Developing intercultural communicative competence by the means of telecollaboration
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Developing intercultural communicative competence by the means of telecollaboration Saliha Toscu 1
& İsmail
Hakkı Erten 2
Received: 23 January 2020 / Accepted: 24 March 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This paper presents the results of an eight-week quasi-experimental study of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners at the tertiary level in Turkey. The purpose of the study was to reveal the extent to which EFL learners’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC) was enhanced as a result of communication with native and non-native speakers of English with the means of a/synchronous communication tools as compared with the instruction given in a real classroom setting. The data were gathered using a variety of distinct means that entailed questionnaires administered before and after the treatment, weekly reflection papers to explore the participants’ thoughts about experience, and semistructured interviews held after the treatment. All the data were analysed with the Statistical Package of Social Sciences (SPSS) version 17.0 and Maximum Analysis of Qualitative Data (MAXQDA 10) software. The findings evidenced that telecollaboration had a positive impact on the participants’ intercultural communicative competence. The study explicates the benefit of telecollaboration for developing learners’ ICC over classroom instruction and underpins the necessity of integration of telecollaboration into language learning programs for educators, planners and institutions. Keywords Telecollaboration . Communication . Technology . Intercultural competence .
Mixed-methods
1 Introduction Telecollaboration (also referred to as virtual exchange) is an approach engaging people who are geographically distant from each other into real communication with each This article is based on Ph.D. thesis “The impact of telecollaboration on learners’ intercultural communicative competence and ideal L2 self” (Toscu 2018).
* Saliha Toscu [email protected]
1
English Preparatory School, Çankaya University, Ankara, Turkey
2
English Language Teaching Department, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey
Education and Information Technologies
other (Dooly and O’Dowd 2018). By virtue of the integration of technology into educational settings, the limited nature of the use of foreign languages has improved, and hence, more ways for communication have arisen, which has caused a shift from face-to-face communication to an intercultural communication providing users with a learning experience beyond the classroom, helping users exercise initiative in communication, increasing learner autonomy in their own foreign language learning processes, motivating learners to use the foreign language for meaningful and authentic communication with other speakers of the target language (O’Dowd 2011). Previous studies involving diverse methods to investigate telecollaboration have indicated its recognized value in educational settings. However, they were mostly based on e-mail exchanges (Furcsa 2009;
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