Bridging Classroom Mandarin and Workplace Communication: Challenges and Adaptive Strategies among Student Interns in a Chinese Company

Abstract

This study examines how Mandarin Language Education students navigate the transition from classroom learning to workplace communication during internships in a Chinese company in Indonesia. Its main contribution is an integrated, empirically grounded account that links the Mandarin communication barriers interns encounter to the competence-related and contextual factors behind them and to the social, linguistic, nonverbal, and digital strategies used to manage them, an integration rarely addressed within a single analytic framework in prior Mandarin education research. A descriptive qualitative case study design was used. All 12 interns placed at the company completed a Likert-scale questionnaire providing descriptive supporting data on general tendencies in barriers, factors, and strategies; five were then purposively selected, based on placement division, internship duration, and experience using Mandarin at work, for in-depth semi-structured interviews. Data were analyzed using the interactive model of Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña, guided by DeVito's noise typology, communicative competence, and Tarone's communication-strategy taxonomy. Findings show that semantic noise (technical vocabulary and grammatical-register difficulties) and psychological noise (anxiety and low confidence) were more salient than physical noise. These challenges were linked to a classroom-workplace vocabulary gap, limited company language training, division-specific tasks, and communication situations with supervisors or coworkers. Interns responded through clarification, help-seeking, paraphrase, circumlocution, gesture, translation applications, and generative AI, used adaptively rather than as fixed techniques. The findings highlight the need for internship-oriented Mandarin preparation integrating technical vocabulary, pronunciation, contextual cross-cultural awareness, and critical use of digital translation tools