Rapport Management: Understanding Cross-cultural Interaction Of Chinese Visiting Scholars In Canada

Sending Chinese Visiting Scholars abroad is an important form to cultivate university academic leaders and academic backbones, and it is also a way of inter-school academic exchange. Chinese Visiting Scholars communicate with people who are from different cultural backgrounds, speaking different languages, having different communication styles, and holding different values, so their intercultural interaction competence has an important influence on their overseas work and study. Previous research has discussed a lot on their intercultural interaction competence, but it pays more attention to the language abilities of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Some studies concerned with overall intercultural interaction competence while they lacked detailed and deeper discussion on specific intercultural interaction competences. Few people researched into the problems in real interaction and the effect of communication. Although they have been trained for at least six months before they go abroad, there are still many difficulties in their overseas interaction. Therefore, it is necessary to understand their real situation and problems in overseas interaction.My research is a qualitative research, which aims to understand intercultural interaction of Chinese Visiting Scholars in Canada. By analyzing their rapport management behavior in intercultural interaction, I explore behavior and strategies of rapport management. With an aim to explore five aspects of rapport management, I collect data by interview with 15 Chinese Visiting Scholars who have studied in Canada, and learn about their actual situation in intercultural interaction and difficulties they have met. The study shows that Chinese Visiting Scholars have difficulties in five aspects, such as, contextual awareness, interpersonal attentiveness, information gathering, social attuning, and emotion regulation, and it also comes up with some solution strategies. By discussing these five capacities, my research tries to make a deeper understanding of rapport management.A deeper understanding of intercultural behavior and problems can really help to improve intercultural interaction of visiting scholars. I hope the results of the research that can help overseas training institutions with training courses for improving intercultural interaction competence. Based on the analysis, we propose the following suggestions: The first suggestion is to include awareness of improving intercultural rapport management as one of the teaching goals; the second is to design classroom activities such as knowledge teaching, scenario simulation and other teaching activities, which help visiting scholars to better adapt to overseas life and communicate effectively in their study and exchange.