ENHANCING LANGUAGE AND CROSS-CULTURAL COMPETENCE THROUGH TELECOLLABORATION

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.20535/2410-8286.214539

Keywords:

language, cross-cultural competence, telecollaboration, project work

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.

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Author Biographies

Ricardo Casañ-Pitarch, Universitat Politècnica de València

Ricardo Casañ Pitarch is a PhD assistant professor and researcher at Universitat Politècnica de València. His main research interest is in applied linguistics, more concretely in discourse analysis and foreign language teaching and ICT. His latest publications and communications focus on genre analyses of specific discourse forms and the use of videogames in foreign language teaching.

Miguel Ángel Candel-Mora, Universitat Politècnica de València

Miguel Ángel Candel-Mora is a PhD Associate professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain. Master's Degree in Translation from Kent State University and PhD in English Philology from the University of Valencia. His academic interests focus on special languages, intercultural communication, terminology management, and language technologies for translators. He is currently director of the Master's Degree in Languages and Technology at the UPV.

Maria Luisa Carrió-Pastor, Universitat Politècnica de València

María Luisa Carrió-Pastor is a PhD professor of English language at Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain. Currently she is the head of the Department of Applied Linguistics and the coordinator of the Doctorate degree “Languages, Literature, Culture and, their applications”. Her research areas are contrastive linguistics, pragmatics and the study of academic and professional discourse both for second language acquisition and discourse analysis.

Olga Demydenko, Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute

Olga Demydenko is a PhD Associate Professor at the Department of Theory, Practice and Translation of the English Language, Faculty of Linguistics at the National Technical University of Ukraine "Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute", Ukraine. Her research areas are foreign language teaching and cross-cultural communication, translation and applied linguistics.

Iana Tikan, Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute

Iana Tikan is a PhD Associate Professor at the Department of Theory, Practice and Translation of the English Language at the National Technical University of Ukraine "Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute", Ukraine. Her research interest is on foreign language teaching and multicultural education. 

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Published

2020-12-20

How to Cite

Casañ-Pitarch, R., Candel-Mora, M. Ángel, Carrió-Pastor, M. L., Demydenko, O., & Tikan, I. (2020). ENHANCING LANGUAGE AND CROSS-CULTURAL COMPETENCE THROUGH TELECOLLABORATION. Advanced Education, 7(16), 78–87. https://doi.org/10.20535/2410-8286.214539

Issue

2020: Issue 16

Section

ARTICLES

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Copyright (c) 2020 Ricardo Casañ-Pitarch, Miguel Ángel Candel-Mora, Maria Luisa Carrió-Pastor, Olga Demydenko, Iana Tikan

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