The Interculture Project

Department of European Languages and Cultures, Lonsdale College, Lancaster University, LA1 4YN, England

The Lancaster University Consortium

Telephone: 01524 592670                                              Fax: 01524 843934                                      e-mail: icp@lists.lancaster.ac.uk
                                                                                                                  website:  www.lancs.ac.uk/users/interculture

Dear

I hope that your plans for your year abroad have gone well and that, if you are already 'there', the experience of settling in is offering you real pleasure and only a minimum of pain.

You may recall that, at the preparation course at Lancaster in June, we mentioned the possibility of your keeping a personal diary, partly for yourselves and partly as a contribution to the work of The Interculture Project.

As we said at the course, the project is one element of a wide-ranging government initiative to maximise the quality of teaching and learning in UK Higher Education.  As a consortium of 5 universities, our task is to investigate the process of students' adaptation to the cultures of the communities in which they are spending all or part of their year abroad.

What we would like you to do is to write a day to day account of your experiences.  Try to express yourself as freely as you can about any cultural similarities and differences which strike you as significant between your own culture and that of the community where you are staying.  No topics need be excluded.  What matters is that they interest you.  Food, drink, language, sport, sex, gender, daily behaviour, clothing, professional codes, use of time, attitudes and so on.  You may also wish to comment on your own acquisition of the target language: the difficulties you are encountering, problems of finding the right expression in different situations, embarrassing breakdowns in communication, feelings of satisfaction at your own progress, the new words which you have picked up in any given week... . As various students have told us over the last two years, writing a diary can be therapeutic and can act as a personal record of your experiences which you may want to keep for the future. 

Please write in whatever style seems natural to you.  Ideally, we would prefer you to write up your diary every day but this may often not be possible.  In that case, you can compress several days experience into one entry but it would be helpful to put the day and date above each one so as to give you and us an accurate idea of when each entry was written.  You can write in English or in the language of the country where you are living - whichever you prefer.  One option would be to write the personal diary in English and then to use the material as the basis for your Residence Abroad Project.  As you may know, your assessed project can take the form of a diary which would need to be written in the target language and be more thematically organised and longer than the personal account which you submit to us. 

CONFIDENTIALITY

The content of your personal diary will be regarded as strictly confidential.  It will not be used for academic assessment in any way and will not be read by academic staff who are not members of the project team.  In any case, the member of the team who receives the diary (not one of the academic staff) will number it and remove your name so as to protect your anonymity.  However, we may want to use parts of your account for research purposes and for this we need your consent.  We assure you that any material used in this way will not be attributable to its author.  Please sign the enclosed consent form and return it to us with your diary no later than the end of January 2000.  

Without a signed consent form from you the diary cannot be used by the project team to develop new materials to improve the experience of future students so please don't forget to sign the form and include it when you return the diary.  Please send them to: 

	Brigitte Theunissen-Hughes
		The Interculture Project
		Department of European Languages and Cultures
		Lancaster University
		LANCS UK LA1 4YN

		e-mail: b.theunissen-hughes@lancaster.ac.uk

To get you in the mood, we also enclose a postcard.  Do please return it to us with just one anecdote about your life abroad which you think would be culturally instructive.  
If you have access to the internet, you can send it to us at icp@lists.lancs.ac.uk.   
Do also have a look at our website, on www.lancs.ac.uk/users/interculture

If you have any questions about the diary or the project, please do contact us. 

Good luck with everything and best wishes from all of us at distant Lancaster.

Yours sincerely, 

Karin Tusting,
for and on behalf of
The Interculture Project Team

encl.  	Diary notebook
	consent form
      	postcard