Reformulation in Institutional Counselling

Abstract

This study investigates how reformulations are realized in institutional counselling conversations with local and international students at the International Office of Utrecht University. Six reformulation strategies (Chiang & Mi, 2008) were identified and analyzed with a Counselling Pattern (Cheung, 2018), which reconstructed the institutional pattern of the counselling conversations. It was found that local students reformulate their advice requests more often than international students. Another result was that both international and local students confirm the advice that is given by the international officer by using reformulations. Finally, a tendency was identified that international officers gave additional advice by reformulating the original advice more often in the conversations with international students. The aim of this study is to contribute to intercultural trainings that are organized for international office staff by the Intercultural Competences for Utrecht University (ICUU) project.