Abstract
Teachers are expected to prepare their students for life in a world that changes daily, fueled by technological progress and globalisation (Howells, 2018). In this internationalized world, English has become the lingua franca for business, science and education (Tatsioka et al., 2018). Young professionals are expected to be proficient in English and able to easily communicate with colleagues from other countries. Achieving these objectives presents challenges for teachers and students. Practical approaches to incorporating authentic communication across cultures in the English language classroom are discussed in this paper. Over three years we authors implemented several projects using different didactic methods to bring students from Japan and Germany together to improve their proficiency in language as well as their cross-cultural communication skills. Students worked in small teams on joint tasks, in which the use of ICT (information and communication technologies) was crucial to successful outcome. Naturally, any careful advance planning was quickly met by the emergence of unforeseen problems that needed immediate attention from teachers and students. In this paper, we focus on challenges teachers and students may encounter when developing new strategies to include meaningful cross-cultural and intercultural exchanges in the tertiary ELF classroom, based on teacher and student experiences.
Highlights
IntroductionOver the past three years, we have created and implemented five projects in our English language classrooms that were aimed at strengthening both language and cross-culture communication skills of our students
Over three years we authors implemented several projects using different didactic methods to bring students from Japan and Germany together to improve their proficiency in language as well as their cross-cultural communication skills
Over the past three years, we have created and implemented five projects in our English language classrooms that were aimed at strengthening both language and cross-culture communication skills of our students
Summary
Over the past three years, we have created and implemented five projects in our English language classrooms that were aimed at strengthening both language and cross-culture communication skills of our students. Those projects were completed with varying degrees of success. In some of our projects, we included students from our countries of residence (Germany and Japan), and from various parts of Africa, Asia and Europe, who were studying in Germany In this collaboration, our initial idea was to increase our students‟ motivation and language proficiency by providing a very hands-on experience of working with colleagues from another country and the subsequent necessity to use English as a common language. This paper covers challenges that we have faced in our projects, literature to frame our experience, and notes that we feel are most pertinent to consider when embarking on an asynchronous cross-cultural communication project
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