Fostering intercultural competence through videoconference exchange: using an external provider to match learners with trained native speakers and administer video calls

Alonso Varo Varo

doi:10.21827/jve.4.35981

Abstract

This practical case presents the use of an External Provider (EP) as an alternative approach to the traditional telecollaboration setting where a partnership with a foreign higher education institution is established. Usually, these partnerships involve language exchanges between learning partners who mutually practice each other’s native language. Instead, an eight-week cross-cultural Virtual Exchange (VE) in Spanish between US college students studying Spanish and trained Colombian university students was organized through an external language platform to foster the US students’ Intercultural Competence (IC). It is concluded that the use of an EP brings an undeniable level of flexibility to the organization of the VE, and makes manageable the integration of this type of program in higher education language classes. Additionally, this article assesses the value of this approach by looking at the effect of VE on the US students’ self- assessment of IC after the videoconference exchanges. Data from quantitative surveys and student blogs show a significant increase in the students’ IC after the program.

Highlights

Given the growing importance of internationalization and diversity on our campuses and in our daily relations, a correct integration of Intercultural Competence (IC) into the 21st century higher education curriculum is critical (Deardorff, 2004
A Shapiro-Wilk test was conducted on the difference between the paired variables of the pre- and post-surveys to analyze the normality of the distributions and establish whether parametric tests could be used8
This report presented the effectiveness of using an External Provider (EP) that manages the administrative aspects of partnering trained native speakers with Spanish language learners as an alternative approach to the traditional practitioner-led telecollaboration setting

Summary

Introduction

Given the growing importance of internationalization and diversity on our campuses and in our daily relations, a correct integration of IC into the 21st century higher education curriculum is critical (Deardorff, 2004). One of the most common practices to incorporate IC development into higher education is telecollaboration, called VE, online intercultural exchange, or collaborative online international learning (Liaw, 2006; O’Dowd, 2007; Vinagre, 2014). Telecollaboration is the “engagement of groups of learners in online intercultural interactions and collaboration projects with partners from other cultural contexts or geographical locations as an integrated part of their educational programmes” Teacher-to-teacher relationships, course organization, technical issues, differences in timetables, matching of learners, workload, and curricular limitations are reasons for teachers to disregard the possibility of creating a telecollaboration project (see Ferreira-Lopes, Bezanilla, & Elexpuru, 2018). Helm, 2015; O’Dowd, 2018), there remains a need to develop sustainable instructional design models and to address the main barriers to the integration of telecollaboration in higher education (Ferreira-Lopes et al, 2018)

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