Studying the impact of academic mobility on intercultural competence: a mixed-methods perspective

This paper contributes to the study of the impact of academic mobility on the development of students’ intercultural competence (IC). Following Byram, IC is seen as comprising the three components of knowledge, behaviour and attitude. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach, analysing the results of a quantitative pre-stay post-stay survey administered to 110 students from 2 universities in Catalonia (Spain), as well as one student’s discursive construction of this impact during her study abroad (SA). The analysis explores the potential complementarity of the two perspectives. Findings show that for this group of students, SA of between 5 and 10 months had a stronger impact on the knowledge component of IC than on the behaviour and attitude components. The analysis of an individual student’s experiential narratives is used to shed light on the challenge of personal ‘change’ in adapting to the ‘difference’ of the SA context.


Introduction
The analysis of the impact of academic mobility on the development of students' intercultural competence (IC) has often been based on methodological approaches focussing on the 'product' or outcome of the study abroad (SA) experience by employing surveys or tests (e.g. Llanes and Muñoz 2013), interviews (e.g. Allen and Herron 2003) and, to a lesser extent, role-plays (e.g. Lafford 1995) or diaries and blogs (e.g. Hassall 2006). There has also been a line of research focussing on the 'process', through the adoption of an ethnographic perspective and paying attention to the day-to-day experience of the students as seen by themselves or by others (e.g. Jackson 2006). This paper reports on the results of a mixed-methods study that aims to overcome this dichotomy by combining (a) a product-oriented quantitative analysis involving an IC questionnaire administered to a group of students from two universities in Catalonia (Spain) before and after their academic stay abroad in a European country, and (b) a processoriented qualitative analysis of how an SA student discursively constructs her experience during her SA by resorting to specific elements of her new environment and adopting particular stances towards them. The analysis of the data explores the potential complementarity of the two perspectives in order to better understand the impact of academic mobility on the development of students' IC.
This paper is divided into three main sections. We first review the literature on the study of IC, its connections with SA and different proposals that have been put forward for its assessment. The following section introduces the mixed-methods approach adopted for the research as well as the data on which it is based. The analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data is then presented, followed by an exploration of the possible complementarity of the two analyses. The paper closes with a summary of the results and discussion of the possible implications of the study.
Background IC is defined as 'abilities to adeptly navigate complex environments marked by a growing diversity of peoples, cultures and lifestyles' (UNESCO 2013: 5). More specifically, IC is usually defined as the set of attitudes, skills and knowledge that allows us to communicate and interact effectively (in relation to one's own view) and appropriately (in relation to the other's view) with people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds (Fantini and Tirmizi 2006). The IC construct has been researched, defined and operationalised from different perspectives and in different contexts such as education, counselling, business and management, mostly with a view to assessing levels of IC and helping people enhance their IC. IC has also been studied from the perspectives of language learning and intercultural communication. In the first case, language and culture are assumed to be interwoven, and this is what has led scholars like Agar (1994) or Risager (2006) to use the term languaculture, in an attempt to emphasise the reciprocal influence between language use and culture. In the second case, intercultural communication skills are nowadays considered crucial in our increasingly interconnected and globalised world.
Many theories of IC draw upon the dominant idea that human competences consist of motivation, knowledge and skills, though context and outcomes have also been acknowledged as significant influences. Because competence has been associated with deployment of a particular behaviour or set of skills, there has been much research on skills. For example, drawing on Deardorff (2011), the UNESCO report (2013: 24) cited above lists the following seven basic skills for attaining minimal IC: respect (i.e. valuing of others), self-awareness (understanding the lens through which we view the world), seeing from other perspectives or world views, listening, adaptation (ability to shift temporarily into a different perspective), relationship building (forging lasting cross-cultural personal bonds) and cultural humility (a combination of respect and self-awareness). Underlying these skills is the notion of change or adaptability, which is inherent to becoming interculturally competent and which a number of theories subdivide into adjustment, assimilation and adaptation (e.g. Kim 1991).
The application of different models of IC (e.g. Bennett 1993;Byram 1997;Deardoff 2006) has been criticised as having certain biases (ethnocentric Western or European, self-selection, social desirability) and as based excessively on self-reports, which sometimes only seem to reflect sojourners' difficulties as key experiences (Dervin 2010;Salisbury 2011;Williams 2005). Other criticisms that have been made of these models (Spitzberg and Changnon 2009) are that motivation, knowledge and skills are not necessarily separable components and they do not take into account the physiological and emotional side of interactants, often depicted as too rational and self-conscious human beings. Finally, the conceptualisation of adaptability is also questioned, as it is not clear to what extent it is the sole responsibility of the sojourner. For example, the interculturality of the local people in the host culture is now regarded as important too (Dervin and Layne 2013) and it is recognised that adjustment should be reciprocal between both the sojourner and their local counterparts (Lam 2006). However, the extent to which both must adapt to one another remains unclear (Spitzberg and Changnon 2009). While our study certainly suffers from some of these biases, it represents a first attempt to overcome some of the limitations by combining quantitative data from a pre-and post-stay self-report questionnaire with qualitative data from two different formats of 'while-stay' self-reports in which the individual participant's self-expression is simultaneous with the experience of SA, and therefore less constrained by the nature of the research instrument.
An important characteristic of research into IC is that it has been widely studied as an outcome of SA experiences as these latter are assumed to enhance both foreign language skills and IC in terms of knowledge of, and skills in dealing with, a new culture. Many studies have probed the impact of SA on individuals' IC and language learning, exploring in particular factors such as the length of SA stay and the geographic and cultural distance between home and SA settings (Byram and Feng 2006). These foci can be explained by two main assumptions. The first is the belief that for people to be able to understand their own country and describe their country's culture through an objective lens, they must have been abroad (Catteeuw 2012). The second assumption is grounded in Allport's Contact hypothesis (Allport 1954), which posited that prejudice by one group toward another could be reduced if individuals participated in sustained interpersonal contact (Spencer-Rodgers and McGovern 2002), provided there was equality between groups, engagement toward a shared goal, opportunity to develop the level of intimacy necessary to contradict previously held stereotypes and the support of an authority figure.
Hence, contact among students from different backgrounds and the immersion that SA provides have often been conceptualised as drivers of enhanced IC (Byram and Dervin 2008;Fantini 2005;Kinginger 2013;Messelink, van Maele and Spencer-Oatey 2015;Salisbury 2011). While a strand of research points to SA as an experience that not only makes participants more open-minded and more respectful toward others but also helps them gain a better knowledge/insight into themselves, studies such as Salisbury (2011) partly challenge the Contact hypothesis. Salisbury found that although SA influences students' diversity of contact, it has no statistically significant effect on students' relativistic appreciation of cultural differences, and he claims that growth in ethnorelativism is not limited to the confines of college experience, as other students who stay on campus can also experience comfort with diversity.
In similar vein, Williams (2005) concluded that (a) intercultural exposure prior to the SA semester, rather than the actual stay abroad, was more predictive of high IC scores, (b) initially high levels of IC skills left little room for increase and (c) gender and academic major might be better predictors of ethnorelativism, as female students and students majoring in communication were found to have higher increases than male students and students majoring in business. Although in Alkheshnam's (2012) study, females, older individuals, minority individuals, and individuals who were multilingual did tend to have higher levels of IC, other intervening factors have also been highlighted, such as the factor of time spent abroad, prior intercultural experiences, contextual factors (such as social and economic status) or institutional support. Recent studies have examined students' motivations (Krzaklewska 2008) and pointed to the lack of correspondence between students' motivations and purposes for their SA, on the one hand, and the idealised objectives of increased multilingualism, on the other. The lasting effects of SA may extend to even 10 years after SA (Alred and Byram 2002), though in very different ways for different people (Alred and Byram 2006). Finally, for both short and long stays, the impact of SA can be enhanced through institutional support and the integration of intercultural learning into the curriculum, with initiatives such as 're-entry' post-sojourn courses (Jackson 2013;Messelink, van Maele and Spencer-Oatey 2015) or better institutional support before, during and after SA.
IC has been measured through a wide array of approaches and research methods. Sinicrope, Norris and Watanabe (2007: 12-31) distinguish between indirect assessment methods, basically consisting of self-reports in the form of surveys, and direct methods, which comprise performance assessment, portfolio assessment and interviews. In their view, indirect methods are less time-consuming than direct ones but their main shortcoming is that they risk 'social desirability bias' (Sinicrope, Norris and Watanabe 2007: 27), while direct methods 'potentially offer more complete assessments of intercultural competence because they can provide more detailed, nuanced and individualized accounts' (28). Later conceptualisations of IC have contested views of interculturality that envisage culture as a 'static subjectivity-less cultural representative' (Dervin and Liddicoat 2013: 6) and instead have focussed on the internal diversity in human beings and in society. Given this recent rethinking of interculturality, which essentially sees culture as changing and evolving across contexts, languages and subjects, qualitative methods may be more appropriate tools to explore human diversity and study a case in point in greater depth. This is one of the goals of this study. Thus, qualitative assessment tools like portfolio assessment, interviews, journal writing and ethnographic studies, which seek to elicit individuals' ability to display IC and to observe their intercultural behaviour, tend to be predominant research methods (Byram and Feng 2006).
These research methods that have been used to investigate IC are, of course, not free from controversy. Among the reasons for this are the following: (a) subjects are not always honest in self-reports; (b) competences, like emotions and affect, are unstablesee, for example, Dervin (2010) on IC assessment in language learning and teaching and (c) subjects sometimes tend to remember only difficulties when reflecting on the key aspects of their international experience. As a consequence, and in an attempt to overcome these caveats, blended or mixed tools have been on the rise more recently in order to achieve a more comprehensive account and understanding of IC phenomena. A wellknown example of this is the Intercultural Competence Assessment project (INCA) (Prechtl and Lund 2007). The present study borrows from this line of mixed-methods research. Even though self-reports have been criticised due to the sometimes highly subjective criteria and memories of sojourners, we think this limitation can be largely overcome if the researcher has been properly trained and takes these problems into account.

Methodology
A mixed-methods approach In this study, we adopt a mixed-methods approach, in which 'a researcher or a team of researchers combines elements of qualitative and quantitative research approaches (e.g. viewpoints, data collection, analysis, inference techniques) for the broad purpose of breadth and depth of understanding and corroboration' (Johnson, Onwuegbuzie and Turner 2007: 123). In our view, our research focus requires both 'a structured quantitative and an emergent and holistic qualitative type of approach' (Teddlie and Tashakkori 2010: 18, emphasis in the original); in order to fully explore the impact of academic mobility on intercultural experience, we need to survey changes in students' IC, using quantifiable means to allow for comparative analyses with other studies, but we also need take into account how the impact of a SA experience may be seen through the process of discursive constructions that the students themselves make for others (i.e. family, friends or, as in our case, a researcher) during their stay abroad. Of the five purposes that Riazi and Candlin (2014) mention for mixed-methods research (i.e. triangulation, complementarity, development, initiation and expansion), this study could be included within the 'expansion' purpose, as it aims to extend the depth of the quantitative analysis by exploring the discourse of one participant who could be considered representative of the group for whom, according to the quantitative assessment, the SA experience had a lower impact. We believe that the linguistic micro-analysis of two self-reports produced by this student can shed light on why and how the impact of a SA experience on IC might be limited.
We thus aim to answer the following two research questions: (1) what is the impact of academic mobility on IC as measured by a quantitative survey, and (2) how is this impact discursively constructed by an SA student, taking into account two key elements in the development of IC: (a) apprehension and acceptance of 'difference' and (b) willingness and capacity to 'change'? The focus of this second question derives not only from the fact that, as pointed out above, the notion of personal 'change' (or adaptability) as a response to encountering 'difference' seems to be an essential element in the definition of IC, but also from the fact that the student herself addressed these themes spontaneously in her self-reports. After addressing each of these questions, we will try to relate the quantitative and the qualitative analyses by exploring any possible connections that come out of the 'intercultural profile' of the specific student as obtained by means of the quantitative assessment tool and the analysis of two textual productions produced by herself in collaboration with one of the researchers.
Quantitative datathe pre-stay post-stay questionnaire A total of 110 students from 2 different universities in Catalonia (Spain) completed a questionnaire assessing their IC both before and after a period of SA. Sixty-five participants spent a semester abroad, while 45 completed a whole academic year. The SA host countries were mainly northern European countries (The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Germany, Lithuania and UK) and, to a lesser extent, central and southern European countries such as Poland or Italy. The questionnaire employed Likert scales, drawing on the scales used by the INCA project (2004), Deardoff (2006), Fantini and Tirmizi (2006) and especially Alkheshnam (2012), summarised in Table 1. In general, only the scales that were common among the different sources (marked in italics in Table 1) were adopted. As it was not possible to administer the questionnaire to all the students in one physical place, given that students came from two different universities, 38.1% of the participants completed the survey online.
The questionnaire included a total of 43 items divided into 3 sections which correspond to Byram's (1997) Table 2.

Qualitative data
The qualitative part of the analysis focuses on two elicited self-reports produced by an undergraduate student (whom we will refer to as Mónica) participating in the quantitative survey, who embarked on a five-month SA experience in Denmark. By focussing on a single focal case, we do not claim that our conclusions can necessarily be applied to a more general population. However, we do support Flyvbjerg's (2011: 301) idea that a case study, which 'may be studied in a number of ways, for instance qualitatively or quantitatively, analytically or hermeneutically, or by mixed methods', comprises 'more detail, richness, completeness and variancethat is, depth' and, therefore it allows us to 'represent the unique nature of each experience' (Kinginger 2008: 61) and understand how individual particularities may affect 'the qualities of their experience' (Kinginger 2008: 112). We approach Mònica's discourse from the perspective of understanding how she constructs her encounter with 'difference' and the impact this encounter has on her 'self'.
The two elicited self-reports were produced in the middle of her stay abroad. The first consists of a text that the student was asked to write in English in which she described 'a typical day abroad'. The second takes the form of an interview in Catalan between Mònica, her roommate Helena, and one of the researchers. The interview took place in the middle of Mònica's SA period and it focussed mainly on her perception of the differences that she was encountering compared to 'home' and the extent to which she felt that the experience was changing her. The participant consented to have her reports recorded and anonymised for Interpreting and relating research purposes. As the analysis will show, the themes of 'difference' and 'change' are not directly elicited by the researchers but rather are introduced by the student. Thus, both data sourcesthe written self-report and the interviewallow us to see whether the encountered difference and the changes that, according to Mònica, she is undergoing, have to do with a 'move from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism' (Bennett 2004: 62).
Departing from the theoretical premise that individuals construct their identity through discourse (Norton 2010) and therefore language is inextricable from identity (Benwell and Stokoe 2006), we focus our analysis on the elements of Mònica's environment that she resorts to in order to construct her personal SA experience. The analysis adopts two main notions from discourse-analytical methods: 'membership categorisation device' and 'stance'. The notion of membership categorisation device, which we borrow from ethnomethodology (Hester and Francis 1997), allows us to explore the ways in which Mònica categorises her new sociocultural environment. Although most of the work in ethnomethodology has focussed on how social members categorise other social members (see, for instance, Schegloff 2007;Stokoe 2012), in this study, we follow McHoul and Watson (1984) by considering any categorisation (including personal and non-personal referents as well as actions/events) that Mònica makes in the course of the reflective narratives she shares with the researcher. With the notion of stance (Jaffee 2009), we can also focus on how she positions herself towards that world. In other words, in our analysis of the texts produced by the student, we are interested in (a) the 'elements of the world' that she resorts to in order to construct her experience and (b) how she relates to those elements.

Data analysis Questionnaire
The analysis of the students' responses to the questionnaire aimed at answering two main questions: (1) in what ways does the students' IC change between pre-and post-stay? and (2) are there any correlations between length of stay (one term vs. one academic year) and changes in any aspect of IC?
In order to carry out the analysis, the distribution of the data was first tested and it was found that most of the variables violated the assumption of normality. Therefore, a non- • Ethnorelativism (items 4-7) • Culture-specific information (items 20, 25, 26, 27) • Intercultural adaptation and communicative awareness (items 32-34) • Tolerance (items 8-10) • Cultural self-awareness (items 21-23) • Interpreting and relating (items 35, 36) • Empathy (items 11-14) • Sociolinguistic awareness (items 24, 28) • Critical cultural awareness (items 37-39) • Tolerance for ambiguity (items 15-18) • Perspective taking (items 40-43) parametric test was run to answer the first research question. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test was employed in order to see whether there would be statistically significant differences between the pre-and the post-stay responses on all of the 43 questionnaire items. As can be seen by comparing the M pre-stay and M post-stay scores in Table 3, participants experienced significant gains on 19 out of the 43 items. Table 3 shows that participants, on average, display quite a high degree of IC prior to their SA, which echoes previous findings (Williams 2005). However, the SA experience still had a further positive, though small, impact on almost half the items of the questionnaire. The only item in which participants showed a significant decrease was number 6 (I see no good reason to pay attention to what happens in other countries), where it was found that the SA experience caused a reverse effect, i.e. on return from their stay abroad students were slightly more in agreement with the statement than before leaving.
If we look at which of the 3 components of IC are most positively affected by SA, the 'knowledge' component stands out as showing most gains, as 7 out of 10 items (70%) showed a significant increase. The next component is 'behaviour' with 6 items out of 15 (40%). Finally, in the 'attitude' component, we find only 5 out of 18 items (27.7%) showing a significant increase, as can be seen in Table 4. Attitude is thus the component that is least susceptible to change. According to our findings, then, different aspects of IC may be affected differently by SA. This is true even within the three components. In the case of the attitude component, we can see that of the seven items comprising the 'tolerance/tolerance of ambiguity' scales, only one shows an increase. In the knowledge component, the scale that appears to be most resistant to change is 'deep understanding of knowledge and culture'. Finally, in the behaviour component, the scales most resistant to change are 'intercultural adaptation' and 'communicative awareness' (three items) and 'perspective taking' (four items) where no items show a significant increase.
In summary, the students in this study increased their IC after their SA experience first and foremost in terms of the knowledge component (70% of the component items); the items making up 'cultural self-awareness' and 'sociolinguistic self-awareness' all showed an increase and one of the two items comprising 'culture-specific information' increased. These results support Fantini and Tirmizi's (2006) claim that self-awareness is a key component in IC.
In second place, the behaviour component also showed significant gains post-SA but on a much lower percentage of items (40% of the component items). The scales concerned were 'behavioural openness' and 'critical cultural awareness', where all items showed a significant increase, and 'interpreting and relating', with a significant increase on one of the two items.
Finally, the lowest impact of the academic stay abroad was on the attitude component (27.7% of the component items), and in this case, the increase is concentrated in students' 'openness', with all items comprising this construct showing an increase, and to a much lesser extent on the scales of 'ethnorelativism', 'empathic concern' and 'tolerance for ambiguity', where only one out of four component items in each case increased.
In order to answer the second research question, Spearman Rho bivariate correlations were run between length of stay (one term vs. one academic year) and the items showing a significant change between pre-stay and post-stay. Very few significant correlations with length of stay were found; those that were, included item 1 (r = 0.302**, p = .001), item 29 (r = 0.218, p = .026) and item 35 (r = 0.194, p = .049). In other words, participants who spent an academic year abroad scored significantly higher than those spending one term only on just three items: item 1 (I like the differences that exist between myself and people from other countries, races and ethnic groups), item 29 (I travel to other countries) and item 35 (I often compare things in other cultures with   similar things in my own culture). In general, length of stay did not seem to have a major impact on our participants' development of IC.
The discursive construction of 'difference' and 'change' The qualitative part of the analysis focuses on narratives produced by Mònica, one of the 110 students who responded to the survey. She produced these narratives when she was in the middle of her five-month stay in Denmark. If we consider the post-stay survey, Mònica's scores show a level of IC which is slightly lower than the average on 12 items and higher than average on seven of the 19 items in which we found a significant change between pre-stay and post-stay. On 11 items, her post-stay score was either the same or lower than the corresponding pre-stay score. These items were distributed as in Table 5. If we add the items with lower and equal scores, we could suggest that Mònica's fivemonth stay abroad in Denmark had a relatively low impact on her IC and that this impact shows a similar pattern to that for the rest of the group, with knowledge as the component experiencing the greatest impact and attitude as the component in which we find the lowest impact.

Encountering 'difference'
In the first elicited narrative that we focus on for this study, Mònica was asked to take pictures of all the key moments that, according to her, made up a typical day abroad and then write a text in English describing what her day abroad was normally like. Table 4. Questionnaire items showing a significant change between the pre-and post-measurements.

Component Scales
Knowledge 70% • Deep understanding and knowledge of culture: no significant change • Culture-specific information: significant increase in 2 out 4 items • Cultural self-awareness: significant increase in 3 out of 3 items • Sociolinguistic self-awareness: significant increase in 2 out of 2 items Behaviour 40% • Behavioural openness: significant increase in 2 out 2 items • Intercultural adaptation and communicative awareness: no change • Interpreting and relating: significant increase in 1 out of 2 items • Critical cultural awareness: significant increase in 3 out of 3 items.
• Perspective taking: no significant change Attitude 27.7% • Openness: significant increase in 3 out of 3 items • Ethnorelativism: significant increase in 1 out of 4 items • Tolerance: no significant change • Empathic concern: significant increase in 1 out of 4 items.
• Tolerance for ambiguity: significant increase in 1 out of 4 items Table 5. Monica's scores in the post-stay survey compared to pre-stay scores.
Post-scores lower than pre-scores Equal score at preand post-stay Post-scores higher than pre-scores Attitude (6 items) 2 2 2 Knowledge (7 items) 2 2 3 Behaviour (6 items) 1 2 3 Without being asked, Mònica organised the narrative of her 'day abroad' around the differences that she encountered on a daily basis compared to her previous daily routine at home. We could therefore say that the categories to which she refers form part of the membership categorisation device 'difference'. This is made clear by the fact that she constantly uses adjective phrases like 'strange', 'unusual', 'not the same' and 'different' as 'category-resonant descriptions' (Schegloff 2007) of categories which she considers as cultural markers: the weather, the window blinds, the shower curtains, the trolley, the daily academic routine, the classroom dynamics and the students' eating habits. She even ends her description of her day abroad by describing what she expects her 'tomorrow' to be like: 'different'. Extract 1 shows how Mònica begins her description of 'a day abroad': Extract 1 All the days at university are different; we start at different times, sometimes at 8 o'clock, sometimes at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and so on. I couldn't imagine that it was like this!!
The membership categorisation device 'difference' also appears in the interview which two of the researchers held with Mònica and her Catalan friend Helena (HEL), with whom she shared the whole Erasmus experience. In this interview, as can be seen in Extract 2, Mònica and her friend establish a binary distinction between 'our things' and 'things here'; and also between 'the food that they eat' and 'the food that we eat' (authors' italics), which again reinforces the appraisal of those objects which Mònica is constructing as different.
Extract 2 HEL: ens hem intentat posar també lo nostre\ perquè els horaris si no ens l'han fet_ si ens diuen a les onze i mitja heu de dinar perquè a les dotze tenim classe_ nosaltres no dinaríem a les onze i mitja\ o sigui que també ens intentem emportar lo nostre\ we have tried to keep to our things\ because the timetables if they haven't done it for us, if they tell us that at half past eleven we have to have lunch because we have class at twelve_ we wouldn't have lunch at half past eleven\ so we also try to keep to our things\ Apart from specifying her environment into categories through which she constructs difference, Mònica also takes a stance towards these categories not just by means of adjectives like 'strange', 'different' or 'unusual' but also, in the case of the written narrative, by means of punctuation, capital letters and even emoticonsall of them serving different communicative functions. Mònica is constantly expressing an affective stance (Biber and Finegan 1989) of surprise through (a) the frequent use of exclamation marks, (b) the repetition of a sentence controlled by the negated modal verb 'could not imagine' and (c) the expression 'I freaked out'. Faced with so much difference, we notice that towards the end of her written narrative, Mònica says that she is 'trying to get used to it although it's difficult'.
Resisting 'change' Mònica's stance towards her daily encounter with difference, as expressed in her written narrative, is also addressed during the interview in answer to the researcher's question: 'How is it going in Denmark?' Mònica begins to orient herself to the membership categorisation device 'change' by describing her experience in Denmark as 'generally good, but for example all those changes we have found at the university … ' (en general bé, però per exemple a la universitat pues els canvis que hem trobat … ). By using the adversative conjunction 'but', Mònica makes it clear that the experience could be better. And the reason for this is precisely the 'changes' that they have experienced at the university. As she puts it, these 'changes'a synonym for 'differences'involve 'doing things differently' (t'implica fer una cosa diferent) and they force one to change ('whether you want it to or not, you have to change'vulguis o no has de canviar).
Despite Mònica's apparent acceptance of having to adapt to the new environment, it is interesting that when the researcher (RES) asks her whether she has changed at all, she hesitates and cannot immediately suggest one aspect in which she has changed. This may suggest resistance to change. This can also be seen in Extract 3 where Helena (HEL) also fails to give a specific answer in answer to the researcher's question about change. In response, the researchers feel obliged to suggest different categories that the students might use to exemplify how they have changed: Extract 3 RES: creieu que esteu canviant des del principi a ara amb alguna cosa/ heu notat algun canvi amb vosatres mateixos o amb l'altra/ (2) dieu vam arribar amb aquesta idea i ara ja no·_ do you think you've changed from the beginning until now in any aspect/ have you noticed any change within yourselves or in the other/ (2.) you say we got here with this idea and now we don't_ HEL: mm·· però· mm· (3) canvi en el sentit de que t'esperes una cosa i te'n trobes una altra/ mm·· bu·t mm· (3.) change, meaning that you expect one thing and you find another one/ RES: bueno que_ que_ * sí\ o que no en· * al principi no en menja-well_ that_ that_ * yes\ or that you do·n't * at the beginning you didn't eat-HEL: o canvi d'actitud o·_ or_ change in attitude o·r_ RES: o·_ o d'actitud o· de conducta\ no/ que dius al principi no menjava mai pa negre i ara sempre· * ara en menjo\ o· al principi no feia mai això i ara ho faig\ o·r_ or in attitude o·r in behaviour\ right/ that you say at the beginning I never ate black bread and now I alway·s * now I eat it\ o·r at the beginning I never did this and now I do\ MON: ah_ bueno_{(@) el muesli aquell que ens fa gràcia\} oh_ well_ {(@) that muesli that we like\} HEL: ah_ sí\ oh_ yes\ In the interview with the researchers, Mònica says that the university is different and that therefore you are somehow forced to change, if only from an academic point of view. When asked to specify what these changes are about, she refers to three different category-bound activities for the category 'student': 'having a couldn't-care-less attitude' (passotisme), 'using a laptop in class' (utilitzar el portàtil a classe), which 'is unthinkable' (és impensable) in her home university, and 'eating in class' (menjar a classe) during the lesson. Thus, Mònica mentions different ordinary activities in which she has inevitably had to change. Changes are not only to do with the incorporation of new activities in her life abroad but also with stopping doing some activities which for her were bound to the category 'student' before her SA experience. For example, Mònica and Helena say that in Denmark they 'don't wear high heels' (no portem talons) because they have noticed that when Danish women go out, 'they wear a dress and sport shoes' (van amb vestit i bambes) and therefore one 'doesn't need to worry about anything' (no t'has de preocupar per a res). Mònica and her friend refer here to another category-bound activity associated with the category 'student', which is 'going out at night' but in this case, the two students admit that they have changed because in Denmark they don't go out, whereas if they had been in their home country they 'would have gone out every week for sure' (haguéssim sortit cada setmana fijo).
Mònica chose the SA experience voluntarily and she says she expected to encounter 'a new country, new people and a new culture'. Mònica and Helena both say they respect other ways of doing things and they do 'try to adapt in some aspect' (ens intentem adaptar en algun sentit). Yet for them this adaptation 'is difficult' (costa) and they activate the categories 'timetable' and 'food' to exemplify two of the aspects in which they haven't changed. In the following extract, we can see that Mònica constructs her discourse of resistance to change by aligning with Helena's discourse. Although Mònica had previously said that she had changed in some aspects, in this extract, they both seem to eschew differences in the host environment and cling to habits from their home culture. In fact, at the end of the interview, they conclude that 'we have adapted, but we haven't integrated' (ens hem adaptat però no ens hem integrat). Extract 4 illustrates the students' stance of resistance to integration, which is summarised in Mònica's last utterance 'everything like us' (tot com nosaltres) when she explicitly says that they do everything as they would in Catalonia.
Extract 4 RES: ah·_ amb els horaris de menjar\ no· no·· no els· respecteu/ oh_ you don't keep to the meal schedule \ you don't_ you don't_ you don't keep to them\ HEL: no no\ o sigui per exemple avui_ no no\ I mean_ for example today_ MON: no\ no\ HEL: hem dinat a la una i mitja\ i_ i_ i si podem els caps de setmana dinem a la una i mitja\ we had lunch at half past one and_ and_ and if we can_ we have lunch at half past one at the weekend\ MON: sí\ sempre tard\ yes\ always late\ HEL: i el menjar tampoc es que· comprem lo que· ells mengin o mengem lo que ells mengen\ and we don't buy the food or eat the food that they eat either\ MON: no\ tot com nosaltres\ no\ everything like us\ Comparing quantitative and qualitative data As we have seen, the quantitative scores corresponding to the 19 questionnaire items showing a significant change before and after SA reflect a group of individuals who seem to be well prepared at the outset for their 'intercultural experience' and who develop their IC as a result of the SA. However, when we look in detail at those 19 items, we see that the students' experience of academic mobility only has a clear-cut impact on their knowledge; its impact on their behaviour or attitude is less significant. Given this finding, a possible conclusion might be that the 'redefinition' of the behaviour and attitude components of IC probably requires a much longer period of immersion in the new culture than was the case here. However, length of stay does not appear to be a determining factor when we compare the pre-and post-stay scores of the students spending one term abroad with those who spent an entire academic year. Indeed, among the attitude and behaviour components, we find three items that show that students' degree of 'openness' increases with a one-semester stay but decreases when the length of the stay abroad is a whole academic year. One explanation for this may be that a one-semester stay is short enough for a majority of students to remain within what has traditionally been referred to as the 'honeymoon stage' of intercultural adaptation while a one-year stay abroad means that students move into the 'crisis' or 'hostility' stage (see, for instance, Ting-Toomey 2005), In order to shed light on the processes that students go through and the reasons why they may accept or resist adaptation to the new environment, it is important to research further the discourses of 'difference' and 'change' that students construct in the process of reflecting upon their experience.
The analysis of the reflective narratives produced by Mònica two and half months into her SA period suggests a student profile that involves heightened awareness of 'difference' between her home environment and the new one but, at the same time, a stance of resistance to adapting to this difference. This heightened awareness is expressed by lexical and other graphological means, and it focuses on common cultural markers such as the weather, household objects and routines. However, it may be precisely this heightened awareness of difference in everyday life which makes Mònica adopt a stance of resistance. This stance is reflected, for instance, in the fact that when the researcher asks her about the SA experience, she responds 'generally good' but immediately afterwards adds an adversative clause pointing to obstacles in her adaptation process. Two more indexes of Mònica's resistance are her incapacity to respond immediately with a specific example when asked whether she has changed and her rather negative stance towards the 'inevitable' changes she has had to make in her ordinary life.
After the analysis of Mònica's reflective narratives, we can begin to glimpse a possible conflict between discourses of 'difference' and 'change' in the construction of her experience of academic mobility. It seems as if a heightened awareness of difference may render the students' enterprise of adapting to the new environment excessively daunting, given the limited period of time they have there. Faced with this perception of the risk of destabilisation due to the number of changes they have to make, the students may react by mounting stiff resistance to change.

Conclusion
The mixed-methods approach adopted in this paper in order to explore the impact of academic mobility on IC has allowed us, in the first place, to specify the degree and nature of this impact through pre-and post-stay quantitative measurements of the three main components of IC: attitude, knowledge and behaviour. From the students' collective profile, we see that they already show a high level of IC before their stay abroad, which may explain why we have not found dramatic increases in their post-stay scores on any of the 19 items where significant differences between pre-and post-stay were found. Our results suggest that the clearest impact of an academic mobility of one or two terms is an increase in knowledge about other cultures; the impact on behaviour and attitudes is not so clear. Furthermore, length of stay (one term vs. two) was found not to be a significant intervening factor. These results lead us to speculate not only about the possibility that changes in attitude and behaviour require a much longer period of time than an academic year in order to be affected, but also the possibility that it is precisely the limited duration of the academic mobility programme that predisposes students to resist changes in the two components of attitude and behaviour as a way of protecting themselves from the challenge of destabilisation of their identity.
The qualitative part of this study has allowed us to explore how the SA experience was categorised by one participant, and this seems to point again to what we interpret as students' resistance to modify their intercultural attitude and behaviour. Through the analysis of two experiential narratives, we have seen that the notion of 'difference' appears spontaneously in the student's discourse and clearly plays a dominant role in categorising her experience; in contrast, the notion of personal 'change' as a result of the SA experience is hardly present at all even after two and a half months. This may confirm our quantitative results, which show that a SA of between 5 and 10 months has significantly less impact on the attitude and behaviour components of IC than on the knowledge component. Personal 'change' can be seen as particularly involving changes in behaviour and attitudes; these may not only require longer immersion in the new culture but also may be conditional on students' willingness to modify their habits and on their perception that such modification is worthwhile in the time available.
The limited nature of the qualitative part of our study allows us only to hypothesise a line of analysis of SA discourse. In order to be able to draw more solid conclusions about the relevance of the discourses of 'difference' and 'change', it would be necessary not only to take into account the experiential narratives of the same student at different stages of her stay as well as the narratives of other students, but also the institutional discourse of SA to which students are exposed via institutional channels, such as from their own university, or less formal channels, such as students who have previously participated in a SA programme. At the institutional level, it seems particularly important to consider carefully students' individual expectations prior to their participation in a SA programme and work from these in order to prepare them for an enriching intercultural experience. Likewise, we think that universities should devote some attention to post-stay actions with returning students (as recommended by Jackson 2013; Messelink, van Maele and Spencer-Oatey 2015), in order to help them create from their personal experience abroad a solid basis on which to continue developing their IC.

Transcription conventions
. Laughter: All laughter and laughter-like sounds are transcribed with the @ symbol between the '+' symbol, approximating syllable number; utterances spoken laughingly appear between claudators. . Lengthening: Lengthened sounds are marked with one dot (·) or two dots (··) depending on the degree of lengthening. . Pauses: A number in parenthesis is used to indicate the duration in seconds of a pause. . Repetition: All voluntary and involuntary repetitions of words and phrases are transcribed. . Terminal pitch movement: Rising pitch movement is marked with a slash (/); falling pitch movement is marked with a backslash (\); continuing or level pitch movement is marked with an underscore (_). . Truncated word or utterance: An asterisk (*) indicates that the speaker has truncated a word or an utterance, leaving the end unuttered.