Reading Intercultural Conflict in Film: Indonesian Undergraduate Students' Face-Negotiation Analyses through Pecha Kucha Presentation

Abstract

In spite of the fact that popular media is widely used in higher education to promote Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC), literature and language students frequently study intercultural encounters subjectively due to a lack of explicit, structured theoretical frameworks. To address this gap, this study investigates how 15 Indonesian International Undergraduate Program (IUP) English Literature students applied an integrated macro–micro analytical framework that combines Hofstede’s ‘Cultural Value Dimensions’ and Ting-Toomey’s ‘Face-Negotiation Theory’ (FNT) in order to analyze intercultural conflict in film and television through Pecha Kucha presentations (20 slides, 20 seconds each). Qualitative content analysis shows that Power Distance was the most frequently invoked dimension (87%), far resulting ‘Individualism–Collectivism’ (53%), as visual media readily dramatize spatial and status hierarchies. A striking finding reveals that resolution asymmetry emerged: while 73% of presentations diagnosed on-screen conflicts as driven by a ‘Dominating’ conflict style, 100% proposed ‘Integrating’ resolutions. Furthermore, in intergenerational family narratives, collectivist elders—rather than individualist characters—enacted dominating styles, indicating that ‘Power Distance’, rather than ‘Individualism–Collectivism’, predicts domination in hierarchical family settings. Notably, only 53% of students explicitly connected named cultural dimensions directly to interactional behaviors, demonstrating a tendency to apply theoretical concepts descriptively rather than explanatorily. These findings emphasize the need for pedagogical interventions that scaffold mechanism-level facework strategies, guiding tertiary learners beyond superficial cultural labeling toward nuanced intercultural reasoning