Intercultural Aspects in Live Online Language Training - Coping with new divides
(Transcript continued .... ) Serpil Sahin Gönül: Of course intercultural aspects are really important in the traditional face to face teaching too but because of the distance problem or travelling most probably depending on the country where you live most probably in the traditional class you have students from similar cultural backgrounds. For example we have students coming to learn English mostly they are Turkish students coming from the same culture. But in an online environment because there is no problem with the distance and travel there will be a problem, so, most probably, there will be a lot of students from different cultural backgrounds. So, that is why we have to take intercultural issues into account, cultural differences among students and ..
Finally since it is our aim is to develop a teacher training course for online teachers in that platform we have potential three groups, firstly there are teacher trainers, they'll teach online teachers to show how to teach online and second group teachers participating in the LANCELOT course and finally, we have target learners participating in online, live online courses.
What is to say here, my aim is, to say that we have two meeting grounds here, firstly teacher trainers and lets say, live online candidate trainers, they will come together and most probably the teacher trainer will be from a different cultural background and the candidate student teachers will be from a different cultural background. So, this meeting ground creates a different intercultural environment.
Secondly after taking the LANCELOT course and the materials, these candidate teachers will be online teachers and most probably in the future they'll have some students from around the world and so they take into account intercultural issues is an important point in that project.
Because of time limits, I am going to introduce what is in ICC strand in this project. First of all let me talk about the 'Learning Units', as Christian said we have Learning Units in each strand and under intercultural strand we have totally 11 units and each is studied one topic a week, except the Intercultural Foreign Language and Learning and Teaching in the virtual Environment and the Intercultural differences in the virtual environment, in the first we start with the Intercultural Communicative Competence, shortly ICC here our aim is to give the preliminary ideas and key concept about ICC and here we try to explain ...Again I would like to make a distinction briefly between ICC and IC. So here, we mostly talk about what is ICC and what is the component and the key concept about it theoretical knowledge about ICC.
After that in the second week we try to help LANCELOT teachers to put the theory they have read in the first block into practise by thinking about the ICC concept themself and reflect on it. It means shortly I can say that, we try to learn or we try to get some ideas from LANCELOT teachers, how do they perceive ICC, so we want them to reflect on that topic. In the third week as I said earlier, we have two Learning Units and we are interested in Intercultural differences in the virtual environment in both in Foreign Language teaching and Learning and in the virtual environment. After that we learn Knowledge, Awareness, Attitude, Interaction, Role behaviours and assessing ICC levels.
Shortly I can say that during the first 3 weeks, we try to give the general idea, after that we only concentrate on only IC issues. Here I would like to make a distinction ICC, is the general term which includes the Intercultural competence itself. So, I can say that Intercultural Communicative Competence is mostly divided into two, on one hand we have communicative competences and the second hand we have intercultural competences and because another strand 'Methodology' mostly deals with the linguistic skills after the third week, we only deal with intercultural competence and, we like that, and under this we have Knowledge, Awareness, Attitude, Respect, Interaction and Role behaviour.
And mainly we can say that, regarding the intercultural differences especially in Internet based learning there are language differentials among groups of people.
- Language differential
- Cultural differential
- Technical infrastructure differential
- Local versus global differential
- Learning styles differentials
- Reasoning pattern differentials
- High and low context differential
- Social context differentials.
So, these differentials and factors must be considered while preparing and reflecting and presenting your online sessions if you have an international group as your students.
So they are you see here exemplified, by giving some examples taken from some researchers, again, in one of the knowledge units. Regarding the topics under IC, how do we deal with them? First for each of them we give some theoretical knowledge and depending on the topic we give some examples and these examples, for example, you will see this on the next slide, these examples are real experiences from our 'piloters'.
We asked them to reflect on the topic of the relevant week so they reflected on the ideas, so we used these examples as our examples, of course after asking for their permission, so they reflected real experiences under each topic. For example you see here attitude some examples and in one of these topics we use some reflective activities and task either in a writing task or in peer-to-peer activity. ...So ok, and finally we have 'Assessing IC levels' and our aim here is, not to show the correct way but to guide our LANCELOT teachers to see how to assess a different way, to show the different ways to assess their students' IC levels there are some links and examples. Thank you very much. (End of Transcript)
Serpil Sahin Gönül, phD
Asli Oguz Salcan
Baris Cansevgisi
Hande Arli