In this weeks task I will take the role of a teacher and student at the same time assessing the role of ICC in both, education and teaching.
Importance of ICC in learning an L2.
Before reading this blog I will just summarize what is ICC as I believe some would be unsure of what is the main function of it. It is the ability to interact with people from different cultures and countries in a foreign language. ICC includes linguistic competence, sociolinguistic competence, intercultural competence and discourse competence (Byram, 1997). Integrating cultures in English language teaching is urgent and necessary in order for L2 learners to grasp and enhance their intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in the globalized community where English has been used as a means of communication among people of multicultural backgrounds.
To learners: The ICC concept goes through the acquisition of intercultural aspects such as practices and different perspectives. It promotes intercultural awareness so that students can compare and analyse effectively beliefs, attitudes and behaviours of students from other cultures to their own. Moreover, knowledge of various cultural backgrounds is an important value to have for the real world.
To teachers: It is important for students to be able to identify their cultures with others. This can be developed by encountering projects with people form different cultures via e-mail and chats.
Intercultural exchange case study
What caught my attestation is a telecollaborative project between students in Brasil. Its a language exchange where students learn languages from each other. In this project, students communicate via Skype. Other ways of communication could be also through email, Whatsapp or even Facebook where students can also video chat and additionally it gives the students a free voice. The main concern in those projects is time as it is an extra activity outside of class time. But, the main advantage of this project is that student can text whenever they have spare time and its not urgent as there is no deadlines. It is for the students benefit as when they are talking to an individual of their own age group in a L2 language they are more likely to grasp vocabulary for everyday use in topics that they are interested in.
Although, this project is for the benefit of students, it has weak points. I noticed that teachers had a difficulty in assessing this project. In teachers point of view, I would ask students to create a portfolio in which they would reflect about the whole collaborative experience including learning outcomes, work with their partner and topics they discussed.
According to O’Down and Ware, (O’Dowd and Ware 2009: 176-177) It is an Information exchange tasks as students are carrying out virtual interviews and they are engaging in informal discussion with a C2 speaker of a foreign language to improve their fluency.
Till next week xx
I hope you will consider doing a tele-collaborative task yourself.
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