CIICPD 2023

4.2.2 Reporting Narratives

CI-narrative 4

Austrians and the master course 1 I was enrolled in a course that was taken by master students in my exchange semester. Due to the 2 fact that I did not have many international students with me in this course I had to randomly team 3 up with regular master students who are specialized in the topic of this course. When I began 4 working in the project with them, they always used terms that I did not understand and they used 5 to work on their project in German and they had to switch after a while when I joined them 6 because my main study language is English. We had always this struggle of linking information 7 or describing tasks to each other. Also I took this course as an elective course outside of my 8 specialization so I didn’t have the background knowledge enough to keep up with them. One 9 other problem was that they already were together in other projects in their program so they can 10 talk about our project while I am not around because I am not always with them for different 11 schedule. To sum up, there were lots of struggles that we had and tried to manage throughout 12 the semester. Fortunately, we were able somehow to work it. Due to COVID situation in the 13 university, the course was held online and we didn’t ever meet in real life which made it more 14 difficult to overcome this intercultural problem. Overall, I learned to always state what makes 15 me uncomfortable in the first encounter so that things do not build in a wrong way along the 16 course. The narrative was written by a student, who does not mention his/her origin. The other participants are identified in the title as Austrian students, but we get no indication about their number or genders. The text covers a period of one semester and can be considered as a summary of what happened during the whole semester as indicated in some of the formulations (“they always used terms” (line 4); “we had always this struggle” (line 6); “To sum up, there were lots of struggles […] throughout the semester.” (line 11–12)). It is not possible to identify the narration of one specific critical event. As Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann describe, the perspective and time of experience can be considered as an “undramatic retrospective summarising and categorising descriptions of actions and sequences of events, ‘processed’ on the basis of knowledge of the here-and-now.” 20 (2004, p. 156). In line with this, the narrator clearly categorises the events as a struggle or problem (“We had always this struggle” (line 6); “there were a lot of struggles” (line 11), “One other problem was” (line 8–9), “which made it more difficult to overcome this intercultural problem.” (line 14)). The text can be structured into three main parts. In the orientation (line 1–3), the narrator explains why he was the only international student within the “Austrian” project-group. From line 4 to 11, the difficulties within the project work are described. A summary, which can be considered as a result follows in line 11 (“To sum up”) and is interrupted by mentioning an additional difficulty due to the “COVID situation” (line 12). The coda in the last two lines corresponds to the following typical aspect of reporting narratives: “dealing with tension […] less with regard to individual event elements, but to the biographical relevance.” (Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann, 2004, p. 157). “Overall,

20 Translated by the authors.

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