Enhancing Language and Cross-Cultural Competence Through Telecollaboration

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.

Entornos virtuales de aprendizaje para la enseñanza de inglés global

“…Los resultados del progreso en la mejora en habilidades comunicativas en inglés y competencias digitales se han presentado en diferentes publicaciones (Candel-Mora et al, 2020;Casañ-Pitarch et al, 2020;, no obstante para este trabajo preliminar destacamos los resultados del progreso de los participantes en la adquisición de la competencia intercultural, clave para la enseñanza de inglés global.…”

A Systematic Review of Engineering Students in Intercultural Teamwork: Characteristics, Challenges, and Coping Strategies

“…Fourteen papers also demonstrated how students prepared for intercultural teamwork to ensure that every team member could work together effectively and break down barriers. Most of them (n = 11) reported that students attended cultural orientation courses such as courses on cross-cultural behaviors or teambuilding, technical courses for virtual teams, and language training courses held by the relevant institutions or programs [41,54,61]. In addition, a few of these 14 articles (n = 5) mentioned predeparture meetings before short-term study abroad, and informal social activities intended to develop a sense of group identity [38,48,62].…”

Designing Integral Learning Outcomes in Higher Education Within the Frameworks of the Competency-Based Approach

“…The lack of scientifically grounded classification of integral learning outcomes in higher education has caused terminological discordance. In some publications, along with established conceptual categories of "key competencies", "professional competence", "communicative competence", "foreign language communicative competence" (Bogush et al, 2019;Kachmarchyk et al, 2019;Мammadov et al, 2019) etc., arguable terms are adopted, which significantly complicate modern scientific discourse: "cross-curricular competencies" (Gewerc et al, 2011), "technical competency" (Bovermann et al, 2018;Sinchev et al, 2018), "intercultural competence" (Tomozeiu et al, 2016;Holubnycha et al, 2019;Casañ-Pitarch et al, 2020), "traditional teaching competencies", "original teacher competency", "traditional competencies", "individual competencies", "core competencies", "specific competencies", "most critical competencies" (Weng et al, 2020); "cultural competence", "intercultural communicative competence" (Padua and Gonzalez Smith, 2020).…”