2.1 Preparing for working abroad

The World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages (The National Standards Collaborative Board, 2015) clearly state that foreign language education should train students to function in a large variety of situations, including interdisciplinary academic and career-related scenarios. Scholars, for example, Michael Byram also explicitly suggest that foreign language education must be associated with other disciplines to achieve internationalization and help students become “intercultural citizens” (Byram,  2008, 2018; Byram and Wagner, 2018). In the meantime, educators have been exploring how international internships help L2 learners successfully function in various contexts and communicate with the target community (Brown, 2014; Marijuan & Sanz, 2018; Wu, 2017). Brown (2014) conducted a survey with 190 college-level students and reported that their desire to participate in in-country experiential learning experiences was clear. He further revealed that the internship experiences led to a rapid improvement in students' language proficiency. Although scholars and educators have not yet come to an agreement on what constitutes an effective international internship program, it is commonly accepted that introducing L2 learners to intercultural experiences could significantly improve their language competencies, communication skills, and instill an appreciation of global connectedness (Watson et al., 2013).

Recent studies have revealed that students must receive proper, specific training to be able to truly benefit from international internship experiences (e.g., Pederson, 2010). Koyama (2020) investigated a group of 11 Japanese language students who participated in a 10-week internship in Japan and concluded that students' language skills and cultural readiness determine how they will approach and establish meaningful relationships with their counterparts from the new community. In other words, the overall outcomes of an international internship depend heavily on the quality of the specific training students receive, especially their predeparture preparation. It is noteworthy that although there is a large host of literature on how to prepare students for their study abroad (e.g., Highum, 2014; Kruse, 2007), among which some touched upon students' cross-cultural abilities (e.g., Koo Moon et al., 2012), the competencies one requires to function productively in the workplace differ significantly from what it takes to be a thriving short-term international student. As Jia (2019a) suggested, advanced-level L2 learners commonly experience frustration in an unfamiliar professional environment regardless of their language proficiency. Xiong (2020) investigated 11 American students who respectively took part in internships at five different Chinese workplaces and reached a similar conclusion. Although this group of students' language and cultural gains were evident, they reported a high level of confusion about handling the social hierarchy at Chinese workplaces. Possibly unfamiliar aspects of a typical Chinese workplace, such as an explicit social hierarchy, domain-specific discourse, complex interpersonal relationships, and expectations for foreign employees, all play an important role in shaping their internship or early career experiences. L2 learners who are not equipped with a thorough understanding of cultural diversity and a vision of a professional self could be at high risk for failure and lack of professional development in the long run.

This finding is supported by researchers who have examined the implementation and efficacy of international internship programs. For example, He and Qin (2017) studied the importance of a series of predeparture courses designed to improve students' general knowledge of working abroad. They argued that pre-internship training would help students become more mentally prepared for handling routine entry-level tasks typical of internships and form realistic expectations of the work environment and interpersonal relations in the target culture. Fryer and Day (1993) also suggested “view[ing] the internship as an important state in the continuous process of acquiring skills in communication and cross-cultural awareness, but also as an end in itself—the justification for preparatory courses in language and culture” (p. 285). However, surprisingly, the ways and degree to which predeparture courses purposefully prepare students for their work abroad has not been thoroughly explored. According to Jian and Shepherd (2010), to help learners build cultural memories beyond a set of linguistic codes, they must be provided with “an environment where they can practice doing things instead of just hearing things about, Chinese behavioral culture and where culture is not an object to look at or think about, but an experience attained through performance and practice” (p. 97). In other words, performance should be used as an approach in predeparture courses to help students be familiar with and build memories of participating in specific professional scenarios. The course examined in the current study adopts a performance-based approach and evaluates students' learning outcomes by how they handle a highly contextualized workplace performance, a mock job interview.

2.2 LSP in the context of negotiating a third space

They further emphasized the importance of establishing an “understanding of cultural factors related to working and living in the corresponding foreign setting” (p. 183). In the context of creating global professionals, Jian (2020) also stressed developing students' awareness about other cultures' expectations should be a major task for advanced-level foreign language curricula. Particularly, he proposed that the focus should be switched “from ‘meeting expectation’ to ‘negotiate expectation’” (p. 14). This means L2 learners will not be encouraged to completely adapt to the target culture and “do as the Romans do.” Instead, they should be equipped with skills and knowledge to effectively interact in a professional environment where they handle dynamic and continuous negotiation to construct productive working relationships and reach mutually beneficial goals. Zeng's (2018) case study on a superior-level Chinese language learner's professional experiences in China, as certified through an official ACTFL OPI, sends a clear message that foreign professionals are expected to possess some “global qualities” while being “not too Chinese” (p. 673) so as to benefit the organization by highlighting its symbolic power as a globalized workplace. From the psychological perspectives, the focus on negotiation could also “reduce the possible fatigue and conflicts that advanced-level learners may gradually develop” (p. 677).

Recognizing the importance of learners' cultural awareness, domain expertise, and negotiation skills distinguishes LSP courses from traditional advanced-level language training in that the fluency level of students is no longer the only concern. When negotiation becomes the theme of the course, the training focuses on helping students use the target language to accomplish specific tasks and sustain productive working relationships to achieve mutually shared goals with their counterparts. In the long run, learners are expected to use their negotiation skills to co-construct a sustainable professional relationship with the target community. The outcomes of the negotiation should benefit both the students and their counterparts in a way that they feel motivated to further interact with each other. The type of negotiation in discussion can occur on a discourse level, such as participating in short conversational exchanges, or in a broader sense such as establishing a long-term work relationship. More importantly, students without such training are likely to fail on a professional level regardless of their high language proficiency (Zeng, 2018).

To understand how the goals of LSP programs could be achieved, one must examine actual classes and curriculum design. According to Wu (2017), Language Flagship Programs are among the best at providing students with internship opportunities that often incorporate LSP components. This is especially true given that students attending these programs are expected to gain a high level of proficiency and intercultural competence to navigate the work environment in the target community. Spring (2012) is among the researchers who have closely analyzed how the LSP approach and courses are incorporated into the CFP's internship and work preparation curricula. As reported (Spring, 2012), one of the approaches for implementing LSP into advanced-level language curricula is to offer theme-based courses, such as Chinese business. To further understand how students improve their domain-specific language performances and cultural knowledge through LSP training, this article explores a theme-based LSP course with a particular emphasis on the crucial skill of intercultural negotiation.

This mutually constructed Third Space should help those with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds to collaboratively perform their professional roles, achieve commonly recognized goals, and gain a strong sense of achievement that will help them sustain their extended language-learning journey (Jia, 2019a). Thus, the key to an LSP course is to provide the communication skills one needs to negotiate across cultures to create and function in a Third Space. It is noteworthy that almost every negotiation scenario demands more than one communication skill. For instance, when negotiating with one's boss to reduce workload over the weekend, it requires the employee to at least know how to show respect, clarify their needs, initiate a sensitive topic in spoken or written form, and actively listen and respond. When the course contents are organized around the negotiation purposes, students are able to learn these communication skills systematically but also in a highly contextual manner.

In addition, the intercultural negotiation skill we explore in this paper differs dramatically from business negotiation, as the former focuses on enabling foreign language learners to become experts in negotiating intentions and expectations in a general professional setting with the aim to develop a mutually beneficial relationship toward mutually recognized goals. More specifically, in the context of developing L2 Chinese learners' professional competency, “intercultural negotiation” is a communication process that benefits both Chinese and foreign professionals. It can also be interpreted as a willingness to take the initiative, employ different points of view, and make compromises to achieve mutually recognized goals within the workplace. For instance, in Mainland China, it is common for a foreign employee to be invited to drink alcohol during a formal banquet. If a foreign employee does not feel comfortable about it and does not know how to negotiate, he or she could unwillingly accept the invitation or decline the invitation politely, neither of which leads to better interpersonal relations or helps the Chinese host gain mianzi (face), a key purpose of a Chinese banquet. In the long run, it could even cause misunderstandings among the foreign colleagues and their Chinese counterparts. On the contrary, Chinese learners who are trained to negotiate interculturally can recognize the common goal of communication. For example, instead of drinking or declining directly, they can provide a reasonable excuse, offer to do some performance, or compliment food with an explicitly expressed recognition and appreciation of the hospitality of the host.

2.3 Envisioning a professional self

When the goal of foreign language education extends to functioning professionally in the target culture and co-constructing a Third Space, one should prepare for a long journey on which language instructors and students themselves spend years of effort. This realization raised much concern among L2 educators and inspired interest in researching and sustaining their students' learning motivation. Dörnyei (2005) proposed that the ideal L2 self, the “ought-to self,” and the student's on-going language learning experiences are involved in sustained enthusiasm for knowledge acquisition. Although this framework was not proposed to address learners' long-term motivation in particular, the ideal L2 self has been widely explored and has inspired much of the later research on this topic (e.g., Jia, 2019a).

Dörnyei and Chan (2013) described the ideal L2 self, a specific facet of one's perfect self, as a “powerful motivator.” It is worth emphasizing that the ideal self is not simply a fluent speaker of the target language. Rather, this ideal future self will entail a specific evoked role, such as an international business executive. According to Dörnyei (2009), one's ideal L2 self should not be considered as a newly created role because “it is highly unlikely that any motivational intervention will lead a student to generate an ideal self out of nothing. In reality, the process is more likely to involve awareness raising and guided selection from the multiple aspirations, dreams, desires, etc. that students have already entertained in the past” (p. 33). Jia (2019b) also discussed the importance for language learners to create a holistic view of their learning experiences. Jia suggested students should be constantly reminded to reflect on their past selves to identify their language skills and achievements in their domains. In other words, reflecting on one's past self in detail and recognizing both their readiness and some specific areas that can be improved with reasonable efforts is the initial step to visualize a successful professional self. Hence, developing an ideal L2 self is especially meaningful and practical for advanced-level students who already have a future goal to intern or work in the target culture. In order for them to sustain long-term learning motivation, their imagined ideal L2 self should holistically incorporate elements of their past experiences, present lives as well as their expectations for the future.

To answer the question of how learners visualize their successful and failing future selves, it is helpful to look to the substantial body of research on this subject (e.g., Adolphs et al., 2018; Dörnyei & Chan, 2013; Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020; Muir & Dörnyei, 2013). For example, Dörnyei and his colleagues argued that the possible selves of L2 learners are similar to the students' current perceptions about themselves or “mental representations of the sensory experiences of a future goal state (involving imagination and imagery)” (Muir & Dörnyei, 2013, p. 357). Dörnyei (2009) also carefully distinguished the concept of future selves from future goals, stating that the former “involves images and senses that approximate what people actually experience when they are engaged in motivated or goal-directed behavior” (p. 15). Thus, according to the motivational self-system theory, creating a vision for learners by providing them with detailed experiences of achieving a future goal is considered a feasible approach for establishing a motivating ideal L2 self. In addition, the timing of this process is crucial. According to Dörnyei (2009), the ideal L2 self is an imagined vision based on what learners have experienced; thus, with effective visual inputs, advanced-level students should be able to build a connection between their imagined version of their L2 selves and their actual professional selves even before they begin to work in the target culture. In a study of 97 German upper-intermediate to advanced-level college students studying English, Hessel (2015) discovered, “The accessibility of the students' ideal L2 selves, that is, the frequency with which the students imagined themselves as fluent speakers of English, emerged as by far the strongest and most direct predictor of their levels of self-motivated engagement in L2 learning” (p. 112). This finding provided a meaningful reference for designing language-learning experiences. In other words, instructors who aim to increase learner motivation should incorporate experiences that encourage students to consistently visualize themselves successfully participating in the target culture. For instance, exposing students to a role model with a similar background to theirs and who is able to effectively navigate the target culture can help them imagine an ideal professional future self (Bandura, 1997; Jia, 2019a). Being able to relate to a role model is like being “linked to memberships in imagined communities that shape individuals' present and future decisions and behaviors and provide an evaluative and interpretive context for such decisions, behaviors, and their outcomes” (Pavlenko & Norton, 2007, p. 670). It is noteworthy that a role model can be a person in real life that students interact with, but it can also be fictional, for instance, a character in a film or novel. In this study, the protagonist in the textbook, James Rogers, served as a role model in the training process.

However, despite the fruitful discussion on the process of vision construction, it remains rather unclear which type of language curriculum and learning materials will be most effective for helping students to visualize a successful future self. Walker and Noda (2010) argued, “In the pedagogy of performing a learned culture, learning stories is a part of a larger process of compiling the memories that will support participation in the target culture” (p. 32). Thus, the learning stories that students will compile through interacting with pedagogical materials, instructors, and peers will contribute to their pedagogically constructed vision of a future self. According to Noda (2020), effective pedagogical materials “offer model performances for learners to emulate and build improvisations on” (p. 150). Therefore, constructing a vision of an ideal professional self involves increasing students' engagement with successful performances in specific contexts. The memories of handling various tasks at different work-related settings will provide them with a number of opportunities to visualize their future professional selves. One purpose of our study is to understand how a course focusing on introducing these workplace performances helps students to visualize their professional selves. Furthermore, for a vision to serve as a consistent motivating factor, it should ideally be a self-generated internalized image that involves self-motivated learning behavior and personal characteristics. As Wen and Piao (2020) clearly noted, “Sustained motivation, derived from a learner's personal interest in improving specific language skills and/or particular learning domains, promotes a reengagement of his or her objectives in the learning process” (p. 11). By the same token, studies that explore language learner's vision development more than often collect narrative data on learners' self identified learning experiences and aspects through interviews (Jia, 2019a; Thompson, 2017; Vlaeva & Dörnyei, 2021; Wen & Piao, 2020). For instance, Wen and Piao (2020) used semistructured interviews to explore how ideal self and the ought-to self impact Chinese learning and how future self-guides sustain learner motivation. Thompson (2017) investigates the ought-to and anti-ought-to selves of a Chinese learner and an Arabic learner through interviewing and encouraging them to tell their language learning stories. As Vlaeva and Dörnyei (2021) clearly pointed out, using quantitative measures with small sample sizes poses a threat to the validity of the findings. Therefore, this study, in a foreign language other than English (LOTE) context with a small size of participants, uses semistructured interviews to collect narrative data. Same as Thompson (2017), the instrument of our study avoids using the prompting of the “motivation” theme so that learners do not focus on discussing their positive learning experiences.

3.1 The setting

3.2 Participants

The participants (pseudonyms: Jake, Lily, Mary, and Sasha) who agreed to take part in this study included all four Flagship undergraduate students enrolled in the class. Except one sophomore, all were in the senior cohort of the Flagship, meaning they would soon start their Capstone year. Sasha, the sophomore, was the only one who spoke exclusively Chinese before moving to the United States at age 9. The other three began studying Chinese in a foreign language context (i.e., in the United States) in college. All the students except Sasha had study-abroad experience in China. Specifically, both Jake and Lily had completed one semester in Harbin and one summer in Shanghai. Mary experienced one summer in Shanghai and one in Harbin. However, Lily was the only one who had a 2-month internship before taking this course, in Shenzhen, China, where she worked for an NGO focusing on environmental protection in an exclusively Chinese environment.

3.3 Data collection

Major data collected and analyzed for the current study include students' performance in a mock job interview as the final assessment of this course and a semistructured interview with the student participants conducted after the end of the semester. All data collection instruments used in the present study can be freely downloaded on the IRIS Database. Meanwhile, class observations and students' written assignments are used as a reference and will only be presented when they correspond to the findings from the major set of data.

The mock job interview required students to meet with a Chinese instructor from another university they had never met on Zoom for 30 min. The mock job interview is contextualized as a screening interview, the purpose of which is to assess students' communication skills in handling professional interactions, as required for the internship, with less focus on students' domain knowledge. Specifically, the interview tested students' knowledge of various negotiation skills (see Appendix A for a list of specific tasks) introduced in the course and their ability to negotiate between what they choose to be and what they are expected to be in those scenarios frequently encountered in Chinese professional contexts. These scenarios, such as being forced to drink alcohol at a business banquet or encountering unintentionally offensive jokes from a culturally insensitive supervisor, are extensively documented in the existing literature (e.g., Jian & Shepherd, 2010; Shepherd, 2005) and are considered commonly encountered issues that have “amused, surprised, challenged, annoyed, or troubled” (Jian & Shepherd, 2010, p. 102) American learners and have serious impacts on their communicating with Chinese interlocutors. Although the main purpose of the interview is to assess students' ability in using those intercultural negotiation skills as practiced throughout the course, students are not discouraged from using other strategies so long as they fit. In other words, points are not taken off for not using a particular strategy as expected by the instructor, but for not meeting the criteria of a successful negotiation.

Moreover, considering the time limitation and the authenticity of the task, there is no back-and-forth negotiation that continues forever. Specifically, the interviewer always starts by presenting a situation that could potentially require negotiation. If the interviewee recognized the situation as a negotiable one and strategically attempted to negotiate an alternative course of action, the interviewer would either give in by accepting the alternative proposal, if it was acceptable, or expressed her dissatisfaction and sticked to the original plan if the negotiation was culturally inappropriate or the negotiated result was undesirable to the interviewer. On the contrary, if the interviewee did not recognize the situation as a negotiable one, the interviewer could either give them one more chance to negotiate or simply accept it as it is, depending on the situation. Students also engaged in a series of authentic tasks accompanying the interview. For example, a few weeks before the interview, students learned how to prepare a CV and write a cover letter appropriate to the cultural conventions. After the interviewer contacted the students, they were required to write a prompt response to confirm the interview date and time. After the interview, students also wrote thank-you notes to the interviewer and eventually responded via email to either an acceptance or rejection letter, depending on their interview performance.

Lastly, a semi-structured interview was conducted 1 week after the end of the semester. Three out of the four students participated in these 45–50-min interviews. In addition to the pre-planned interview questions, new issues that arose during the interview were also discussed. The interview questions covered students' opinions about helpful and unhelpful practices utilized in the course, evaluation of the pedagogical material in terms of its helpfulness and relatedness to student goals, difficulties encountered throughout the learning process, as well as a self-evaluation in terms of growth in language proficiency, cultural competence, motivation, and confidence.

3.4 Data analysis

Both the semi-structured interviews for this study and the final-assessment job interviews were recorded and transcribed. The transcripts were cross-checked to identify prominent themes as they related to our second research question, namely, students' experiences with the course and the material as well as their opinions about whether the class helped them construct a detailed vision of a work persona. When analyzing the job interview transcripts, the analysis focused on what type of skills the students were able to acquire that would benefit them during intercultural negotiations.

4.1 Learning outcomes: Gauging ability to perform intercultural negotiation

During the interviews, all students rated “Negotiate and Compromise,” “Leadership and Hierarchy,” and “Socializing in the Workplace and at the Banquet” as the three most useful themes. The commonality among them is that they all involve different levels of negotiation to accomplish goals without simply complying with their peers. In this section, we will report on all four students' performances in the course's final assessment, a mock job interview taking place on Zoom. A detailed analysis of the 30-min interviews allowed us to determine what students have learned after one semester in terms of linguistic skills, cultural awareness and most importantly, ability to perform intercultural negotiation.

In 6 of the 15 tasks (see Appendix A), all four students demonstrated a high level of linguistic accuracy and cultural appropriateness. They included writing a preinterview email, greetings and self-introductions, responding to a potentially embarrassing compliment, disagreeing with the supervisor, toasting at a banquet and composing an acceptance email for the job offer. A close look at students' discourse performances revealed that at the lexical level, the students had successfully acquired expressions that can accurately index their social, affective and/or epistemic stances. For example, when referring to the company to which they applied, all four students consistently used “your distinguished company” (贵公司) as an honorific term in both written and spoken discourse to demonstrate humbleness and a high level of formality. In addition, students also were quick to pick up on formulaic expressions commonly used in particular contexts, such as downplaying a compliment, enthusiastically proposing a toast and making implicit suggestions. Their uses of conventional expressions were both accurate and relevant due to the extensive input and practice from both classroom activities and the material. Furthermore, the communicative strategies utilized by the students were very similar to those in the textbook dialogues. For example, in Task 7, a scenario is presented in which an employee disagrees with his or her supervisor's choice of personnel and must find an appropriate way to suggest an alternative candidate. In all four recorded performances, the students chose circumvention by first positively responding to the supervisor's proposal by highlighting the parts with which they agreed while subtly showing their disagreement by raising questions or sharing their concerns. At the end of the conversation, students casually emphasized their preferred candidate's strengths while avoiding comparisons with the first candidate. It was clear that every step of this negotiation was enhanced by their solid linguistic skills.

For other tasks (see Tasks 6, 9, 10, 14 in Appendix A), although students were confident about what strategies to apply in the given situations, they were not fully linguistically prepared to communicate their intentions clearly or coherently. One common issue found among the four is making unnecessary comments. For example, when the interviewer expressed her high expectations regarding the interviewee's ability to play an important role in the company, Lily used the idiomatic expression “carve and polish” (切磋) from the textbook to demonstrate modesty, indicating that she and her colleagues could learn from each other by exchanging views. However, this nearly perfect response was marred by an awkward addition of another sentence to display modesty that she had vaguely memorized from the textbook “I do not deserve their asking for my advice.” (请教可不敢当), which was completely irrelevant to the situation as the interviewer had not mentioned anyone needing to consult her at all. The same issue was found with Sasha when she added she hoped to contribute to eliminating the great “estrangement” (隔阂) between the two cultures. Despite her inaccurate use of the word “estrangement,” bringing up a negative aspect during the interview was also inappropriate.

Although students strategically handled more than half of the tasks as shown above, there were a few (see tasks 4, 5, 11, 12, 13 in Appendix A) for which they could not properly negotiate as expected. In two situations, students were asked to properly convey their disagreement with stereotypes and biases. They were expected to strategically correct the bias underlying the interviewer's comments while avoiding a face-threatening debate. As one of the strategies introduced in the textbook students could first conditionally agree with the acceptable part of the comment and then present their own contradictory perspectives while downplaying their epistemic authority through modal expressions. Two types of issues appear in students' performances—they were either too eager to correct the offensive opinion or they circumvented the main issue without showing any disagreement at all. For example, when the interviewer commented that she heard American students were not hardworking at school and the American education system was too easy on students, Sasha bluntly responded with a strong “No” (沒有) and then stated her opinion. In another case, after the interviewer expressed her opinion that southerners in the United States are backward, both Jake and Sasha began discussing differences between the north and the south without directly responding to the offensive comments. Such irrelevant talk could not qualify as a successful negotiation.

4.2 Confidence and motivation: Envisioning a successful professional self

In this section, the researchers will report on the extent to which students successfully constructed a vision of a professional self by the end of the course, and identify some practices designed to enhance visualization of success that have been built into the course and learning materials. As previously revealed in section 2.3, it is common to analyze narrative data from interviews on language learners' self identified learning experiences so as to explore their vision development. In this study, particularly, the analysis will be made on students' self-evaluations of their growth in terms of linguistic and cultural competence as well as their confidence and motivation.

Based on Lily's comment, that particular class was identified from the recorded data. During the activity, the instructor had the students chat with a man holding a mug next to the water dispenser on her PowerPoint slide, who was dubbed as the interns' supervisor. Students were required to engage in a relatively casual conversation about their impressions of the city and compare it to other Chinese cities they had experienced in a positive way. Recorded class videos revealed that the instructor frequently used authentic images with vivid details to establish the setting for the contextualized performances. As the class had gone virtual by that time, the instructor often had the students use authentic photos, like the dining hall of a dim sum restaurant, as their Zoom virtual backgrounds to enhance the realness of the context.

5.1 The skills students gain from a negotiation-themed LSP curriculum

After one semester of intense training, students were able to recognize that most situations are negotiable and to efficiently identify the shared goals that motivate interaction. For example, when excessively praised by the interviewer, rather than revealing their embarrassment or simply accepting the compliments, all students were eager to utilize that opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of Chinese culture by politely and modestly praising the company in return. Students have internalized the “experiences” they accumulated by studying the textbook and practicing negotiation skills through role play in class.

It is obvious that students were able to use the negotiation strategies for the final assessment when they were presented with similar situations. When handling these negotiation tasks, students established a certain level of automaticity and accuracy in their speech, especially when using conventional expressions. However, in some less familiar situations, they sometimes could not sustain such fluency and accuracy.

Despite these tremendous gains, the limited one-semester class might be insufficient to provide students with enough input for them to perform adequately in all situations. It is an even greater challenge for students to determine what is improper behavior and conversation in particular situations than what is appropriate. In addition, although students were able to recognize most of the obviously negotiable situations, the greatest challenge facing students, which requires more time and training, was to recognize various types of explicit and implicit negotiable meanings and to act accordingly. This is more ambiguous in some situations than others depending on the purpose of the negotiation and how smoothly a mutually desired communicative result can be achieved. Students were unable to successfully perform because they still lacked the ability to read between lines and tended to take some culturally conventional expressions literally. In other situations, the fact that they were participating in a “mock” interview also prevented the students from taking the situation realistically and seeing the necessity of negotiating, such as to negotiate the starting date of the job.

5.2 Toward the construction of a professional L2 self

Based on students' self-evaluations of their learning experiences as summarized in 4.2, three key aspects that work collaboratively to enhance the construction of a professional vision were identified: (1) introducing a role model; (2) visualizing the workplace in detail; (3) creating a holistic view of one's own learning experiences. These three aspects correspond well to the five facets of visualizing language learning proposed by Dörnyei and Kubanyiova (2014, p. 37). As revealed in the interview, students perceived the main character in the textbook as a role model. Although in real life, he might not be easy for the students to relate to, having such a role model allowed them to constantly reflect on what they have learned about Chinese culture and their personal experiences of interacting with Chinese people in the past. Meanwhile, by imitating the communicative strategies adopted by the role model, students felt more prepared for their future internship which mitigated their stress to a certain extent. Furthermore, our study shows that a fictional role model introduced in the training process may be an ideal guide for presenting proper behaviors.

Another aspect closely related to the use of role models is the act of visualization. The fact these students had all lived in China for a period of time contributed to the ease with which they were able to visualize a realistic workplace. Describing the tasks as “real” also indicated that previous experiences helped them to successfully recall the details of living in China. By the same token, tangible images showing the detailed arrangement of an office provided students with strong sensory elements to help them establish an enhanced vision of a work self. Details like standing by a water dispenser and drinking a mug of coffee while chatting, as recalled by Lily, served as the “tasters,” a term coined by (p. 46) Dörnyei and Kubanyiova (2014), that provide sensory glimpses of the bigger picture to help students to visualize themselves using the new language in the future. It may not be a coincidence that Lily, the only subject who had interned in China, was the one who mentioned the helpfulness of the workplace details. In addition to those teaching props, the storyline of Mr. Rogers' experiences as well as every learning activity including the final assessment also provided students with a guided imagery experience that closely resembles the professional situation they will encounter in the near future.

Lastly, to help learners cultivate a professional L2 self, it is also essential for instructors and students themselves to gain a holistic understanding of their current concerns and previous learning experiences. Particularly in the current study, all four participants were facing their upcoming capstone year and feeling the anxiety. Being aware that this course was specifically designed to address their upcoming needs and concerns in Chinese workplaces, students were more motivated to achieve the course goals, and once they did, they gained a strong sense of achievement. From students' interview data, it is also clear that encouraging students to reflect on their previous learning experiences is equally important as understanding their current concerns. Students were able to see a link between the current curriculum and their previous academic experiences and environment, which made it easier for them to commit to the current pedagogical objectives and to invest their time and efforts accordingly. Meanwhile, all students focused on what they were not able to do before and what they have achieved in this course, such as Lily, who was able to understand the mistakes and misunderstandings she suffered during her previous internship. Reflecting on the past self also helps Lily to recognize her improvements in navigating professional contexts.

5.3 Implications for preparing students for professional experiences abroad

5.4 Limitations of the current study

Given the difficulty of finding advanced-level Chinese learners who can use Chinese in professional settings, as revealed in previous research (McAloon, 2008; Zeng, 2018), this study focuses on all four CFP students taking the LSP capstone course before their departure. Although this small sample size has limitations that may reduce the generalizability of the findings, performances analyzed in this study have clearly illustrated that the negotiated-themed LSP course shows promise as an effective means of training students to negotiate cultural boundaries between local expectations. Students' performances in mock job interview also allowed the researchers to include rich construction and deep descriptions about challenges facing students in intercultural negotiation, which requires more time and effective training in the future. Moreover, the three participants' personal accounts of their respective learning processes within the course exemplify Dörnyei's description of constructing the ideal L2 self. These findings not only provide a glimpse into how Chinese learners develop a detailed vision of themselves as global professionals, but also invite further investigation into those specific aspects of enhancing the construction of a professional self, as revealed in this study.

Indeed, as a qualitative study with a smaller sample size, the current study has its own limitations that might not lead to widescale generalizability. The use of a fictional male American character as the major role model for vision construction does not satisfy the needs of students with different genders or ethnic backgrounds. Therefore, in the next stage, as originally included but eventually left out in the current study due to the pandemic, a follow-up study focusing on the students while they are studying and interning in China or even after they return will further enrich our understanding of the strengths and limitations of the current negotiation-themed LSP course. In addition, an adoption of various types of role models as well as role models with diversified backgrounds should be implemented.