Teaching Intercultural Communication in Foreign Language Education through Video Conferencing

Since 1980s, Western linguists and specialists on second language acquisition have emphasized the importance of enhancing students’ intercultural communication competence in foreign language education. At the same time, the demand for intercultural communicative competence increased along with the advances of communication technology with its increasingly global reach and the process of globalization itself.In the field of distance language education, these changes have resulted in a shift of focus from the production and distribution of learning materials towards communication and learning as a social process, facilitated by various internet-based platforms. The current focus on learners interacting and communicating synchronously trough videoconferencing is known as the fourth generation of distance language education. Despite the fact that teaching of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) faces the same or even greater challenges as teaching other languages, the intercultural communication perspective is still quite a new trend in CFL and its implementation and evaluation are still under development. Moreover, the advocates of the new trends in CFL have so far focused almost exclusively on classroom-based courses, neglecting the distance mode of CFL and leaving it as an open field for others to explore. In this under-researched context, Dalarna University (Sweden), where I currently work, started to provide web-based courses of the Chinese language in 2007. Since 2010, the Chinese language courses have been available only in the distance form, using the same teaching materials as the previous campus-based courses. The textbooks used in both settings basically followed the functional nationalism approach. However, in order to catch up with the main trend of foreign-language education, we felt a need to implement the cross-cultural dimension into the distance courses as well. Therefore in 2010, a pilot study has been carried out to explore opportunities and challenges for implementing a cross-cultural perspective into existing courses and evaluating the effectiveness of this implementation based on the feedback of the students and on the experience of the teacher/researcher.

Conversación digital: copresencia y disponibilidad : Estudio pragmático del preámbulo de reuniones multipartitas por videoconferencia

The present thesis explores how interaction is initiated in multi-party meetings in Adobe Connect, 7.0, with a particular focus on how co-presence and mutual availability are established through the preambles of 18 meetings held in Spanish without a moderator. Taking Conversation Analysis (CA) as a methodological point of departure, this thesis comprises four different studies, each of them analyzing a particular phenomenon within the interaction of the preambles in a multimodal environment that allows simultaneous interaction through video, voice and text-chat. The first study (Artículo I) shows how participants solve jointly the issue of availability in a technological environment where being online is not necessarily understood as being available for communicating. The second study (Artículo II) focuses on the beginning of the audiovisual interaction; in particular on how participants check the right functioning of the audiovisual mode. The third study (Artículo III) explores silences within the interaction of the preamble. It shows that the length of gaps and lapses become a significant aspect the preambles and how they are connected to the issue of availability.  Finally, the four study introduces the notion of modal alignment, an interactional phenomenon that systematically appears in the beginnings of the encounters, which seems to be used and understood  as a strategy for the establishment of mutual availability and negotiation of the participation framework. As a whole, this research shows how participants, in order to establish mutual co-presence and availability, adapt to a particular technology in terms of participation management, deploying strategies and conveying successive actions which, as it is the case of the activation of their respective webcams, seem to be understood as predictable within the intricate process of establishing mutual availability before the meeting starts.