Digitally-enhanced learning: Applications of communities of practice to develop intercultural communicative competence

• In Event: Online Spaces of Language Teaching, Learning, and Assessment

Proposal

Intercultural communicative competence development plays an ever-growing role in foreign language education in preparing our students to live and work in this shrinking world. This has led students to seeking experiential learning opportunities beyond the classroom walls and connecting to different communities of practice, a concept first introduced by Lave and Wenger (1990), where people share a concern or passion for something as they interact regularly. Advocating for a strong cultural approach to foreign language education, our presentation is designed to investigate the potential of virtual exchanges and online communities of practice in the “global at home” environment where American learners of Korean/Japanese and Korean/Japanese learners of English can make links across disciplinary, geographic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries with the specific goal of developing their intercultural communicative competence.

More specifically, after introducing two theoretical frameworks of our presentation, community of practice and intercultural communicative competence, we will present examples in which one group of American students participate in a language exchange with Korean cohorts and another group with Japanese cohorts. It will lead into a discussion of many of the benefits, challenges, and drawbacks of a community of practice, emphasizing its potential for enhancing telecollaborative foreign language learning. Based on these two virtual exchanges conducted over a number of years, we will then explore the perceived benefits and the effectiveness of their respective communities of practice in fostering intercultural communicative competence and intercultural sensitivity (Chen & Starosta, 2000). We conclude with implications for future language exchange programs and courses designed around virtual exchanges aiming to advance the development of intercultural communicative competence.

Although our program as a community of practice has been found to be professionally and personally empowering, there still remains a great deal of more focused research to be done in order to determine the full effectiveness of such exchange programs. In an effort to optimize transformational, authentic, and empowering learning experiences for foreign language learners, we aim to traverse a broader digital terrain and build a global community of practice. While not the panacea for all types of students we find in our classrooms today, an exchange program with foreign language learners who are native speakers of the partner’s target language may be one model of communities of practice that warrants further exploration and incorporation into our curricula in order to enhance the intercultural competence and learning experiences of foreign language learners in these times of internationalization (Deardorff, 2006).

Authors

• Jeongyi Lee, Kennesaw State University

• Kathryn Negrelli, Kennesaw State University