Speaker
Description
Students need to understand different cultures across the world to gain intercultural communication skills and raise awareness. Therefore, this speaker asked a professor in Sri Lanka to proceed with a telecollaboration project. Based on the agreement with this professor, the project invited 16 first-year Japanese college students and 10 third-year Sri Lankan college students to participate for two months to learn about cultural differences, including taboos and manners. They were divided into eight groups and started this exchange-culture project by making presentation slides together. Due to the time zones and different communication styles, both groups of students complained of difficulties, so the two lectures shared these students’ voices and tried to observe and support their meetings using Zoom. During this process, each group of Japanese students reported the progress and issues in the classroom and then discussed how to solve these issues in the classroom. As a result, they noticed that WhatsApp, a social media app they were unfamiliar with, was a solution to cover time differences and pronunciation problems. In the end, the Japanese students delivered presentations and sent the recorded videos to the Sri Lankan students. After this project, Japanese students answered survey questions and noted their comments. Moreover, this speaker had face-to-face meetings with three Sri Lankan students in Sri Lanka. The interview data was analyzed to investigate the students’ intercultural communication skills and compare their perspectives toward different cultures. The data, including the video and both students’ perspectives, will be reported in this presentation.,
| Keywords | Cross-cultural understanding, CALL |
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