Open AccessPractical Challenges to Teachers and Students in Asynchronous Cross-cultural Communication Projects
Author(s) -
Kate Sato,
Birte W. Horn
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
global research in higher education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2576-196X
pISSN - 2576-1951
DOI - 10.22158/grhe.v4n4p73
Subject(s) - lingua franca , asynchronous communication , globalization , english as a lingua franca , intercultural communication , pedagogy , information and communications technology , cultural diversity , cross cultural communication , psychology , mathematics education , sociology , computer science , political science , computer network , philosophy , linguistics , communication , world wide web , anthropology , law
Teachers are expected to prepare their students for life in a world that changes daily, fueled by technological progress and globalisation (Howells, 2018). In this internationalized world, English has become the lingua franca for business, science and education (Tatsioka et al., 2018). Young professionals are expected to be proficient in English and able to easily communicate with colleagues from other countries. Achieving these objectives presents challenges for teachers and students. Practical approaches to incorporating authentic communication across cultures in the English language classroom are discussed in this paper. Over three years we authors implemented several projects using different didactic methods to bring students from Japan and Germany together to improve their proficiency in language as well as their cross-cultural communication skills. Students worked in small teams on joint tasks, in which the use of ICT (information and communication technologies) was crucial to successful outcome. Naturally, any careful advance planning was quickly met by the emergence of unforeseen problems that needed immediate attention from teachers and students. In this paper, we focus on challenges teachers and students may encounter when developing new strategies to include meaningful cross-cultural and intercultural exchanges in the tertiary ELF classroom, based on teacher and student experiences.