Developing critical intercultural awareness through video clip-assisted intercultural tasks

ABSTRACT

This paper reports quantitative findings of a project investigating the in-progress formation of EFL students’ critical intercultural awareness (CIA) in the Indonesian tertiary context. It examines a 10-week pedagogical intervention using culturally appropriate YouTube clips with intercultural tasks. A one-group pre-test/post-test design was employed involving a cohort of 50 undergraduate participants of mixed gender in five faculties and from varying ethnic groups. An intercultural awareness questionnaire was administered twice before and after the learning intervention. A paired-sample t-test was performed with SPSS 28 to examine the mean differences. The results revealed a significant improvement (Sig. 2-tailed value .001, p < .05) in participants’ CIA scores. This suggests that video clip-assisted intercultural tasks promote the development of abilities to identify, interpret, and critically evaluate the intercultural values embedded in the clips. The study further showed that gender, fields of study and ethnicity did not significantly contribute to the CIA development.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical intercultural awareness
• intercultural learning
• YouTube clips
• pedagogical tasks

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs (MoRA) for providing the first author with a scholarship and to the participants who volunteered to participate in this study. We also appreciate Dr Susan Mowbray’s meticulous proofreading of this article and the anonymous reviewers’ insightful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. These YouTube clips were accessible online at the time the data was collected.

Additional information

Funding

This work received open access fee support from Western Sydney University.