11060

11060

General Session - Conference Presentation Only (no formal paper)

Fences and Fatalism: Developing Intercultural Communicative Competence in a Digital Age
Pete Smith, University of Texas Arlington and Drake University (VLS) Arlington, TX, USA, psmith@uta.edu Konstantin Shestakov, Drake University (Virtual Language Studies), Omsk, Russia, konstantin73@yandex.ru

How has desktop videoconferencing and digital collaboration allowed students of language and culture to interact with native speakers internationally? Can these digital exchanges go deeper than superficial exchanges of personal information, to explore significant cultural frameworks—the collected attitudes, beliefs, worldviews, and experiences of a people? During two academic semesters in 2010, Russian language students at Drake University (Des Moines, Iowa) and English language students at Omsk Law Institute (Omsk, Russia) took part in an intercontinental Communicating Abroad Project, connecting with their counterparts online from home or their university language centers via Skype. The general goal of the project was to allow students in both the U.S. and Russia an opportunity to develop communicative and intercultural communicative competence, by interacting with a native speaker of the target language they are studying and to explore the differences present in the two culture contexts, before then moving to ideas of collaboration based upon deeper cultural understandings. During the Spring offering, participants explored the complex, rich concept of “tolerance for uncertainty” in the Russian and American contexts, concretely exploring the nature of travel and transportation with their international partners. Students on both sides of planet reflected and wrote about the two societies’ tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity in daily life, and engaged with the deeper intellectual question of how a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. Alongside clear gains in cultural competence, program learners also clearly improved their listening and speaking skills, fluency of speech, overcame language and communication barriers, built self-confidence, and were motivated by intellectually stimulating discussion to continue learning about the target culture.

All Audiences online mentoring intercultural communication desktop videoconferencing