Part 1
“Developing Intercultural Communicative Competence through Online Exchanges” (Chun 2011)
In this article, ICC is studied through the use of CMM with American students who are L2 learners of German, and German students who are L2 learners of English. One of the observations reinforced in the introduction is that successful ICC, “involves an understanding not only of the culture and language being studied, but also the readiness to suspend disbelief and judgment about the other culture and the willingness to reflect on one’s own culture…” (Chun 393). In this case, both synchronous and asynchronous CMC were the means of communication (a forum, then chat session). While the latter form of communication led to very brief responses (by both groups of L2 learners), it seems as if the immediacy of communicating via chat also allowed students to express a number of speech acts more freely (when successful). I suppose some of these more unsuccessful chats could be due to several factors (perhaps their chat partner may not find the topic/ questions to be of high interest to them). Regardless, it was very interesting to see how other more successful attempts reflected curiosity of face work with much more varied comments. I would be interested to see if the same speech acts would have resulted if they students had skyped (just as one student had suggested), or if it would have resulted in different speech acts since body language might be a factor involved in ICC as well.
Part 2
This week, we learned about many extremely interesting CALL tools that were completely new to me. Since I am not a linguist, I have not been previously exposed to the use of a corpus as a writing tool for L2 learners. I was immediately intrigued after reading the assigned article, but I was still completely baffled as to how to go about actually using one. However, Erika’s demonstration was wonderful—her walkthrough really allowed us to explore its usage, and also revealed how some variations can lead to different results. I definitely feel that the use of a corpus would benefit both Heritage learners and NNS L2 learners, especially for calling attention to form/ context in relation to writing.
Hi Christine,
ReplyDeleteYou brought up a great point that body language is part of communication. Speakers (native or nonnative) of a language use gestures and body language to help convey their meanings in different situations such as when you cannot think of an appropriate word and to express emotions. I am also curious about how skyping may contribute to improving ICC.
I am still relatively new to using corpora in teaching L2 writing. But I have used it for my own writing. It is not always easy to access authentic texts when you are learning a foreign language, however, concordancers (such as google and COCA) allow learners to view their target language in the "real" contexts. For this reason, I think such computer programs are very useful.