Language and culture in an online context: what can learner diaries tell us about intercultural competence?

Abstract

Telecollaboration is an approach to intercultural learning that uses Internet technology as a tool to facilitate intercultural communication between classes of learners in different countries. The question of what language learners can gain from telecollaboration is fundamental in putting the case forward for its place in a language course. This paper looks at what learner diaries can tell us about learners’ gains, in terms of intercultural competence, from participation in telecollaboration projects. It also explores the potential of quantitative corpus-processing tools as a supporting tool for qualitative analysis of narrative diaries.

Le nuove tecnologie offrono molte occasioni per l‘integrazione dell'apprendimento interculturale nei corsi di lingua attraverso scambi virtuali. Ma che cosa percepiscono gli apprendenti da questi scambi? Questo articolo esamina i diari personali di studenti partecipi in uno scambio online per osservare lo sviluppo di competenze interculturali.

Keywords:

• intercultural competence
• learner diaries
• telecollaboration

Notes

1. In a survey where university administrators and intercultural experts (Deardorff, 2006) were asked the best way to assess students’ intercultural competence, all agreed that a mix of qualitative and quantitative measures should be used, and though narrative diaries were not actually used in the institutions, analysis of narrative diaries received 95 and 85% acceptance.

2. The suite of tools I used to process the data were Wordsmith Tools 4.0 (developed by Mike Scott of the University of Liverpool and available from OUP).

3. Traditionally, a reference corpus for learner corpora is a larger corpus of ‘native speaker’ production, but for the purposes of this study the reference corpus used was a corpus of language learner diaries from the same university and same degree course, only these learners had not been involved in a telecollaboration exchange.

4. Unfortunately, due to limitations of space it is not possible to describe the data in any greater detail.

5. The learner's name has been changed to Fabio to preserve anonymity. His diaries are quoted as they were written; they have not been corrected for language.