Developing Intercultural Competence Through English Language Telecollaboration Among Chinese English Major Students

Abstract

One of the most recent concerns of foreign language (FL) education is intercultural communicative competence (henceforth IC), which has been recognized as its major objective due to the global context. IC was even incorporated in the National Standards of Teaching Quality for Undergraduate English Majors issued by the Ministry of Education of China in 2015. Telecollaboration is argued to be an effective tool in the development of students’ IC since students of different cultures are brought together online to collaborate and exchange views, especially in the post-epidemic era, in which face-to-face intercultural communication seems increasingly difficult to realize. Based on immersion teaching method, the research aims to explore effective ways to improve students’ IC by carrying out an experimental study of intercultural engagement among 30 junior English major students in Hebei Finance University in China. They are paired up with 25 students majored in graphic design in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and communicate through Wechat on given culture topics for eight weeks. Quantitative data is collected and ananlyzed through pre- and post-experiment self-evaluative questionnaires, followed by a SPSS paired samples T test. The result shows the telecollaboration project between Chinese and Malaysian students are of benefit to the development of Chinese English mojors’ intercultural competence.