A Case Study on Cultivation of Intercultural Communication Competent: An Approach of Collaborative Blended teaching in EFL Classroom

Abstract

With the visualized analysis of CiteSpace 5.8 R1, the study presents findings on the emerging research issues of Intercultural Communication Competence (ICC) in EFL classroom. Since 2002, researchers have begun to explore the technology of telecollaboration to promote ICC from students’ perspective, but they seldom pay attention to the collaboration between teachers in ESP course with information technology - digital teaching platforms. Through the case study of the ESP course Intercultural Communication implemented at an application-oriented college, the paper tries to explore the efficacy of the approach, a collaborative blended teaching model between Chinese and foreign teachers, which aims to improve students’ ICC through lecture, case study, and project-based learning. With qualitative and quantitative data collection, the paper explores how the application of cooperative blended teaching in process, such as pedagogical objectives, selection of teaching materials and web tools, learning tasks, evaluation on students’ performance and achievement. The findings showed that students perceived the со-blended teaching positive for intercultural communication as teachers setting the models in well designed tasks. With the assistant of an online teaching platform, the problems students faced, such as pragmatic use of English, the lack of confidence in communication and strategies in English learning, can be solved.