Publication details
Raising Students’ Intercultural Awareness in Videoconferencing Communication. Teacher’s Observations and Students’ Reflections.
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The chapter is based on our experience with international videoconferencing (VC) used for tertiary level students. The aim is to provide the theoretical background for VC and share good practices - activities, language challenges and soft skills development. The background for the experience lies in the results of the INVITE project (http://invite.cjv.muni.cz), designed for the consortium of a manufacturing company, academic and non-academic institutions in 2006. Since then we have been using VCs in a variety of settings, for different purposes, with students studying different study programs etc. and the chapter describes the most frequent forms of VC use in the classroom as it allows students to practise and develop a range of skills in multicultural communication. Within a virtual classroom, communication becomes more authentic and students seem to be motivated to use English as a lingua franca. VC synchronous communication is accompanied by asynchronous communication with the help of social media. The chapter includes students’ point of view, their expectations before the course and their feedback after the course. One of the subsections is devoted to cultural stereotypes and students’ challenges, another to linguistic observations illustrating differences in expressing modality and different strategies in argumentation. The use of VC in education is a fairly recent phenomenon and a variety of studies have been conducted on the use of VC within a learning environment. |