I plan to apply what I learn in this class to one of my projects aimed to study the intercultural communication between Chinese and American students.
Guided by the tutor, the Chinese students in CUMTB are supposed to establish an intercultural communication blogspot. Several sections will by designed to cover a variety of tasks or themes which might attract both Chinese and American students to engage in interaction, such as typical campus conversations, activities, sports, religions, love and marriage, education, happiness, advertisement, ecology, employment and so on. Students from both cultures may upload their opinions, comments or articles to this blog in written or audio-visual form. Teachers may also assign some projects to them. For example, when studying cultural differences in friends-making pattern, I may guide my students to design a survey or interview , conduct it through the blog, collect data and analyze the result with the statistical software SPSS. In this way not only can students improve their intercultural communication competence, but also they can learn how to conduct students-centered autonomous researches, thus improving their problem-solving ability.
Through this kind of year-long activities, teachers may have a chance to study students’ identity construction in EFL teaching in terms of cognition, attitude, behavior and critical thinking. Hence, EFL teaching and research are combined with technology in a perfect way.
This project sounds wonderful! We will be focusing more on ICC on the last day of class. In particular, we will look an example of a successful ICC exchange (not Cultura). I hope this will continue to spark your ideas. Also, when we meet the two Chinese instructors for a discussion (Friday 8/6), maybe you can share some of your ideas and exchange information with the Chinese Instructors. This way you might be able to organize an ICC exchange with a group of students here are PSU sometime in the future. Fun!
ReplyDeleteAn Intercultural Communication Blogspot is a great idea!
ReplyDeleteI really you could succeed in that project. It would be definitely beneficial to the students.
ReplyDeleteI tried to connect some of my students with those of my American friend's two years ago. We got an e-mail address list respectively and switched it to the other group. Students felt free to choose any e-mail they found interesting and started to write to each other. We didn't monitor a lot, but I heard some of them are still contacting and becoming very good friends. So I hope your students could also benefit a lot!
Good luck!