Campus Decorum : The realisation of apologies, complaints and requests by Nigerian and German students

Academic mobility is on the increase. So are the challenges that accompany it, one of which concerns communication. Therefore, it is necessary that pragmatic studies in intercultural communication investigate communication in academic communities, especially in the international campuses. This study is a cross-cultural analysis of student-lecturer communication on two campuses which represent two different cultural contexts namely, Nigeria and Germany. The similarities and differences between the linguistic realisation strategies of fifty Nigerian students and fifty German students at the University of Bayreuth are analysed using communicative acts categorisation frameworks from Anchimbe (2018), Cohen et al (1981), and Trosborg (1995). Three research questions guide the analysis in this work. The first two research questions guide the analysis of data collected by means of discourse completion task (Blum-Kulka 1989, Anchimbe 2018); what are the similarities and differences in preferred apology, complaint and request strategies in both contexts and what are the social norms invoked by Nigerian students? The third research question seeks to identify transfers of preferred greeting strategies by Nigerian students at the university of Bayreuth, cases of irritations and how repair is achieved. Results show that there are more differences than similarities in group preferences. Nigerian students’ strategies portray social norms, such as consideration and respect for age, gender and social status, social roles of older persons, social value for family and education, the role of finance in education, and religious beliefs, etc. Transfers of Nigerian students’ preferred greeting and address forms are confirmed in the thirty electronic mails collected from Nigerian students at the University of Bayreuth. Student’s metainformation confirm cases of irritation in which lecturers at the University of Bayreuth initiate repair by caution and suggestion of contextually appropriate forms either per email or in class. Based on these findings, group-specific orientation schemes are highly recommendable if relieve on student-lecturer communication, ease of integration of international students and generally, effective interaction on international campus are in focus.