ENHANCING LANGUAGE AND CROSS-CULTURAL COMPETENCE THROUGH TELECOLLABORATION

Ricardo Casañ-Pitarch,Maria Luisa Carrió-Pastor,Iana Tikan,Olga Demydenko,Miguel Ángel Candel-Mora

doi:10.20535/2410-8286.214539

Abstract

This paper presents an experiment which focused on determining if a telecollaborative project work would help enhance students’ foreign language skills and cross-cultural competence. Students from Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and the Polytechnic University of Valencia worked together during the fall term in 2020, in which 56 Ukrainian and Spanish students were engaged in a telecollaborative programme – 32 were master degree students at Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, whereas the remaining 24 were bachelor engineering students at Polytechnic University of Valencia. Our students were engaged in a project work which consisted in the creation of a blog on the topic ‘Sustainable Development Today’. The tools used in this project were mostly Google applications such as Classroom, Hangouts, Blogger, Drive, and Docs. In order to measure their progress, students took pre-tests before the project started and a post-test after its completion. These tests focused on assessing learners’ language competence in English and also their cross-cultural competence. The language test used was designed by Cambridge University Press, whereas the cross-cultural test had been created by the Organizational Behavior Group (Piasentin, 2012). The latter focused on learners’ willingness to engage, cognitive flexibility and openness, emotional regulation, tolerance of uncertainty, self-efficacy, and ethnocultural empathy. As expected, the students who participated in this virtual exchange programme enhanced their competence on both foreign language cross-cultural competences by taking an active part in the telecollaborative project work.

Highlights

The development of language seems to have close bounds with the development of cross-cultural competence and vice-versa
Our results show that students from both institutions enhanced their language skills
According to the results obtained in our experiment, it seems that students have enhanced both their language and cross-cultural competence

Summary

Introduction

The development of language seems to have close bounds with the development of cross-cultural competence and vice-versa. The one and the other are inseparable parts of the same puzzle, and none of them can exist without the other Researchers such as Lawton (1975), Tang (1999) or Tomalin (2008) have previously suggested that languages are necessary to show and describe any reality; and realities involve cultural knowledge, behaviour, and skills. Cross-cultural competence enables students to interact both effectively and in a way that is acceptable to others when they are working in a group whose members have different cultural backgrounds, where ‘cultural’ may denote all manner of features, including values and beliefs, their national, regional and local customs and, in particular, attitudes and practices that affect the way they work (Sadler & Dooly, 2016). The concept of cross-cultural competence, as stated by UNESCO, refers to having adequate relevant knowledge about particular cultures, as well as general knowledge about the sort of issues arising when members of different cultures interact, holding receptive attitudes that encourage establishing and maintaining contact with others, as well as having the skills required to draw upon both knowledge and attitudes when interacting with others from different cultures (Unesco, 2013)

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Conclusion