinese students; the Chinese students felt disempowered and voiceless given that the domestic students asserted themselves and did not listen to the international students. In another qualitative study Min-Hua (2006) investigated Chinese female international students' identity negotiation and found that they were often the most marginalized of all the international students and they were silenced by the language power and the cultural homogeneity of the American classroom.
Thus, in the international student literature, the focus has been on international student adaptation to the host institution, and their experiences with discrimination, rather than putting the onus on the domestic students and faculty to become welcoming and facilitative of international student adaptation. The implication in much of the adjustment literature is that host institutions are open to being sensitive if the international students are willing to adapt; there is not much focus on how higher education institutions have to change to be more accommodating and understanding of international students. There is a need for more studies to examine how institutions are organized in ways that make it difficult for international students to succeed, such as favoring the dominant discourse and marginalizing all those who fall outside of it (Lee & Rice, 2007). For example, Lee and Rice (2007) point out that the institution needs to become more aware of the discrimination that exists and start trying to make changes accordingly. Lee and Rice (2007) state, -We recommend that members of the educational community be made aware of this issue and their responsibility in creating intellectual environments that foster cross-national acceptance and learning and in rejecting the perpetuation of national stereotypes‖ (p. 46).

Scarce Domestic Student Perspectives
The scarce investigation into the perspectives of domestic students points to the need for more research into their thoughts and experiences, as well as the tendency in the literature to focus on international student adjustment. Li and Campbell (2008) point out that their study of Asian international students in New Zealand and their perspectives on group work projects did not address the domestic students' perspectives on group work. According to the researchers, it would be beneficial to examine the domestic students' perspectives, to see how they compare and contrast with international students' perspectives. Similarly, Leki (2001) discusses the international students' perspectives on working in groups with domestic students, but does not explore domestic students' perspectives in her study.
The limited studies exploring domestic students' perspectives do not delve into the specific, situated encounters between people in interactions. The following studies point to what has been learned from the limited studies exploring international student and domestic student interaction, including domestic student perspectives, but it becomes clear that all of the following studies are lacking a discourse-specific, relational, situated approach to interaction. They only take into account students' perspectives in interviews or focus groups and do not examine the interaction in a contextualized in-action context. Volet and Ang (1998) conducted a study of international and domestic students' thoughts on intercultural group work. They found that students, if given the choice, preferred to stay with their own national or cultural group. According to this study, the students felt more of a sense of belonging with people who they considered to be similar to them. However, I am left wondering whether issues of discrimination might be factors influencing their desires to stay with their own group in this study as well. In this study, students assigned to multicultural groups claim to have had a positive experience in those groups, but will still choose to be in groups with people similar to themselves after the multicultural experience. This study focuses entirely on international student and domestic student perspectives about what is happening without looking critically at the situated, in action encounters to see what is actually going on.
Similarly, a study by Harrison and Peacock (2010) investigated, through focus groups and interviews, domestic students' interactions with international students.
Many students reported low contact with international students. They also discussed feeling resentful when international students sat together in class and talked in their languages. There was a lot of xenophobia reported among the domestic students.
Additionally, domestic students explained their anxieties about communication with international students, and Harrison and Peacock (2010) point out that particular attention to reducing anxiety is going to be necessary if intercultural contact is to be effectively facilitated. They also suggest that more research is needed into the construction of home students' perspectives, as this study only identified some of the perspectives not examining how they were developed. This study also did not look at the discourse-specific, relational and situated encounters as the focus of this current study strives to do.
Similarly, this in-action, contextual approach was also missing from Summers and Volet (2008) and Baker and Clark (2010). Summers and Volet (2008) in their examination of questionnaire data from 233 students examined attitudes towards multicultural group work among domestic and international students in Australia. One of their findings was that domestic students who had prior intercultural experiences were more likely to have favorable views of multicultural group work. Baker and Clark (2010) found through conducting surveys and focus groups with international and domestic students that local Australian students with European roots showed less agreement on the value of multicultural group work, while the Chinese students were more likely to see the value in the collaborative group experience. Both of these studies, with their focus on questionnaires and surveys, did not examine the contextual factors, nor did they look at the specific interactions themselves. Leask (2009) proposes ideas for integration of formal and informal curricula in higher education to foster meaningful relationships, collaborative work between international and domestic students, and intercultural competence development. These suggestions stem from the work her institution has been engaged in trying to implement system-wide internationalization strategies. Her work proposing curricular changes that facilitate improved interactions between international and domestic students is unique in the literature as it addresses both international and domestic students and it provides suggestions for structuring intercultural learning and for building institutional support for it inside and outside of the classroom. She provides suggestions, such as attention to structural issues and task design as well as training faculty and staff, for formal curricula to effectively build intercultural competence. In terms of informal curricula outside of the classroom, Leask (2009) suggests purposeful planning, support for both domestic and international students, as well as the slow but necessary change to the campus culture. It is not clear in Leask's (2009) suggestions, however, how she came to some of these conclusions based on her institution's experience. I would have appreciated some more specific insights into lessons learned based on her specific context. Jon (2012) researched power dynamics in interactions between international and domestic students in Korea. Through interviews with Korean domestic students, he found that power imbalances impacted the way domestic and international students approached one another. Gender, race, national origin, and socioeconomic status came up in regard to the interactions and students often saw themselves as higher or lower than others based on some of these dimensions. For example, Korean students commented on how they looked down on students who came from countries with less economic power. Jon (2012) explains, -Another student explained her realization of an assumption on the economic level of a certain Asian country in interacting with an international student. She confessed that her behavior implied Korea's superior economic power over that of the international student's country‖ (p. 446). This study did not, however, look specifically at the actual interactions to see what happened when students were actually communicating with one another. Rather, Jon's (2012) data were based on interview data alone examining student perspectives on their interactions with the international students.
Dunne (2009) conducted a grounded theory study looking at domestic students in Ireland and how they perceived the international students. During the interviews with domestic students, the students expressed that they perceived older domestic students and all international students to be culturally different. This study also asked what influenced the likelihood that students will interact with students who are different from them on campus. One of the findings regarding student motivation showed that host students generally were motivated to engage with students who were different from themselves if it was going to be useful for them in some way. For example, students wanted to interact with international students if they needed to practice a foreign language or were about to travel overseas. Less frequently, the students attributed their motivation to the idea that they have a shared future or that they have interest in or concern for the students. In terms of challenges, the host students reported anxiety, language challenges, effort required to communicate and compromised identities in the communication. This study was useful in that it explored domestic students' perspectives, but, like the aforementioned studies, it did not look specifically at the interaction at all and only looked at what study participants had to say during the interviews. It would have been helpful if there had been another data source to triangulate what the participants had to say. Also it would have been useful to know more about the specific identities of the students interviewed as well as the international students they were talking about in their interviews. Shiyong (2012) examined stereotypes that Chinese students and American students hold of one another through conducting content analysis of students' reflective writing. Overall, both groups held stereotypes of one another, but the American students in this particular study held more negative stereotypes of Chinese students and the Chinese students held more positive stereotypes of American students. The implication of this study is that, given the stereotypes that students hold of one another, it is necessary to take these into account and try to bring more intercultural knowledge into teaching and programming. This study, similar to the others mentioned previously, did not look specifically at the interaction dynamics, nor did it situate those interactions in a specific context.
Thus, the group work literature shows Chinese students are often perceived to be a barrier to group work success and they face disempowerment and discrimination in the group context. The scarce investigation into domestic students indicates a need for more research in this area, particularly exploring the discourse-specific, relational, situated intercultural encounters.

Communication and Critical Intercultural Communication Studies
For the framework of this exploration of interaction, I use the discourse approach to intercultural communication of Scollon et al. (2012) along with critical intercultural communication studies (Halualani & Nakayama, 2010) to support the need for this research and frame the analysis of the interaction. Feminist perspectives (Collins, 1990;Harding, 1991Harding, , 2004Weber, 2004)  interaction, they have come to a discourse approach in contrast to a purely intercultural approach, with specific frames through which to understand interactional dynamics. Critical to such an approach are the notion of discourse, as opposed to culture, and the situated nature of an understanding of human interaction. Were Scollon et al. (2012) to refer to a notion of culture, they would explain that they would describe such a notion as a verb, in contrast to the static notion that one -has‖ a culture.
Building from this theoretical frame of a discourse approach to intercultural communication, Scollon et al. (2012) tackle the inherently complex nature of human interaction, by suggesting that people are part of intersecting, sometimes conflicting, dynamic discourse systems and they explore what happens when they come into contact with other people in interaction. Scollon et al. (2012) caution researchers against saying that certain communities communicate in a certain way because of the culture they represent, but instead they suggest that when analyzing communication, all discourses should be analyzed. For example, instead of assuming a Chinese person is shy because of his/her culture, one should examine as many reasons as possible for such shyness. Obviously, it will be impossible to do an exhaustive analysis of someone's discourse communities, but the point is not to assume causality where it may not exist. Scollon et al. (2012) explain that: We have set asidenot as unimportant but rather as directly relevantaspects of cultural, group or social difference that are not directly involved in social interactions between members from different groups. Our focus is on social interactions, on how they develop an internal logic of their own, and how people read those social interactions in making decisions and in taking actions that have consequences far beyond those situations themselves (p. 18).
In addition, Scollon et al. (2012)  Coupled with a discourse approach to intercultural communication, this study is aligned with critical intercultural communication studies. Scollon et al. (2012) argue that it is impossible to disconnect interaction from issues of power in any interaction and they provide frames through which to analyze power-laden discourse. Halualani and Nakayama (2010) explain that critical intercultural communication emerged in order to account for power dynamics and historical and contextual factors in intercultural communication studies, which have often been criticized for ignoring such phenomena. This study aims to situate the conversations between the conversation partners, taking into account to the best of my ability as a reflexive researcher the variety of discourses that the partners are part of and the power issues involved. While it will not be possible to incorporate all possible power dynamics in this study, I will try to be inclusive and open to what transpires in the interactions. As was mentioned above, the issues for international students tend to center around the disempowerment that they experience given the discrimination they face; through an integration of a critical intercultural approach, I will be able to explore some of those issues and other power dynamics that emerge in this exploratory study.
Supporting critical intercultural communication, feminist perspectives influence this research as well. As a feminist researcher, I recognize power imbalances and oppression as permeating forces in our lives. Weber (2004) argues that too often cultural difference perspectives do not include a focus on power/privilege and that it is critical to analyze the specific situations that people are in, not only their nationalities. She explains that race, class, gender and sexuality are contextual and socially constructed. It is a mistake to label someone and then categorize them as such. Weber (2004) argues that it is becoming critical to examine privilege, like the social construction of whiteness, alongside looking at oppressed groups, because oppression and subordination go together. It is also critical to take into account both the macro and the micro levels of the expression of these evolving discourses, considering they are both simultaneously expressed. Most people have oppressor and oppressed status in their lives and thus it is important to acknowledge this and incorporate this complexity into an understanding of what is transpiring.
Another feminist whose work supports my theoretical framework of critical intercultural communication and interdiscourse communication is Harding (1991Harding ( , 2004. Harding (2004) discusses her notion of -strong objectivity‖ and argues that starting from women's lives and other marginalized communities will provide a more objective approach to inquiry into human experience and interaction. Harding (2004) refers to some of the concepts in her book, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge (1991) and as a standpoint feminist, she examines how conventional approaches to objectivity are actually not objective at all, given the androcentric biases through which such approaches are created. She suggests that researchers approach research ready to listen and be reflexive, and to avoid imposing notions and models from the outside. Similarly, in Collins' (1990) work on interlocking systems of oppression, she challenges the notion that sharing a common oppressed identity affects all people in the same way. There are multiple overlapping identities that affect people differently.
A Black woman and a White woman experience gender oppression differently.
Similarly, drawing a connection to this study, a language learner from an upper class family will experience language oppression differently than a language learner from a lower class family. Collins (1990) writes, -The significance of seeing race, class and gender as interlocking systems of oppression is that such an oppression fosters a paradigmatic shift of thinking inclusively about other oppressions, such as age, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity‖ (p. 225). Rather than thinking only in terms of the international/domestic student dichotomy, where the international student is in a subordinate position, this study includes other aspects of participants' identities, like race, socioeconomic status and gender, which could potentially influence their levels of power in the interactions with each other. Collins (1990) then goes on to say, -Depending on the context, an individual may be an oppressor, a member of an oppressed group, or simultaneously oppressor and oppressed‖ (225).
Thus, to explore interaction dynamics between domestic and international students in the Conversation Partner Program, I used the discourse approach to intercultural communication of Scollon et al. (2012) along with critical intercultural communication studies (Halualani & Nakayama, 2010) to analyze the interactions and to guide my research focus. Feminist perspectives (Collins, 1990;Harding, 1991Harding, , 2004Weber, 2004) are also woven into my methodology, informing my choices as a researcher.

Conclusion
This review of the literature began with some critical definitions and then explored internationalization efforts and intercultural competence research. Then, there was an examination of what was missing from international student research and finally a description of the theoretical underpinnings of this study.

Introduction
Throughout the process of trying to best address my research questions, collecting data and analyzing it, the exploratory nature of qualitative research has been a journey requiring immense reflection and revision of the original plan along the way.
Blommaert and Jie (2010) sum up the inherently chaotic process of ethnographic data collection and analysis by saying, -Chaos is the normal state of things. It is nothing to worry about. Remember what we set out to do: to describe and analyse complexity, not to simplify a complex social event into neat tables and lines‖ (p. 25). They then go on to explain, however, that the more we understand complex events the less likely we are to experience them as chaotic. In this chapter, I will explain the research questions and the choice of ethnographic method along with participant recruitment, data collection and analysis which all led to a fuller understanding of the students' experiences in this particular Conversation Partner Program.

Research Questions
In order to explore the situation and the interaction between conversation partners in the Conversation Partner Program, to understand what happens when domestic students and Chinese international students interact with one another, the following questions were explored: 1. What transpires in the interactions between conversation partners?

Ethnographic Method Choice
Ethnographic interviewing of eight individual participants and analysis of the interviews and recorded conversations between conversation partners were used to explore the research questions. I chose an ethnographic approach to interviewing and discourse analysis as a way to explore interaction, theoretically framed with a discourse approach to intercultural communication and critical intercultural communication studies. Fitch (2001) discusses ethnography of speaking and explains that at the center of this field is situated language; rather than assuming that language transmits meaning, ethnography of speaking studies language in context, examining its social construction. This contextual lens is more informative because it allows researchers to try to see what is really happening, rather than making assumptions based on expectations of what might happen. In this study, I explore what conversation partners say about their interaction with one another, as well as look at their communication with one another.
Ethnographic interviewing aims to study people's lives from their perspectives, while taking into account the social context (Reinharz, 1992). This particular methodological choice is appropriate for this study because I am looking at students' experiences in the context of the specific situation, taking into account the relative power each individual holds and the specific dynamics of their interaction. As mentioned above, Blommaert and Jie (2010) in their explanation of ethnography explain that it is impossible to remove any research from its context. They discuss how inherently chaotic any situation is prior to contextualizing it. Once more is learned about the context, however, the chaos seems to dissipate. Blommaert

Participants
At the outset of the data collection, all eight participants, four Chinese international students and four domestic students, were chosen through purposive sampling. I explained the opportunity to participate to a group of undergraduate conversation partners at an evening meeting during which students would be meeting their partners for the first time. I needed four Chinese international students and four domestic students, and it happened that in addition to the domestic students present, all international students at this particular meeting were Chinese. The students' professors were also at this meeting and the professors explained that the students could choose participation in my study to get credit for one of their assignments. To show their interest in the study, I had the students' put a star on their sign-in sheet and then we put those papers with stars in a separate pile. Twenty students, twelve international and eight domestic, expressed interest in being in the study and then I took the piles and shuffled them and chose four international students and four domestic students to pair together. At that time, I then had my colleague finish matching the other partners and I took the participants to the computer lab to explain the study, to answer their questions, and to have them sign their consent forms.
(Consent form included in the APPENDIX) I also had them complete the Cultural Intelligence inventory and schedule their first interviews with me.

Data Collection Process
The data collection included two main data sources: interviews and recorded conversations. The schedule of the data collection that occurred over the winter term, December 2012 through February 2013, is presented in Figure 3.1. Week 4 Students Record Conversation Discussing CQ results Week 5 Week 6 Week 7 Round Two Interviews (Member Check, how is experience going?) Week 8 Week 9 Week 10 Round Three Interviews (Member Check, how is experience finishing up?)

Conversation Partners Make Second (and Final Recorded
Conversation (CQ and Experience) During the student recruitment evening, described above, all eight participants took the Cultural Intelligence (CQ) assessment directly after the study was explained to them and they had filled out the consent forms. This assessment experience was used as a discussion topic for the conversation partners and also as a topic for reflection during the interviews.  explains that the majority of intercultural competence experts agree that case studies and interviews are the best way to gauge an individual's competence levels and warns against blind adoption of an assessment tool without thinking about how such a tool is directly connected to the particular goals of a study or program. She also explains that it is critical to include multiple perspectives and methods while coming to conclusions about an individual's intercultural competence. Thus, I did not use CQ to make a conclusion about participants' intercultural abilities, but I used it to facilitate participants' discussion of intercultural issues.
The first data source in the data collection process was ethnographic interviewing. The eight participants were interviewed at the outset of the ten weeklong conversation partner experience, at the midpoint, and then nearing the end of the experience. During the interviews, I built my questions from Spradley's (1979) ethnographic interviewing process of grand tour questions and tried to gain an understanding of each person's experiences; then I tried to confirm the meaning with interviewees by reviewing my understanding with them in follow-up interviews. As soon as possible following each interview, I wrote in an interview journal and described body language and contextual factors that would be imperceptible from the recordings alone. The interviews were initially transcribed using an outside transcription service, and then I reviewed and made modifications to increase the accuracy of the transcriptions. Finally, I listened to the recordings and analyzed them for general meaning in order to guide my questions in the next round of interviews. I have included the interview questions here:  As a way to triangulate the conversation partners' experiences of the interaction and, in Scollon et al.'s (2012) words, provide more -neutral observations‖ I also conducted discourse analysis of two recorded meetings from each of the four pairs as the second data source. During these conversations, the participants discussed their experiences taking the CQ assessment. The recordings of the conversations complement the interviews in that they allow me to get a sense of the students' interactions together from a different perspective. These recordings were made in the fourth week and the tenth week of the program. I gave my recorders to the students and had them record two of their conversations without my being present. Three of the pairs recorded two conversations and one pair recorded three conversations. In Figure 3.3, I have included the questions participants were given in order to guide their discussion of the CQ Assessment. You can talk about any topics you want, but also make sure to take some time to discuss the following questions:  What was your experience taking the Cultural Assessment?
 What do you think about your results?
 Do you agree/disagree with them? Why?
 Specifically, CQ drive: Do you agree with your score? Why/ why not?
 CQ knowledge: Do you agree with your score? Why/ why not?
 CQ strategy: Do you agree with your score? Why/ why not? In ethnography, it is critical that analysis begins with a very close description of the setting and the context (Creswell, 2007). The next chapter, Chapter IV, will do just that in order to provide background on the Conversation Partner Program at this particular university. Thus, given the ethnographic focus of this study, the particular setting and the contextual influences were prioritized in the analysis process.
My goal was to leave myself as open as possible in order to see what emerged from the data. Blommaert and Jie (2010) discuss the complexity of any research and that it is inherently chaotic, especially when working with all of the data at once.
Blommaert and Jie (2010) explain, -People contradict each other, and just when you think you found the key to the whole thing, the whole thing changes again. The plan has to be revised over and over again…‖ (p. 24). I found this to be true in my analysis process and I went down a variety of paths to see whether it was a good fit and then modified my process along the way. My initial plan was to use Cultural Intelligence to frame my analysis of the data, but then after doing a preliminary analysis of interviews and conversations using that frame, I realized that I was trying to force the data to fit into that structure and some of the most interesting points did not align with the framework of Cultural Intelligence. I realized that I needed to return to my original plan of letting the data and specifically the thematic categories emerge from the data.
I listened to and read through the interview data many times, taking into account some initial codes and passages that were particularly noteworthy. Saldana With the conversation data, I followed a similar strategy and listened to it all and read through it many times. Keeping the theoretical frames of the discourse approach to intercultural communication (Scollon et al., 2012) and critical intercultural communication (Halualani & Nakayama, 2010) in mind, I looked at what was happening in the exchange to see if anything seemed to reflect or contradict the chosen models. As I reviewed the transcriptions of the recordings, my goal was to give a -faithful representation of the data‖ (Cameron, 2001, p. 35). I let the discourse analysis process be open and exploratory, but I used Deardorff's (2006)  showed involvement with one another and whether one partner seemed to let the other partner lead or whether they were both engaging actively with one another. In order to explore their involvement, I counted initiations for each partner and then I looked at what types of initiations they were making. This strategy of looking at initiations and then specifying type is something that is done quite frequently in analysis of classroom discourse in order to show the degree to which the students are the teacher is sharing classroom authority with the students. Oyler (1996) discusses her study in which students' types of initiations were coded during an in-class read aloud. She explains that moving away from a teacher initiation and student response model allows for students to assert their authority and knowledge, as well as learn more from each other. Given that I am interested in whether the domestic student controlled and facilitated the whole conversation or whether the international student initiated actively as well, this method of analysis was a useful window into involvement.
Lastly, in terms of analysis of the conversation data, to complement the initiation analysis, I was also looking at what each partner says in the interaction to show that that he/she is the leader or that he/she is deferring to his/her partner in the interaction.

Limitations
One strength of this ethnographic study is that it is open and exploratory, taking into account a wide variety of possibilities, truly listening to what the participants bring to the interactions and interviews. That being said, this open approach can be viewed as a limitation as well, given that any of the themes that emerge would be worthy of further, more in-depth analysis and focus. Thus, this study and the findings below could lead to a variety of other questions that would be interesting to explore in greater depth.
Another strong point of this study is just how contextual the data are; the data are located in a specific context and that context is described and explained below.
However, since the data are so connected to the specific context and there are only eight participants in this study, the findings from this study are not necessarily applicable to other contexts where the program and students have different characteristics and experiences.
Lastly, language emerges as a limitation in this study. All interviews and conversations were in English and the Chinese participants are all in the process of learning English. While they are taking Advanced ESL Classes, they are still not entirely fluent and one could imagine that they might have opened up more or contributed differently if the interviews had been conducted in their native languages.
It would be useful in a future study to explore this question and ask the same questions in their native languages. There also were some language miscommunications both in the interviews and during the conversations. Some of those could have been avoided with translation or an interviewer who was fluent in the participants' languages, Mandarin and Cantonese.

Conclusion
Thus, through a close exploration of the interviews and conversations, the data led me to answer my research questions, always keeping my theoretical frameworks in mind. An exploratory ethnographic study was the best fit for this study as listening to the participants and bringing their contextualized experiences to the forefront was critical.

Introduction
In qualitative research, particularly ethnographic research, understanding the specific context of a study is a critical step in analysis and a key to understanding the data. Paying particular attention to the context allows one to make sense of what is going on and the specific nature of it. In this discussion of the context, I describe the setting of the university, as well as the specific program, the participants, and the setting for the conversations and interviews.

Private University in the Northeast
The setting for this study is a private university in the Northeast where there has been an increasing enrollment of international students. The majority of the Chinese international students who attend this institution, and who are a focus of this study, have high financial resources. According to a World Education Services (2012) report, over 60% of all Chinese international students studying in the United States have high financial resources. Additionally, 85% of affluent Chinese plan to send their children overseas for educational purposes. As for the domestic students, according to -U.S. News and World Report‖ (2013) professors are required integrate the program into their courses and guide participants to explore various topics and learn from cultural differences and similarities. They do this by giving various assignments to their students, asking them to write or give presentations on their discoveries from conversations with their conversation partners.
Additionally, on a weekly basis, students turn in summary reports documenting what has been learned from their partners and how the conversations are going overall. The students receive grades on these reports and then these grades are reflected in their final grade for the course. There is the assumption that through interaction in English outside of class their communicative English will improve and they will be increasing their fluency which is one of the objectives of the course.
The domestic students' professors, on the other hand, are not required by the university to participate in this program and instead they volunteer to participate in the program. The ESL Department recruits faculty to offer the Conversation Partner Program to their students. Most of the professors who volunteer to offer the program to their students teach Public Speaking courses, but some teach History and Sociology courses. The professors offering the Conversation Partner Program to their students integrate the experience into their courses in a variety of different ways. The domestic students' professor in this study is a history professor; he has been a consistent strong supporter of the Conversation Partner Program and was willing to offer the option of participating in this study to his students.
The domestic students participating in this project are volunteers. In the case of this study, this option to work with international students on a weekly basis was one of the two options that the history professor presented to the class. He gave students the option of writing a paper about various historical sites or of teaching the international language learners through this teaching project. The four domestic students in this study all chose the teaching project on the history of the local area.
Essentially, the domestic students were required to research various sites and then they were supposed to accompany their international student partners to the sites and when they were visiting the sites, they were supposed to then teach the international students about the various places. In the case of the students who signed up for this study, however, because they were engaged in the interviews with me, they did not complete their class assignment to take the students to all the professor's assigned sites. This was not brought to my attention until the end of the term and I am not sure about the reasons why they did not do their project. I do wonder if the professor was more lenient with students on their class requirements because he knew that I was requiring more time from his students for their participation in this study. The students also did not have to write the reflection paper that would have been required of students had they chosen to research various historical sites and not participate in the Conversation Partner Program.
Similarly, the international students mentioned to me that their ESL professor very rarely engaged with them about their conversation partner experience and did not assign any specific tasks to them. While ESL professors are expected to actively structure the learning in this program, in reality, the extent of professor involvement varies from professor to professor; some remain very hands off and others get quite involved trying to assess the learning that is going on for students. Thus, for both the international and domestic students, the relationship between international and domestic students was unstructured, without the reflection components that often accompany the conversation partner experience.
Neither of the professors provided the participants with a detailed structure for their conversations; the only structure that participants followed was my assignment to discuss their results on the Cultural Intelligence (CQ) inventory. As was mentioned in Chapter III, the methodology chapter, this CQ inventory was a means to get the students talking specifically about interaction across cultures. The hope is that this exploration of an unmonitored, unstructured experience will provide insight into how to advise faculty and staff in program development and structure; in other words, knowing what happens when there is a lack of structure should provide a starting point for the development of structure.

Description of Participants
There were eight participants in the study. Four of the participants were from China and four of them were from the United States. All four domestic students were female, while two of the international students were female and two were male.
Below is an overview of the pairs, including who was in each pair and whether they were domestic or international students. In the analysis chapters that follow, some of the specific characteristics of these students will be explained in further detail, referencing what they said in interviews and conversations. All names have been changed. As the international students all used their English names in their interactions with me, I have given them English names in this study. Derek also was not that interested in getting to know an American student at the outset of the Conversation Partner Program, but then he expressed interest in continuing to get to know Violet after he had met with her. Like the most of the other international and domestic students, he expressed some prejudiced views. For example, he talked about how he was scared of black people but not Violet because she was a student at the school.
-Yeah just have the feeling, and they talk different they talk like gangs‖ (Interview 3, lines 701-709).

Setting for Interviews and Conversations
Interviews I conducted three interviews with each participant for a total of twenty-four interviews. Twenty-three of the twenty-four interviews were conducted in my second floor office which is space shared with a colleague, but the colleague was never present during the interviews. The office is located in one of the main classroom buildings on campus. There is a large window overlooking the street where students are always walking by. There are a couple computers in the office. My desk is facing the window and there is ample space for at least two chairs behind the desk, so we both sat next to each other behind the desk. I always provided snacks and drinks to participants as a way to help make it more likely that they would feel comfortable and would want to come back. One time I emailed all the participants before their interview appointments and took sandwich orders. I was pleasantly surprised that all students put in a specific order for a sandwich and then came on time to their appointments.
I offered to meet students in other locations, but it seemed that meeting in the office was most convenient for participants because it is close to where the majority of their classes were held. I was also able to keep the door closed with very few interruptions during the interviews. The one exception was the time I met Derek, one of the international students, at a local restaurant at his request; it was really difficult to transcribe that recording because the music was playing so loudly in the background. I also felt he was distracted by the people coming and going around us.
Thus, it ended up that a quiet space was better in that we could hear one another and I could also hear the recording on playback and we were not distracted during the actual interview.

Conversations
Most of the recorded conversations of student pairs took place in Starbucks. I had given recorders to the students and told them to record a conversation and return the recorder to me. I did this once at the beginning of the term and a second time near the end. Aside from these instructions, the students had the freedom to choose the location of their conversations and most (6 of 9), with the exception of three conversations, ended up being in the same downtown Starbucks. The downtown Starbucks is located close to one of the main classroom buildings. There is a constant flow of students, faculty and staff in and out of the Starbucks, and often a line out the door. The conversations ranged in time from about twenty minutes to an hour and fifteen minutes.
The three conversations that did not take place in Starbucks were Violet and Derek's two conversations and Becky and Kate's third conversation. Both of Violet and Derek's conversations took place as they were walking around the downtown area. In the first one they walked to the State House and then around the nearby mall and during the second conversation, they took the bus to a nearby street with a lot of stores and restaurants and talked as they walked around there. Becky and Kate's third conversation took place in Becky's dorm room.

Conclusion
Thus, in this chapter, the setting of the university and the Conversation Partner Program, along with a description of the participations and the setting for their conversations and interviews were discussed. In ethnographic research, the meaning of activities and knowledge are situated in a context and it is impossible to decontextualize the activities or the knowledge. Blommaert and Jie (2010) discuss the paramount importance of context in ethnography and that the only way to truly understand a situation is through examining the context concurrently. This chapter has aimed to explain some of the contextual elements involved in this study and there will be references back to them throughout the other chapters.

Introduction
The eight participants, four domestic students, and four international students were each interviewed three times, bringing the interview data set to a total of twentyfour interviews. The tables below show month and week of term, length and location for each interview.  When the goal of interviewing is -access to people's ideas, thoughts, and memories in their own words rather than in the words of the researcher,‖ feminists argue that it is necessary for the interviewers to self-disclose information about themselves and strive to form relationships with their interviewees (Reinharz, 1992, p. 19). Reinharz (1992) also references Oakley's (1981) insights about the egalitarianism essential to the feminist approach to interviewing. Reinharz (1992)  During these conversational interviews, we covered topics such as background information, expectations for the program, perceptions of their partners, challenges in the program, topics discussed and culture learning. To delve more specifically into intercultural interaction and participants' comments about it, I also asked questions about the Cultural Intelligence assessment. As was mentioned above, this part of the interviews ended up being less significant in this study, as I felt that the participants were able to discuss their views on intercultural interaction without the outside model as a guide.
I modified and adapted the coding process along the way to better fit the data that were emerging, the research questions and the theoretical frameworks. Much of what the students had to say during the interviews fit within the five thematic areas of motivation, expectations, comments about self, comments about other and challenges.
Arriving at these themes required repeated inspection of the transcripts. It was a learning process and not always smooth, given the number of themes and directions that the data took me initially. For example, I was initially planning to use the Cultural Intelligence framework for my analysis, so I coded my data using its categories. I found in the process that it was forcing the data into categories that did not always make sense given what the participants said during interviews. I decided to abandon that framework as a way to structure my analysis because I wanted to let my participants' comments guide the direction of my analysis.
Within each thematic category, the analysis focused on power dynamics involved in the interaction, reflecting the critical intercultural communication theoretical framework (Halualani & Nakayama, 2010) and Scollon et al.'s (2012) discourse approach to intercultural communication. According to Halualani and Nakayama (2010) and Scollon et al. (2012) all intercultural communication involves uneven power dynamics, across various dimensions. For example, even though an international student language learner might be in a less powerful position as compared to a domestic student in regard to language, that same international student may be in a more powerful position due to his/her socioeconomic status. In addition to issues of power, however, other comments that the students emphasized are included, considering in this exploratory, emergent design listening to the participants and letting them guide the focus of the research is of critical importance to this study.

Motivation
The first theme that emerged from the interview data is the students'  (Vollhardt, 2010) and have increased intercultural competence (Jon, 2013). Violet, the African-American Caribbean student with the most intercultural experience, in addition to wanting to build her resume through this experience, was the only student who talked about her empathetic desire to welcome the international students into the community; she also shared that she was genuinely curious about learning from the international students' experiences. The other students, showing mainly self-interest as motivation for participation in this program, were not likely to develop intercultural competence through this experience. As Deardorff's (2006) model demonstrates, curiosity and openness are necessary for intercultural competence development; based on the interview data, these attitudes seemed to be lacking and instead the students have more self-focused interest in participation in the program.

Expectation
The second theme that emerged from the data was students' expectations for what was going to happen prior to meeting with one another. Derek said, -I would like to meet her again. It was like, you know, it's okay for me.
Like it's nothing special or anything. Like I enjoyed the talk and conversing. I like to talk to her. Like we are similar‖ (Interview 2, lines 481-485). While Kate did not say that interaction across cultures was going to be easy, she did talk about how she felt that she and Becky were similar, and that they had many topics to discuss. Kate said, -I think, for me, I don't think we more really, really lot different because I think the age like me. We just have some same concepts so…‖ (Interview 1, lines 280-281).
The expectations of both the domestic and the international students that this experience would be easy shows, according to Deardorff's (2006) (2010) explain is not an equal exchange of ideas between people engaged in an interaction. There is always a power dynamic at play and Violet's questioning how she would be perceived due to her race demonstrates this; when she enters any interaction, she has very different expectations, as compared to the White domestic students, due to her experience having encountered racism in the past. Jon (2012) in his study examining power dynamics between Korean students and international students studying abroad in Korea explained that this area of power dynamics in international domestic-student relationships is an under researched area. In this study, Violet's experience as a Black woman, approaching the interaction with more hesitancy and fear about how she would be received reflects the importance of including issues of race into the international student literature and much more exploration into this topic is needed.

Comments about Self and Comments about Other
The participants also discussed the ways that they saw their own roles in the communication and the ways they viewed their partners' roles in the communication.

Comments about Self
In the actual interaction, all four domestic students talked about how they saw themselves as having high intercultural ability as well as an obligation to lead and guide the conversation. As will be seen in the conversation data, to be described in All four of the domestic students saw themselves as being the leaders, obligated to lead; they also claimed that they demonstrated high intercultural ability.
Violet, once again, was the only one who expressed more awareness about stereotypes and the need for reflection on one's own behavior in intercultural interaction. In terms of how they perceived themselves, the four international students, In addition to talking about international students as being quiet and not likely to share in their interactions with them, domestic students also talked about international students in terms of their socioeconomic status. As referenced in Chapter IV, many international students do come to campus with more than adequate funds for their time abroad, allowing them to not only pay for their education, but also travel around the United States. Three of the domestic students mentioned that they perceived their international student partners to have a lot of money. Valerie talked in an interview about a comment that she made during one of her conversations with George, -I noticed that, you know, you guys have the best cars around‖ (Interview, lines 831-834). Debbie also made a comment about the car that her conversation partner's friend drives; she said, -He has the most expensive car. It's like the nicest car I've ever seen‖ (Interview 2, lines 1000-1001). Violet also discussed the socioeconomic status of the international students; she said, Of course you know, I'm always wanting more money. I remember I was coming out of the library and I saw this really nice car and I just kind of looked at it. I'm like I guarantee you an Asian is going to come out of that car. And sure enough, an Asian comes out. (Interview 3, lines 1398-1408).
Most Chinese international students do come to United States' higher education campuses with the financial resources necessary to function well in higher education (World Education Services 2012 Report). This provides a contrast to some of the domestic students, a few of whom are represented in this study, who have to hold jobs and live at home in order to afford their education. This is important in that it shows, from a critical intercultural communication perspective, how students do not perceive themselves in completely cultural terms and instead, power-laden dimensions, such as socioeconomic status, influence how students view and approach one another. In Jon's (2012) study of power dynamics between international and domestic students in a Korean context, he found that the economic power of students' home countries played a role in how students perceived each other and the relative amount of power that they were able to assert.
Two students, Valerie and Becky, both mentioned gender in regard to their international student partners. Valerie says that if George had been a woman she thought they would have had more to talk about and Becky said that she felt that she had a lot to talk about with Kate because they were both women. When asked who her ideal conversation partner would be, Valerie replied -Um it would be a girl‖ (Interview 3, line 2661) and she attributed this to the fact that she would have more to talk about with a female. Similar to the point about socioeconomic status, this demonstrates that students saw one another not only in regard to their cultures, but also, sometimes more significantly in their minds, in regard to their genders and other parts of their identities that are not related to their country of origin (Jon, 2012 These expressions of prejudice showed how the international students position themselves in the United States' context; while the literature suggests they are disempowered in language and in other areas with the American students (Hsieh, 2007;Min-Hua, 2006), these expressions of prejudice show that they are also expressing narrow views, asserting their views in this context. Hsieh (2007) and Min-Hua (2006) explain that international students are often voiceless in their interactions in the United States; these expressions of prejudice contradict that notion, showing that they are expressing dominant views. Gresham and Clayton (2011) found that the challenges that came about in a Community Connections program included racist attitudes of international students toward other international students on campus.
Similar to the female domestic students, the two male international students, Derek and George, also said that they would have preferred male partners because they would have had more to talk about. Thus, perception of what characteristics accompany each gender intervened into the conversation partner experience; rather than seeing this as a purely cultural exchange of ideas, students thought in terms of gender, race, socioeconomic status and other constructs they already had well-defined beliefs about. As with the domestic students, gender came up for the international students and both of the males thought that they would have had more to say with a male partner. This is consistent with what was said above about the role of other aspects of identity, like race and socioeconomic status, which are integrated into students' comments about intercultural communication. Scollon et al. (2012) discuss the notion that national identity is not necessarily going to be the most salient difference between people interacting across differences and it is important to note that other parts of their identity might be more significant depending on the situation. (2009) discuss the importance of moving away from national identity as the most critical difference in intercultural communication, as it might not be the difference having the most influence on the interaction at a particular time.

Challenges
All four domestic students mentioned language as being the main challenge in communication and, other than that, they felt that the interaction was easy. Becky claimed the conversation would get much easier once they were in the middle of it, but the only challenge was the language barrier; she said, -And by the time like we got to the middle of the conversation, she was starting to like interject more and like ask me

Conclusion
Through rereading and listening to the interviews multiple times, the themes of motivation, expectations, comments about self, comments about other and challenges emerged across all interviews. There were some power-laden dynamics, like race, socioeconomic status and gender, that emerged and these will be discussed and reflected upon even further in Chapter VII. In addition, given the exploratory emergent nature of this design, comments that were emphasized by students are highlighted in this chapter and quotations were selected to reflect what the students actually said. These participants' generalizations provide one set of views into what was happening and analysis of the conversations themselves presents another perspective into the conversation partner experience.

Introduction
Complementing the interview data, the conversational data collected for this study are the more -neutral observations‖ required in an ethnographic study (Scollon et al., 2012). As mentioned previously, Scollon et al. (2012)  be considered relatively more neutral as compared to the reported experiences of participants and interpretations made by me, the researcher.
As described in Chapter III, audio recorders were distributed to each of the four pairs and the students were requested to record two of their conversations. One of the four pairs, Becky and Kate, recorded three conversations, bringing the conversation data set to a total of nine conversations. Here is a table of the month and week of term, length and location for each conversation. Similar to the interview analysis process, I listened to these conversations and read the transcripts multiple times. I considered several pathways for analysis before I chose the final codes. For example, as with the interview data, I considered using the Cultural Intelligence framework to guide my analysis of the conversations, but then I decided that it limited this exploratory study to bring in such a specific framework.
Maintaining openness and listening to what participants brought to the study were goals of mine and forcing the data into the Cultural Intelligence framework seemed to contradict those goals.
Finally, after considering various possibilities for analysis, I chose to explore intercultural competence in action and involvement in the interaction, explained in depth below. In this chapter, first I will review who the pairs are and a little bit about what they did and talked about; then I will explain the two main themes of intercultural competence in action and involvement in the interaction that emerged from the conversation data, supported by students' comments and the theoretical frames of this study. Finally, I will go on to explain the conversation charts I created and the features of the charts that are particularly interesting according to the theoretical frameworks of this study and the discoveries from the interview data. This is an exploration into an area where there has not been much research and given the open-ended nature of this study, much of what is said regarding the conversation chart beyond the average utterances per turn and the initiation counts is quite speculative and more research needs to be conducted to examine some of the speculative claims made.

Relationships between Conversation Partners at Program Completion
Prior to an explanation of the themes of intercultural competence in action and involvement in the interaction, I present an overview of the conversation partner relationships, emphasizing the nature of their relationships at the end of the program.
In the sections that follow, there are reflections on some of the discourse features of their communication with one another so it is helpful to first remind the reader of the unique dynamics between each pair. Contextual dynamics, specific to each pair, including individual circumstances, topics discussed and gender, undoubtedly influenced each pair's communication. These dynamics will be referenced during the analysis of conversations.
Valerie, domestic student, and George, international student, met only four of the expected ten meetings. Sickness and schedule challenges prevented them from meeting as often as they planned to. During their fourth and final meeting, Valerie and George met in the library. During this visit, George, the Chinese student, convinced Valerie to sign his form for more times than they actually had met because he wanted to get a better grade on the project. Valerie agreed to do this. Over the course of their four meetings with one another, they did not learn much from one another about each other's countries and mostly focused on George's breakup with his girlfriend and things that George and Valerie were planning to buy. Valerie explained that she felt as though she was George's counselor and that she thought that he seemed so sad all the time and George expressed a lack of interest in spending time or getting to know Valerie, or any Americans.
Becky, domestic student, and Kate, international student, met weekly over the course of the ten weeks. They ended their relationship on a difficult note, as Becky was very frustrated with Kate for her having been late to so many of their meetings.
When they first started meeting, Becky said in her first interview that they would end Debbie, domestic student, and Isabel, international student, also met weekly over the ten weeks. While they both spoke positively about their experiences communicating with one another, they also shared that they had communication challenges. Isabel said that she wanted and tried to share with Debbie, but she did not feel as though Debbie was interested in learning about her. Debbie expressed that she felt a lot of pressure to lead the conversation and thought that Isabel did not seem to be sharing a lot with her. At the end of the communication, neither one claimed to have learned anything meaningful about the partner's country or culture.
Violet, domestic student, and Derek, international student, met weekly over the ten weeks. They often went on walks during their meetings together and this talking while walking definitely influenced their communication in that they were often talking about what was around them. Violet was often acting as a tour guide, showing Derek around the city and sharing stories about local businesses. Initially, Derek was not interested in getting to know Violet, but then over time, he expressed an interest in getting to know her and felt as though he had learned a lot from her by the end. Violet was initially apprehensive about how Derek would react to her; she feared that he might react negatively to her as a Black person. Following that, however, the pair did end up getting along quite well and definitely talked more deeply about topics, such as cultural and linguistic differences, than the other three pairs.

Intercultural Competence in Action and Involvement in the Interaction
Three of the pairs, as is evident from the interview data summarized below, showed in their interactions with one another that they were not likely to develop intercultural competence and all eight partners showed involvement in the interaction and claimed expertise at various points.

Intercultural Competence in Action
During the interviews, both domestic and international students did not seem to express curiosity about communication across cultures, a necessary attitude for intercultural competence to develop (Deardorff, 2006;Bennett, 2009 Thus, from the interview data, it seemed that the domestic and international students, with the exception of Violet, at times, were not exhibiting evidence that they were likely to develop intercultural competence in their interactions with one another.
These conclusions from the interview data were based on students' comments about their experiences alone and thus, an exploration of the conversation data helps to triangulate those student comments and provide a different analysis angle into what was happening in regard to intercultural competence in the interactions.  . From the conversational data, I identified three discursive features that seem relevant: assumptions, evaluative comments, and lack of follow-up. Identifying these features involved reading through and listening to the conversations multiple times and taking notes on instances where the partners made comments showing they were trying to see from the other person's perspective and on instances where the conversation partners did not seem to be seeing from their partner's perspective. These three discursive features will be defined and explained here along with examples from students' comments in their interactions with one another. Following a discussion of the discursive features of these interactions, Violet and Derek's conversations will be further explored, given that they seemed to be characterized by more empathy and willingness to learn.

Assumptions.
The first area in this theme of seeing from the other perspective is making assumptions. As mentioned previously, Bennett (2009)  In this situation, it seemed that George was making the assumption that he got it and it seemed that he was trying to agree with Valerie without fully knowing what her perspective was on the situation. This example is also an example of the next category, the tendency for students to make evaluative comments prior to having a full understanding of what is being said; George made an evaluative comment, -That's boring‖, before knowing what Valerie's interpretation of the situation was.

Evaluative comments.
There are a variety of instances of the tendency to make evaluative comments showing agreement, disagreement or approval without a full understanding of what is being explained. This is another discursive feature, like assumptions, which I used to determine whether the partners were suspending assumptions in order to exhibit curiosity. As mentioned above, this suspension of judgment is characterized by questions and comments to learn more, not quick evaluative comments. Thus, as I noticed students making evaluative comments before having a full understanding of what their partners were saying, I identified this discursive feature as another feature that could be associated with the lack of development of intercultural competence.
For example, the following transcript section is from Debbie and Isabel's interaction.
Debbie: So they must have big classrooms? Before knowing what Debbie thought about living at home with her parents she made the assumption that it was nice for Debbie possibly because that was how she would feel in the situation.
These quick evaluative comments could also be a way to keep the conversation moving forward and to fill the conversation space. The domestic students talked in the interviews about how they felt they were responsible to keep the conversation going.
They also could be trying to be polite by not asking too many questions. The international students could also be making these evaluative comments for the same reasons as the domestic students or, since they are in the process of learning language, they could be making these evaluative comments because they were something that they knew how to say and they wanted to show that they were involved in the interaction. Asking questions that dig deeper into a topic is a skill that in some situations requires more skillful manipulation of language.

Lack of follow up.
In addition to the self-focused assumptions and the evaluative comments, a third discursive feature that seems relevant to the development of intercultural Debbie also interpreted Isabel's parents wanting her to go back home to be positive, even though it is not clear this was Isabel's perspective.
Through a close analysis of the conversation partner transcripts, it appeared that overall both partners did not seem to be really trying to see from their partner's perspective during the conversations. While there were some isolated instances where the students were trying to see from their partner's perspective, the points in the conversation where they were not doing so were dominant as I read through the transcripts multiple times. Research has shown that intercultural competence development has to be actively facilitated, including training, ongoing reflection, meaningful interaction and critical assessment of specific measurable objectives (Bennett, 2009). However, these students had not been given training or reflection assignments.
This study is unique in allowing for a close exploration of some specific discursive features related to intercultural competence. For each of these areas, while both domestic and international students are engaging in this behavior, it was discovered as examples were uncovered that there were more instances of this happening from domestic students. One can speculate that this is because, as has been mentioned previously, domestic students were more comfortable speaking in English and at the same the same, they felt responsible to keep the conversations afloat, seeing themselves, as was expressed in the interviews, as the leaders or topic creators in the interaction. More data would be required to confirm these speculations, but at this point it is worth noting that in most conversations, in a variety of instances, both partners were not effectively expressing inquisitiveness about their partner, even if there were relatively more examples of this occurring for domestic students. It is critical to note that there were language miscommunications throughout these conversations and I will continually refer to the possibility that language challenges intervened into each partner's opportunity to see from another person's perspective.

Violet and Derek's conversation: Heightened empathy and desire to learn.
In Violet and Derek's conversations, however, relatively speaking, there was a heightened willingness to try to empathize and learn from other perspectives. Mostly, this came from Violet, but there were some moments when Derek also showed signs of being engaged with more of an empathetic approach to interaction. Violet, like the other students, still made a lot of new topic points, which seemed to be unrelated to previous points, and she also made evaluative comments and assumptions in her communication with her partner. What distinguished her from the others, however, is the fact that she addressed some more complex intercultural issues and she showed that she was trying to understand her partner's experiences as an international student in the United States. Violet discussed her knowledge of the complexity of the Chinese characters and expressed humbly that she might have been mistaken and might have been mixing up her information.
Violet: It's a lot of history.
Derek: Yes. Because I, 5,000 years, Yeah. She then went on to try to delve a little deeper, as compared to the other pairs, into cultural exchange, and this showed that she was expressing willingness to tackle these topics in a way that the others did not try to do.

Violet: When it comes to
Derek: Yeah. I just chose one answer. Derek: So, so, like how many situations do we need to? (Conversation 2, p. 7)

Violet
In the above example, it seems that Violet is trying to express herself and then Derek quickly changed the topic back to a question he had about how many situations they needed to accomplish. I am not sure what Derek was referring to, but it seems that he was not following up on what Violet said and instead changed the topic. The conversation between Derek and Violet definitely had more depth compared to the other conversations that remained focused on day-to-day plans, preferences and what they saw around them. This next example is an example of a point in the exchange where they talked about language, showing that Violet tried to guide the conversation definitely into some deeper cultural topics.
Derek: They switch the word.

Violet: Yeah. Just the two letters are switched. But that, it's the exact same meaning. It's the same word. And that's what makes it easy to learn
some languages if, like, the words are like that. There's a name for words like that when it doesn't change from language to language. Like it's spelled the same. There's a word for it. I just cannot remember the word.
And it's going to bother me all day now.
Derek: You're not going to get some lunch? (Conversation 2, p. 28) Once again, Derek did not follow up with Violet's efforts to bring more depth the conversation. I wondered whether this was a language comprehension issue or whether he was not that interested in what Violet was saying. While there definitely seemed to be more of the in-depth communication and cultural exchange coming from Violet, Derek did at times seem to also try to delve a little more deeply into topics and engage on an empathetic level with Violet.
Derek talked about how the Chinese government did not support his language, Cantonese.
Derek shared that his regional culture was not supported by the government.
Derek: Yeah. Near Hong Kong people speak Cantonese.
Violet: Okay. Cool. Yeah. Those are probably the only two I've heard of.
Derek: Yeah. This, too, is, like, a Chinese, the government. They vote for, like which one is the public language now they have a lot of language.
And then they, like, the final. And they only have Cantonese and Violet: Oh Okay. See, I didn't even know they even voted for the national language.
More exploration and understanding of Derek's identity and Chinese culture is needed to understand his comments here, but I think that he is trying to express frustration with the way that Cantonese speakers are treated in China. I also wonder whether Thus, there were some recurring features of the communication that showed in many different instances the students did not use follow-ups or other questions to see from each other's perspectives. During the interviews, they indicated that they were confident in their intercultural communication skills and how such exchanges were easy; the students also did not express curiosity in learning from one another. Violet, the student with more intercultural experience and an experience of having been the -other‖ in a variety of situations, seemed to be empathetic and able to delve deeper into topics than the other students. When thinking about intercultural communication, and putting college students in pairs or groups together without structured training, learning and reflection, it is important not to assume that they are going to be able to communicate with one another and naturally develop intercultural competence, because the discourse of these students showed, overall, that they do not seem to be listening for and learning from other perspectives. Additionally, it is critical to note that challenges with language differences are always influencing the communication between native and non-native speakers and could be partly responsible for some of these communication challenges.

Involvement in the Interaction
A second theme that will be examined in this analysis of the conversation data is involvement in the interaction. During the interviews, the international student participants discussed that they felt they were engaging actively in the interaction, asking questions and sharing their ideas with their partners. All four of the domestic students expressed that they felt the international students were not actively engaged in the interaction so that leading the conversations was up to them. Violet was the only student who expressed that Derek started to be more engaged in the conversation over time, but she still felt as though she had to be the conversation leader. Debbie explained that she felt like they would just sit there if she did not take the initiative in the conversation. She stated, -Because if I didn't or whatever, it's kind of like we're just sitting there, literally‖ (Interview 2, line 731). Furthermore, in the literature, there are some studies that suggest international students are silenced in their communication with domestic students and that they disengage from the communication due to language challenges, discrimination and also a cultural preference for adherence to authority in a traditional classroom setting over group work learning environments (Hsieh, 2007;Leki, 2001;Min-Hua, 2006). Thus, given that domestic and international students seemed to have very different perspectives on their engagement in the interaction, and that the literature speaks to a silencing of international students, an exploration of what was actually happening in the interaction in terms of involvement was worthwhile.  Above is the conversation chart representing some of what was found in the conversations between conversation partners. In each section that follows, I will explain the codes represented in this chart and the other charts below and then offer some general comments about the domestic and international students' involvement in their conversations with one another and share some more speculative comments about the types of questions the domestic students and international students were asking. Finally, further analysis into non-question initiations, initiations during which students were making comments and adding new information as opposed to asking questions, was conducted and those codes and comments about them are presented below.
Turn lengths.
The first column in Figure 6.2 lists the average turn lengths, determined by averaging the utterances per turn for each participant per conversation. The domestic students have consistently longer average turn lengths. Other than Debbie and Isabel's conversations and the first of Valerie and George, the average turn lengths are twice as long for domestic students compared to international students. For Debbie and Isabel, and the first conversation of Valerie and George, the domestic student turn lengths are still longer by .5-1 utterance. One can speculate that the longer turn lengths are related to English language fluency and the domestic students' feelings of leadership and responsibility to continue the conversation. It would be interesting to explore these points further to examine exactly what is taking place.
Given their longer turn lengths, one could speculate that they were fearful of silence that might have come if they stopped talking after a shorter comment. Holmes (2005) discusses the differences between western and eastern communication styles, in particular focusing on students from New Zealand and China. In discussing Chinese students, he notes that silence is respectful and choosing one's words wisely and relying on context in a high-context manner, or relying more on nonverbal communication and context over explicit verbal communication, is often the Chinese way of communicating effectively. Students from New Zealand, like other students from many western countries, communicate in a low-context manner and rely more on explaining every detail and not expecting context to explain what is being exchanged.
There is the expectation in western, individualist countries that being highly verbal is more appropriate and is often more advantaged in that context. Holmes (2005) also mentions language challenges as one of the reasons that students may be hesitant and fearful of speaking in interaction with one another; students have expressed nervousness about how they will be received if they are struggling with the language.
This is one possible explanation as to why domestic turn lengths are longer, but more investigation into what was actually happening as they engaged in these longer turn lengths might illuminate this point.

Initiations.
The second column in the chart presents the number of initiations. Initiations are defined as the questions and statements in which students initiate or begin a new or related point. It was determined that using initiations to explore involvement was a way to look closely at what was actually happening on a discourse level in the conversations. In her study of first-graders' initiations during in-class read-aloud time, Oyler (1996) noted that students who initiate more are asserting their authority and knowledge. The traditional model is the IRE model (teacher initiates, students responds and teacher evaluates) and Oyler (1996) examines first graders who are breaking out of this traditional model and initiating more, exploring what they do when they initiate and how they go about claiming expertise (Mehan, 1979). Clearly, the context in this study is quite different than Oyler's (1996) study; she was working with young children in the first grade and I am exploring the interactions and engagement of undergraduate students in higher education.
Despite the different contexts, this study has parallels to Oyler's (1996) study in that it is also looking at the types of initiations made by students in order to explore how they go about engaging with one another and sharing authority. In the case of the conversation partners, when the students initiate and bring in a new idea or topic, whether the topics are related to a previous topic or completely new, they are involving themselves in the interaction. Despite the domestic students' longer turns, in most cases, the international students initiated almost as much as the domestic students. In seven of the nine conversations, international students initiated 42% -49% of total initiations. In two of the nine conversations, international students initiated 30 % and 37% of total initiations. Valerie and George's first conversation was the one that had only 30% of the initiations and in this conversation, Valerie, the domestic student, gave George, the international student, advice about his relationship and kept returning to giving relationship advice, explained in more depth below; this focus on her acting as his counselor put her in a role where she was making more initiations and he was just following her lead. In Becky and Kate's third conversation during which Kate, the international student, had 37% of the initiations, Becky, the domestic student, was frustrated with Kate's lateness and expressed that to her. Then, Becky proceeded to ask Kate many questions and moved on quickly to new topics and follow up topics without giving Becky much time to respond. Becky expressed her frustration to me in an interview and explained that she felt hat Kate was nervous to communicate with her in that conversation. Despite the exceptions, in most conversations, the international students were showing that they were actively engaged and initiating almost as much, defined as at least 42% of the total initiations, as the domestic students.

Question initiations.
After looking at numbers of initiations, I looked closely at question initiations to see if there were any patterns that emerged. This was a strategy to open the conversation data up even more and look more closely at what was happening between the partners. I chose question initiations to code first as a way to limit my focus and look only at a subset of the initiations to get a sense of what was taking place. Beyond simply knowing that the international students were initiating almost as much as the domestic students, I speculated that coding for what types of initiations they were engaged in could provide closer attention into their participation. In order to explore their involvement, I had counted initiations for each partner and then I looked at what types of question initiations they were making. This strategy of looking at initiations and then specifying their type is done quite frequently in analysis of classroom discourse in order to show the degree to which the students are sharing classroom authority with the teacher. Oyler (1996) discusses her study in which students' types of initiations were coded during an in-class read aloud. She explains that moving away from a teacher-initiation and student-response model allows for students to assert their authority and knowledge, as well as learn more from each other.  Through looking at the two columns shown above in Figure 6.3, one can see that, for the most part, the domestic students ask more new topic questions and follow up questions than the international students. This could be because the domestic students were more comfortable in English and thus were able to form their questions with more ease as compared to the international students who were learning how to construct questions. It also could be because the domestic students found the international students challenging to understand and thus would move on to a new topic or a quick follow up question more than the international students.
That being said, in the three last conversations on the chart the international students ask more new topic questions than the domestic students; international students ask 75% -88% of the questions. Given that in the last three conversations the international students are males, one may wonder whether gender plays a role in their new topic question generation. This again reflects the theoretical framework of critical intercultural communication in that, as was mentioned earlier, there are other issues that intersect and interact with national culture issues in regard to intercultural communication. Tannen (1990) explores the role of gender in communication and explains that we are socialized to speak in certain ways depending on our gender roles.
For example, she explains that sixth grade boys, while uncomfortable just sitting and talking in groups, were much more apt to change topics abruptly, as compared to the sixth grade girls. Tannen (1990) also explains that in conversations between women and men, women were more likely to -follow the style of the men alone‖ (p. 236) and put their own topics and ways of talking aside. Tannen (1990) Tannen (2001) further explains this concept of the contextual nature of dominance. She says, -Thus, a strategy that seems, or is intended to dominate, may in another context or in the mouth of another speaker be intended or used to establish connection‖ (p. 150). Thus, the men asking more new topic questions than the women in this study does not necessarily show that the men are dominating in the interaction. The role gender is playing in the conversation partners' interactions needs much more investigation, but it is important to note that based on these initiation of new topic questions, it might be influencing the intercultural interaction.
However, in the first conversation between George and Valerie, Valerie, the domestic student, has a lot more new topic questions (19) as compared to George's lack of new topic questions (0). That conversation between Valerie and George was unique, however, considering it was the one in which Valerie was giving George relationship advice, and George, having just had a break up with his girlfriend, For the most part, the domestic students also asked more follow up questions than the international students did, but there were a couple exceptions. For Debbie and Isabel, in one of their two conversations, Debbie, the domestic student, only asked one more follow up question than Isabel, the international student. This is interesting because it also reflects what was happening in their conversations in regard to new topic questions mentioned above. They were more equal in regard to both their new topic questions and their follow up questions, as compared to the others. One could speculate, again, that their contrasting personalities played a role in balancing the conversation of new topic questions and follow up questions. In this case, since Isabel was asking more follow up questions than the other international students, one could wonder if this could be attributed to her extroverted personality. More investigation into this would be necessary in order to confirm this speculation.
Moreover, in both of their conversations, Derek, the international student, asked more follow up questions than Violet, the domestic student; Derek had 79% and 81% of follow up questions in their conversations. One might wonder whether gender also was playing a role here, but more investigation would be required to confirm this.
Another possible explanation is that since Violet is a story teller who expressed herself in stories and as she put it during the interviews, she likes to go on tangents, so it made sense that to interject into this communication style, follow up questions were going to be necessary for Derek. Another possible explanation for Derek's higher numbers of follow up questions could be his experience studying in the United States for high school and his experience taking ESL classes in California. It is possible that this type of question asking was practiced and used in his English education up until this point.
His classes in San Francisco may have been more interactive, as compared to the other international students' English experiences. Again, these comments are quite speculative and they would need more investigation and further research to confirm. Thus, through a closer examination of the types of questions asked, it seems that personalities, gender, language issues and topics discussed may affect their interaction together. All of these areas need further analysis, but point to the complexity of participation in an interaction and the myriad of factors influencing participation and engagement in interaction. Furthermore, it seems from the overall initiation count that international students initiated almost as much as the domestic students, showing that the level of involvement, as reflected in the question initiations of the domestic and international students was similar and domestic students did not dominate the interaction.

Non-question initiations.
After reflecting on and analyzing the question initiations, I reviewed the initiations in one conversation per pair to see what was happening in the non-question initiations. I wondered whether any patterns would emerge through looking at what was happening when they were not asking questions in their initiations, which accounted for a significant portion of their initiations. After doing this, it was found that when they were not asking questions, they were telling related stories, sharing related preferences/opinions, sharing new topic stories, discussing their plans, making suggestions and claiming expertise. Telling a related story occurred when one of the students told his/her conversation partner a story that was related to the previous point.  Kate, an international student, with ten new topic stories has more than her domestic partner, who only had one. The other pairs were all more similar in terms of their new topic stories, with George, another international student, having slightly more and Isabel and Derek, the other international students, having slightly less than Derek had 45% in their conversations. Thus, this shows that the international students, while asking fewer new topic questions overall, as described above, are in fact sharing almost as many or more new topic stories, showing their involvement in the interaction. Lastly, in terms of schedule/plan non-question initiations, Kate was the only international student to talk about her schedule with her partner, and the other international students did not do so. Considering the domestic students did see themselves as the leaders, as was explained from the interviews, this could account for why they initiate -schedule talk‖ more than the international students, but once again this is just a speculation and would require more investigation for confirmation. As was mentioned above, overall domestic students initiated slightly more than the international students. Even though they were initiating slightly more, and their turns were longer, both partners were trying to show their partners that they were knowledgeable leaders and that they had expertise. It is clear from the interviews that Violet went on to say, -I do. Like the Zodiac astrology. I mean, I like to believe in that stuff because I think it's fun‖ (Conversation 2, p. 13).

Conclusion
In this exploration of the conversation partners' conversations, I focused on the following two areas: intercultural competence in action and involvement in the interaction. These were both areas that came up in the interviews and it was helpful to triangulate the interview data with the conversation data in order to learn more about what was happening in the conversation partner experience. In terms of intercultural competence, through an analysis of the conversation discourse, it seemed that most of the students were not demonstrating an ability to see from their partners' perspectives.
The exception to this was Violet, the Black domestic student who had the most intercultural experience and seemed to express more empathy and curiosity about learning about the international student experience. The second theme, involvement in the interaction, was explored through looking at turn lengths and initiation counts for both question and non-question initiations. While international students' turns were shorter and they made slightly fewer initiations overall, they showed that they were actively involved in the interaction and made suggestions and claimed expertise just as the domestic students did. There were also other dynamics, such as gender, personality, language and topics discussed, that may have contributed to participants' involvement in the interaction.

Introduction
The focus on internationalization and the growing numbers of international students in higher education have not translated to more effective programming for intercultural learning and there is not yet a well-developed research base for understanding what takes place when students engage with one another across differences. Despite the fact that increasing the intercultural competence of students, defined in the literature review earlier, is becoming an educational priority for institutions, there has been little research into how intercultural interaction should best be facilitated (Jurgens & Robbins-O'Connell, 2008). Rather than focusing on how to increase meaningful intercultural interaction for both international and domestic students on university campuses to live up to the internationalization rhetoric, the international student literature tends instead to focus on adjustment issues for international students. All too often, the limited studies in the international student literature that look at both domestic and international students' experiences of intercultural interaction do not take into account the actual interactions that they are In this study's design, I triangulated interview and conversation data in order to provide different angles on analysis and see how the interviews and conversations overlapped and diverged. In ethnography, there is a combination of participant experiences and interpretations, researchers' observations and more objectives data, which in this study are the recorded conversations. In this discussion, first I will provide an overview of the overlapping points between the interview data and the conversation data, the intercultural competence among participants and their shifting power dynamics. Then, I will explain some of the limitations of this study, followed by suggestions for future research and program development.

Conversation and Interview Data Commonalities
Findings from the analysis of the conversations seemed to overlap with comments students made in their interviews. The first commonality between conversation data and interview data is that the domestic students and the international students were not making comments or communicating in ways that demonstrated intercultural competence in their interactions with one another, with the exception of Violet, at times. It seemed unlikely, from the conversation and interview data, that these students were going to develop intercultural competence through their interactions with one another. Research has shown that intercultural interaction has to be actively facilitated, through reflection activities, meaningful intercultural interaction and trainings, in order for intercultural competence development to occur, and thus, it is not surprising that in this unstructured learning experience students talk about the experience and engage with one another in ways that seem to demonstrate that intercultural competence development is not likely to develop in their interaction with one another. The second connection between the conversation data and interview data is that the data in both suggested that power-laden dynamics were permeating intercultural communication. There was not a clear dichotomy between international and domestic students in terms of the power they hold in the interaction and there were a variety of other power-laden issues, such as gender, race and socioeconomic status, which seemed to influence the interaction.

Intercultural Competence Development
I explored participants' intercultural competence development in the following areas. First of all, Deardorff (2006) (Volet & Ang, 1998). As will be mentioned in the suggestions for programming below, this points to the notion that it is important not to assume that the international students and domestic students will be motivated for intercultural group work.
In addition to not expressing interest in learning across cultures, the students did not exhibit much of an understanding of the complexity of cultural differences in their interviews with me. In Deardorff's (2006)  with Derek to delve more deeply into certain topics around cultural differences.
The one part of intercultural competence models that all intercultural experts agree on is the ability to see from others' perspectives (Deardorff, 2006 Research has shown that close extended intercultural contact, as Violet has had, does make one more likely to make more culturally sensitive attributions (Vollhardt, 2010) and to have increased intercultural competence (Jon, 2013).

Furthermore, in Harrison and Peacock's (2009) research on interactions between
domestic and international students in the United Kingdom, they found that students who had interacted across cultures previously through s or other opportunities, or students who came from a minority group, were more likely to see value in this experience with international students and they were proactive in trying to overcome challenges. Both of these studies support the idea that Violet's intercultural experience made her more adept in her communication across cultures.
Violet had not only had significant intercultural interaction, she had also lived her life as a Black woman and had been in a variety of situations where she had been the -other‖ and she had encountered much racism in her life so far. Based on this experience, it seemed likely that Violet would be more proactive in her interaction with her partner and also more aware of what the international students may be feeling as outsiders to the university. Harrison and Peacock (2009)  She tried to understand Derek's experience at the university and expressed openness and curiosity about the international student experience. I am suggesting that having experience being -the other‖ in a variety of situations, Violet apparently showed that she understood Derek's experience at the university and was able to act more as an ethnographer would.

Shifting Power Dynamics across a Variety of Dimensions
Another connection between the interview data and the conversation data is the power dynamics between the international and domestic students. Jon (2012) explains that power dynamics in international-domestic student relationships have rarely been explored. It appears from the interviews and the conversations that there were shifting power dynamics that were contextually based in the conversations between partners.
The international student literature often points to the international students' disempowerment; Hsieh (2007) and Min-Hua (2006)  International students are not passive recipients of domestic student power.
Domestic students do seem to try to assert dominance; they described themselves in the interviews as leaders in the interaction with the international students. They explained that they felt they were responsible for keeping the interaction going and that they had to be the topic generators. They perceived the international students to not be opening up in the interaction with them. This reflects the group work literature where domestic students blame some of their group work challenges on their international partners for not opening up with them in the interaction (Baker & Clark, 2010;Lee & Rice, 2007;Li & Campbell, 2008).
However, the international students were not passive recipients of the power that the domestic students were asserting. They described themselves as active participants in the interaction, sharing with their partners; more exploration in this area is needed, in regard to whether they see themselves as more powerful or what influences their ability to engage and not just be passive recipients. Some of the power dynamics described below could have influenced the students' feelings of power in the interaction, but each of these dynamics needs to be explored in more depth.
The domestic students and the international students all described themselves in interviews as having high intercultural ability. For example, Valerie, a domestic student, talked about her ability to communicate with people and that she went to a diverse high school; she said, -So, we always had an interest in that and I've always explains, -Often, they tend to frame dialogue about diversity in ways thathowever well-meaningplace themselves in positions of authority, serve their own personal interests, and make unreasonable demands of people that they are ostensibly trying to empower‖ (p. 578). De Turk (2010) references Jackson's (2002) work on -ready to sign contracts‖ and talks about how those in power often are trying to control the situation from their own worldview and see no need to shift their worldview. In other words, the students who saw themselves as having high intercultural ability were not approaching this interaction challenging their own views or putting themselves in a position where they were going to learn something. Presumably, entering the -inter‖ of intercultural communication requires not assuming one knows more than the other person or how to interpret the situation. According to Rowe (2010), -Thus, to engage in intercultural communication is to tread within the abyss of the inter; it is to place ourselves willingly in the ‗ability of (not) knowing'‖ (p. 218). Therefore, approaching intercultural communication as these students do without any apparent questions or self-doubts may have been precluding these students from entering the challenging area of engaging in intercultural interaction. It feels risky to move in and out of spaces that make one feel vulnerable and unsafe at times, but doing so is really the only way that significant learning will ensue. More research is needed to explore the reasons the international and domestic students' feel that they are knowledgeable contributors to the conversations.
During the conversations, international students initiated almost as much as the domestic students even though the domestic students' turn lengths were all longer than the international students'. For the most part, the international students had fewer new topic question initiations, but they had as many or more new topic stories. In contrast to the literature which points to their cultural reticence and their contextual disempowerment, this study points to the notion that these international students were engaged in the interaction to bring up topics and initiate. Additionally, beyond initiating at almost equal levels, the international and domestic students were both trying to show each other that they were knowledgeable and able to teach one another in their interactions with one another. In Chapter VI, a variety of examples of this tendency for both partners to assert themselves is explored. This finding provides a sharp contrast to the disempowerment literature, again showing that there is not a clear dichotomy between the international students and domestic students in terms of their relative power statuses.
In addition to students' domestic and international statuses, it seemed that various dimensions such as race, socioeconomic status and gender appeared to influence the interaction. Each of these areas will be explained below and it will become evident that more research into each area is necessary in order to understand the complexity of their influence on intercultural interaction.

Race.
In contrast to the other students who expected the interaction to be easy and had that expectation confirmed, Violet shared stories about how she always thinks about her race when she approaches interaction with anyone across different cultures. Scollon et al. (2012) and Halualani and Nakayama (2010)  students are disempowered in their interactions with the American students, in this study, they expressed prejudiced views, putting themselves above other groups of people. Gresham and Clayton (2011) found that the challenges that came about in the Community Connections Program included racist attitudes of international students toward other international students on campus. The domestic students did not express as frequently their prejudices during the interviews with me, but they did all refer to stereotypes that they hold about Chinese students. Violet was the only student to express a general awareness of stereotyping.

Socioeonomic status.
Socioeconomic status also plays a role in domestic students' perceptions of international students and came up in the interviews with the domestic students. They mentioned international students' cars, fashion and money when they described how they perceive the international students. Most Chinese international students did come to campus with the financial resources necessary to function well in higher education and this provided a contrast to many of the domestic students enrolled at this university, a few of whom were represented in this study, who must work and live at home in order to afford their education. This is important in that it shows, from a critical intercultural communication perspective, that students did not perceive themselves in completely cultural terms and instead, in power-laden dimensions, like socioeconomic status (and race and gender, at other points), which play a role in how students view and approach one another. In Jon's (2012) study of power dynamics between international and domestic students in a Korean context, he found that the economic power of students' home countries played a role in how students perceived each other and the relative amount of power that they were able to assert. Future research should be conducted to explore the impact that students' socioeconomic statuses have on the students' interactions with one another, which was not a focus of this current study.

Gender.
Two of the domestic students, Valerie and Becky, both mentioned gender in regard to their international student partners. Valerie said that if George had been a woman she thought they would have had more to talk about and Becky said that she felt that she had a lot to talk about with Kate because they were both women. Similar to the point about socioeconomic status, this demonstrates that students saw one another not only in regard to their cultures, but sometimes more significantly in their minds, in regard to their genders and other dimensions of their identities (Jon, 2012).
The two male international students, Derek and George, said that they would have preferred a male partner because they would have had more to talk about. Thus, perception of what characteristics accompany gender intervened into the Conversation Partner Program experience; rather than seeing this as a purely cultural exchange of ideas students thought in terms of constructs they already have well-defined ideas about. Scollon et al. (2012) discuss the notion that national identity is not necessarily the most salient difference between people interacting across differences and it is important to note that other parts of their identity might be more significant depending on the situation. Signorini, Wiesemes and Murphy (2009) discuss the importance of moving away from national identity as the most critical difference in intercultural communication, as it might not be the difference having the most influence on the interaction at a particular time.
In the conversations, it is possible that gender played a role as well. One exception to domestic students having more initiations than international students was that the male international students in three of four conversations asked more new topic questions (8, 11 and 1 more) than their female domestic student partners. While the differentials are generally smaller than those between the female domestic students and their female international partners (19, 2, 8, 22, 15, and 16 more), this still points to the possibility that gender impacts their numbers of initiations. This again reflects the theoretical framework of critical intercultural communication in that, as was mentioned above, there are other issues that intersect and interact with national culture in regard to intercultural communication. As mentioned previously, Tannen (1990) explores the role of gender in communication and explains that we are socialized to speak in certain ways depending on our gender roles. Tannen (1990) explains that in conversations between women and men, women are more likely to -follow the style of the men alone‖ (p. 236) and put their own topics and ways of talking aside. Tannen  Thus, the men asking more new topic questions than the women in this study does not necessarily show that the men are dominating in the interaction, but it is worth exploring further to better understand the intersection between intercultural interaction and gender.
Thus, in both the interviews and conversations, it seemed that the domestic and international students, with the exception of Violet at times, were not showing that they were likely to develop their intercultural competence. Violet, perhaps because of her experience interacting across cultures and her race, demonstrated some intercultural competence. Additionally, critical to understanding what was happening in these interactions were the shifting power dynamics at hand. International students were not passive recipients of the domestic student power and instead they saw themselves as knowledgeable leaders contributing to the interaction. Race, socioeconomic status and gender all emerged from what students had to say about their interaction experiences and from the analysis of their conversations.

Strengths and Limitations
This ethnographic study, consisting of interview data and discourse analysis of recorded conversations, is a situated inquiry and thus the findings are not readily generalizable to other contexts. That being said, with caution and thought about the contextual differences, some of the learning might transcend this particular context and apply to other programs, but it is critical to take note that there is not necessarily an application to other similar programs. It is my belief, as a qualitative researcher, however, that approaching this study quantitatively, with a fixed set of variables and what participants had to say about gender, race and socioeconomic status and how these elements might have influenced the interaction dynamic.
A third limitation emerged from the conversation data analysis. It was briefly mentioned above that both partners showed a lack of empathy, a tendency to make quick evaluative comments and choppy communication, but that the domestic students did these things more often than the international students. It would have been informative to explore this further to see why this phenomenon occurred and what it revealed to us about the conversation partner experience. Similarly, there were longer turns by the domestic students and presumably greater fluency in English is the reason. However, this assumption would need to be tested.
In addition to the wide array of speculations in this study, another limitation is that I as the researcher am not a cultural insider to Chinese culture. While I am aware of what the research says about Chinese international students, I think it would have been useful to know more about the power dynamics involved among different groups in Chinese society. For example, there was some speculation that Derek might be more understanding of Violet due to his experience being a Cantonese speaker in China, where Mandarin is the dominant dialect. However, I am not familiar enough with the cultural makeup of China and the interactions among groups to fully make that claim and it would have been useful to have a cultural insider to Chinese culture comment on and inform this speculation. Additionally, the Chinese students may have been able to open up much more if they had been able to do the interviews in their Chinese dialect; trying to fit their ideas into English, a language they are in the process of learning, is undoubtedly a limitation in this study.
Another methodological consideration is that the conversations and the interviews were influenced by my role as a researcher and the presence of the recorder. Even though none of the students in the study were my students, they were still aware that I am a professor at the university and thus, even as I tried to make the atmosphere relaxed and comfortable for the interviewees, I am confident that they would have acted differently had they been talking to someone who they were truly comfortable with. At the same time, a strength of this study was that I am insider to the institution, the ESL program and the Conversation Partner Program, as it allowed me to understand more about the specific context. Furthermore, when they recorded their own conversations for me, the presence of the recorder definitely played a role; they were aware it was there and it must have influenced their approach to the conversations in some way. One could speculate that they might have been trying to be on their -best behavior‖ acting as engaged as possible, considering they knew that I was involved in this program.
Lastly, the professors did not structure intercultural learning activities for conversation partners. The history professor allowed the students who participated in my study to opt out of a reflection paper and the ESL professor did not check in with students on a regular basis about what they were learning from their partners. There is the remaining question as to whether the data would have been different were the students to have been in classes with professors who did structure and assign specific learning activities over the course of the term. While I knew that the history professor was giving the students the option of opting out of a reflection paper for participating in this research project, I was unaware that the ESL professor would take such an unstructured approach. I wonder whether more opportunities for in-class reflection might have promoted changes in thinking or behavior, leaving the students slightly more ready to develop intercultural competence through this interaction.

Future Research
From this study, there are a variety of research pathways to be considered going forward. First of all, it would be meaningful to explore more thoroughly Violet and other students of color, looking at their interactions with international students on campus. Initially, I was going to focus only on White students and then I decided to be more open in my approach and this ended up being a very fruitful move even though I did not originally anticipate this. Violet, with her intercultural experience and her experience being a Black woman, was more empathetic and open and interested in learning about differences, as compared to the other students. The insights gained from Violet's participation in the study point to the relevance of racial identity development in relation to intercultural communication.
Additionally, it would be fascinating to examine more closely some of the power dynamics in the conversations to see how different factors play out in the interaction. For example, there is some speculation that gender is influencing the interaction in various ways, but how exactly this is happening and what participants say about its role in their interaction would be interesting to explore. Also, there were other power laden issues that came up in the interviews, such as race and socioeconomic status, both of which could have been explored in more depth in the interviews and in relation to the actual interactions. For example, in what ways did socioeconomic status come up in their interactions with one another? Furthermore, there was some speculation about the role that personality plays in these interactions and it would be fruitful to look more closely at the intersection of personality and culture, to see if there are some personality traits that can overshadow other factors involved in an interaction. For example, an extroverted Chinese student might prefer group work even if culturally he/she comes from a context where lectures and authority driven models of education are dominant.
Another area of research that could be explored is topic selection and discussion and what was actually learned from the communication, rather than focusing on intercultural competence in action and involvement as this study did.
Looking closely at topics, who chose the topics and what topics were selected would be interesting and has not been investigated in the literature.
Lastly, in this study the students did not have structured training or meaningful reflection activities. While it was a useful exploration to examine unstructured intercultural pair experiences, I also think it would be interesting to examine conversation partner pairs who have participated in structured intercultural training and/or reflection activities. Specifically, do conversation partners exhibit more openness and curiosity for intercultural learning when they participate in various structured activities? Are the interaction dynamics influenced by professor involvement?

Suggestions for Intercultural Program Development
The following are some suggestions for intercultural program development for international and domestic students in higher education. As mentioned above, given the situated nature of this study, it is only possible to view the findings as suggestive for other contexts, so I have tried to extract some meaningful suggestions that might have implications beyond this specific context.
1. Nationality may not be the most salient difference in interaction across cultures, for there are a variety of other differences that could potentially influence an interaction.
2. As the literature suggests, putting domestic students and international students in groups together is unlikely to lead to intercultural competence development without structured learning (Bennett, 2009).
3. The requisite attitudes for intercultural competence development are not necessarily going to be found in students studying in higher education. One cannot assume that domestic and international students will want to learn about culture. There might need to be particular attention paid to how assignments are structured for students and teaching them how culture does intervene in communication.
4. There may be variations within the domestic student population, such as racial/ethnic background and/or past intercultural experiences, that are relevant to their interactions with international students.
5. Learning to see from another person's perspective should be practiced and modeled by interculturally competent faculty and administrators, so that students can learn strategies for it. Some examples from these conversations of assumptions and evaluative comments could be used in trainings to discuss and analyze with students as effective strategies are being developed.
6. While some international students are disempowered as the literature suggests, some of them are also engaged actively in interaction, asserting themselves in the U.S.
context. There are some ways in which international students express their power as well; for example, Chinese international students often have sufficient economic resources to study in the United States, which became a focus of domestic students' attention and perception of them.

Conclusion
This exploratory ethnographic study opens a new conversation in regard to international and domestic student interaction in higher education. Much of the literature on international students has focused on international student adjustment to higher education, suggesting that social support and communication across cultures, with domestic students in particular, will help ease the adjustment process. The limited studies that do examine international and domestic student experiences of interactions with one another do not examine the actual interactions themselves, nor do they situate the interactions in a specific context.
A discourse approach to intercultural communication (Scollon et al., 2012) and critical intercultural communication studies (Halualani & Nakayama, 2010) focus this discourse-specific, relational and situated exploration of Chinese international and U.S. domestic student interaction. In this ethnographic study, interview data and conversation data were triangulated to explain what transpired in the interactions between conversation partners and what participants had to say about their experiences in the Conversation Partner Program. In particular, the intercultural competence among participants and their shifting power dynamics were the two themes that were explored in depth in this study. Given that there was a lack of structured learning and reflection taking place, it is not surprising that the conversations and interviews showed that participants were not likely to develop intercultural competence in their interactions with one another (Bennett, 2009). The assumptions, evaluative comments and lack of follow-up were features of their discourse showing how they do not seem to be able to see from each other's perspectives, the only criteria that all models of intercultural competence share. Violet, the Black student with significant intercultural experience, was the only student who showed in her expressions of empathy and openness to culture learning that she seemed to exhibit some intercultural competence in her interactions.
Furthermore, in addition to intercultural competence development, the interviews and conversations were explored in regard to the shifting power dynamics between the conversation partners. There was not a clear dichotomy between international and domestic students in terms of the power they hold in the interaction and there were a variety of other power-laden issues, such as gender, race, socioeconomic status and language differences, which seemed to influence the interaction. Looking closely at the interactions in which structured learning is not taking place was a first necessary step in creating intercultural programs that actively foster learning among participants. The discourse features of and the complex, powerladen dimensions involved in unstructured intercultural communication identified in APPENDIX

Situated Intercultural Communication
You are being asked to participate in a research study about communication between conversation partners. You were selected as a possible participant because you are involved in the Conversation Partner program. Please read this form and ask any questions that you may have before deciding whether to be in the study Emily Spitzman, an Assistant Professor at Johnson and Wales, is conducting this study.

Background Information
The purpose of this research is to examine the interaction between conversation partners in order to make the program better in the future. The researcher is interested in finding out what happens when partners talk to one another and she is interested in learning about your ideas about intercultural interaction.

Procedures
If you choose to be a participant in this research, you will be asked to do the following things:  Take the Cultural Intelligence (CQ) Assessment  Be interviewed by Emily Spitzman three times (Week 3, Week 7 and Week 11) of Winter trimester  Record two conversations with your conversation partner (Week 4 and Week 10)

Risks of Being in the Study
The risks of participating in this research are minimal. You will be discussing your experience participating in this program and thus, the risks involved are the same as you would experience in your daily activities.

Benefits to You
There are no direct benefits to you for participating in the study.

Voluntary Participation
Your participation is completely voluntary. It is not required by your school. You can choose not to participate in this research and it will have no effect on your grades. Also, you can change your mind about participating at any time with no negative consequences.

Confidentiality
The records of this research will be kept private. In any sort of report that might be published, the researcher will not include any information that will make it possible to identify you. Research records will be kept in a secured file, and access will be limited to the researcher. If there are problems with the study, the research records may be viewed by Rhode Island College review board responsible for protecting human participants and other government agencies that protect human participants in research. All data will be kept for three years, after which it will be destroyed.

Contacts and Questions
The researcher conducting this study is Emily Spitzman. You may ask any questions you have now. If you have any questions later, you may contact her at espitzman@jwu.edu, 401-575-8150. Or you may contact her faculty advisor, Carolyn Panofsky, at cpanofsky@ric.edu, 206 456-8040.
If you think you were treated unfairly or would like to talk to someone other than the researcher about your rights or safety as a research participant, please contact Dr. Christine Marco, Chair of the Rhode Island College Institutional Review Board at IRB@ric.edu, or by phone at 401-456-8598, or by writing to Dr. Christine Marco, Chair IRB; c/o Department of Psychology, Horace Mann Hall 311; Rhode Island College; 600 Mount Pleasant Avenue; Providence, RI 02908.
You will be given a copy of this form for your records.