Come check out what ICIS has to offer in Toronto this year!

In this last issue of InterCom before the TESOL convention, we’d like to offer you a little preview to pique your interest in some great ICIS-sponsored events. For example, the speakers below are all participating in an ICIS academic session titled “ Orientation, Collaboration, and Adjustment: Facilitating Intercultural Interactions Around the World.”

Session Summary: An important task for ESL/EFL teaching is facilitating meaningful interaction and communication across cultures. Learners’ contexts must be considered to arrive at best practices for preparing them to engage with the “other” and to reflectively process and interpret what is experienced and learned. Multiple contexts are illustrated and discussed.

Check out the abstracts below for what each presenter on the panel will be discussing.

“The Culture’s Really Different Here”: Facilitating Successful Intercultural Encounters at the University of Tokyo
Alexander Gilmore, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Within the University of Tokyo, Japan, the Department of Civil Engineering is at the forefront of efforts to internationalize, with over 40% of its postgraduate population coming from overseas. In a recent online survey of our foreign students’ experiences of studying at the university, the relationship with “tutors” (student mentors from the same laboratory, responsible for guiding new arrivals through their first few months in Japan) was identified as a key area for improvement. From comments in the questionnaire, it appears that the success of these initial intercultural encounters is highly variable, and largely depends on Japanese mentors’ ability to empathize with alternative cultural perspectives and the difficulties associated with adapting to a new and unfamiliar country. During this panel, Gilmore describes changes to the tutor training, implemented in response to these insights, and the early results of our efforts to enhance the success of these important initial intercultural encounters.

Interculturality Through Partnership: How to Foster Interaction and Transform Perspectives
Roxanna M. Senyshyn, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

Facilitating development of intercultural sensitivity in pre-service teachers has become increasingly important in the United States. At the same time, the growing number of international students created the need to be effectively integrated on American campuses in order to maximize potential for global learning. During this panel, Senyshyn addresses these issues by discussing research conducted at Abington College, Pennsylvania State University. Semester-long partnerships were created between new international students and undergraduate education majors to encourage ELLs (international students) to participate in a meaningful social activity on campus and to give native speakers (education majors) an opportunity to be engaged participants in a multicultural/lingual learning community. The purpose of the study was to examine through qualitative analysis of students' written journals, class discussions, and final reflective papers the impact of the partnership experience (a required course assignment for both international and domestic students) on student learning, personal cultural beliefs, and self-awareness with respect to linguistic and cultural diversity. Overall, for pre-service teachers, preliminary results revealed a heightened awareness to cultural differences and similarities and a change in personal pedagogical and cultural beliefs. As for international students, their newly gained confidence in interacting with domestic students helped in their transition to life and study in the United States.

What We Learned About Each Other’s Cultures: Iraqi and U.S. Faculty
Gayle Nelson, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
May Kadhim Al-Khazraji, University of Baghdad, Iraq
Sabah Atallah Khalifa Ali, University of Baghdad, Iraq

Georgia State University (GSU) and the University of Baghdad participated in a university linkage program in which Iraqi faculty in English literature, translation, and linguistics spent summers in Atlanta, Georgia attending workshops and classes on the content and teaching of their academic disciplines. At the end of the summers, after Iraqis had returned to Baghdad, two Iraqi faculty worked with one GSU faculty on assessing the cultural components of the program. Both Iraqi and U.S. faculty participated in cultural orientation programs. But more important, as the findings demonstrated, they observed and learned while interacting with each other. After the Iraqis returned to Iraq, the researchers collected both interview and survey data on participants’ expectations before the program began and again 4 months after the program was over. Presenters examine the effectiveness of the cultural training and identify additional components that participants would have liked to have been included.

Telecollaboration and Intercultural Communicative Competence
Najwa Saba ‘Ayon, Rafik Hariri University, Meshref, Lebanon
Sandra Whitehead, Rafik Hariri University, Meshref, Lebanon

Recently, a lot of research has stressed the importance of developing students’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC) to ensure successful communication with people of diverse cultures and languages and hence survive in this globalizing world. Telecollaboration has been advocated as a useful tool to help students develop their ICC. One of the researchers is collaborating with two other university professors in the United States and Jordan who are teaching journalism in their respective universities. Through telecollaboration, the participants at our university are likely to learn about other cultures and practice their English as a foreign language in a contextualized, genuine environment. The aim of this study (in progress) is, therefore, to investigate (1) the impact of telecollaboration on the participants’ ICC as well as their communication skills, and (2) the participants’ attitudes towards telecollaboration.

Orientation, Collaboration, and Adjustment: Facilitating Multicultural Interactions Around the World
Yasemin Bayyurt, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey

The aim of this presentation is to explore how teacher educators, pre-service teachers, and practicing English language teachers are using their knowledge of World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca to inform their curriculum planning and language lessons respectively in their future careers as English language teachers. During this panel, Bayyurt’s discussion will mainly focus on the Turkish side of an intercultural exchange between the students of a Turkish and a Korean University via the use of Facebook. In other words, Facebook is used for intercultural learning in a telecollaborative project linking university classes in Turkey and Korea. The Facebook groups on both sides were established by the course instructors and the students were added to the group. There were 17 students from Turkey (16 Turkish and 1 Italian) and 19 students from Korea (16 Korean and 3 Chinese). They were given tasks to exchange information about their contexts both on the Facebook and through their Skype meetings with their partners. In addition, the Turkish participants were asked to exchange cultural information on topics like traditions, eating and food customs, festivals, national holidays, TV and entertainment, and so on. At the end of the project, the Turkish students were asked to write a critical report of their intercultural exchange experience and the use of Facebook for such an exchange.