Publisher's Synopsis
Developing Cross-Cultural Exchange Projects: A Step-by-Step Guide aims at providing readers with a systematic guide to cross-cultural encounters, either at home or abroad, in a globalizing era. It is a useful and a valuable guide for teachers, students, school heads and administrators, agencies of language proficiency tests, police makers, material developers, owners and managers of multicultural corporates, and other non-governmental organizations. Different groups of readers can find useful parts of information based on their needs and objectives. It is especially useful for professors in higher education and practitioners of cross-cultural exchange projects because the book is organized in a sequential manner to guide them step by step to reach their goal, starting from the initial design of the project and the research method and recruiting students to evaluation of the students and the entire project at the final stage of the project. For students who are planning to work on their higher degree in a foreign country, this book covers much useful information for them to make the best decision before they head for a foreign country. Cross-cultural exchanges in this book is defined broadly to cover anything involving people from different cultures, including student mobility, teacher mobility, cross-border collaborations or partnerships, working abroad, and distance education. One of the important features of this book is that it covers a considerable number of examples and empirical studies reported by practitioners of different types of cross-cultural exchange projects. Readers may learn from their experiences of success or failure so that they may feel easier and more comfortable to be prepared for their forthcoming cross-cultural experiences. Finally, in the last chapter, the author envisions the future of cross-cultural exchanges to remind readers that cross-cultural exchanges, like globalization, is dynamic and an on-going practice. The future of cross-cultural exchanges will surely change in accordance with the change of the global community. Practitioners of cross-cultural exchanges need to be aware of the subtle differences happening around the globe and to adjust their cross-cultural exchange projects accordingly to best fit the current situation.
