Connecting international students with the local community through a PCA-informed orientation program
Using the Performed Culture Approach (PCA) as a useful tool for helping international students get the most from their study abroad experience, we developed real-life Chinese language sessions for international learners of Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) in a four-day Language and Culture Camp. The camp is an active learning component of the orientation week for first-year students at a Sino-US joint venture university in China. On a practical level, the real-life Chinese language sessions taught new international students about and connected them to the local community, but a broader outcome was to foster a mindset for productively working and living within the target culture. Most of the participants reported gains from camp attendance, including an improved ability to do things in Kunshan and improved acquaintance with native speakers on campus. In this chapter, we demonstrate how we implemented two of PCA's signature activities – field performance (FP) and performance watching (PW) – to aid students in building their social circles, and we discuss implications for practitioners seeking to develop similar programs.
