Enhancing the Communication Skills of Higher Education Students through International Student Mobility Programs

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the communication strategies used by both the local and international students while joining formal and informal activities. Using thematic analysis, the responses of the 10 local and 14 international participants in the semi-structured interview conducted after joining the formal and informal activities in the international student mobility project were independently and iteratively categorized into the communication strategies proposed by Nanta-umpond and Soontornwipat (2016). The findings showed that the Thai students mostly used the communication strategy of topic avoidance (80%) while the Indonesian students employed the communication strategy of asking for clarification (64.29%) in formal activities. In the informal activities, both the Thai and Indonesian students resorted to use the communication strategy of mine with almost identical percentages of 60% and 57.14%, respectively. Most participants from both groups claimed that their communication strategies were enhanced by informal more than the formal activities since the former were more conversational and the topics were non-academic.