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Editor's Notes

• #4: I’d just like to show you this quotation as an example of the spirit within which the SpEakWise course was developed. In confronting our students with cultural differences through comparing their spontaneous responses to a range of scenarios, we hoped to give students the opportunity to stand back and reflect on their own cultural frames of reference in a conscious way, and thereby to develop critical cultural awareness. This is a key step in developing intercultural competence.
• #5: We wanted students to grow more aware of the cultural frames of reference from their native culture through which they might be misinterpreting events and interactions in the foreign culture. • raise awareness of how differences in values and beliefs across cultures might impact on linguistic realisation (I’ll talk more about this in just a moment) • allow students to test hypotheses about how to communicate in particular settings and to reflect on the success of these • promote team-working, problem solving in teams, negotiation [access to videoconferencing also valuable experience for future career • encourage students to engage in self-directed learning And crucially we wanted students to be able to link the theory of intercultural communication with their own practical experiences on the course
• #8: Activity A – looking at statues, stamps and street names and producing a powerpoint with information. This year asked students to produce a video because we wanted to increase student visibility/audibility in the hope that it would improve online communication through discussion boards. (Track 5 – clearest and loudest, gets straight to the point about statues!)
• #12: �ݺ�ߣ 13: WebCT discussion Pro-Europeanism of Irish (based on Irish group’s interpretation of the Spire). Quotation from slide Last year we used a discussion board for the feedback on this activity as you can see, however, in order to try to promote interaction between the students we held instead a video-conference this year at which students were to ask each other questions on the videos and on some of the cultural issues raised. This wasn’t hugely successful in engendering further interaction throughout the course – partly perhaps because of the poor quality of the images transmitted by video-conference so that it was difficult for students to see each other’s eyes and faces, for example. Also, perhaps because of inhibition engendered by speaking out not only in front of one’s peers, but also in a foreign language to strangers via an unfamiliar medium. This triple or quadruple layer of communicative difficulty i.e. Public speaking, in a foreign language, to strangers, via video-conference is one that it would be worth taking greater account of as a learning point for transferable skills in future versions of the course. Certainly all students of foreign languages are more likely to be using the language at a distance than face-to-face. Unless they move abroad, they are more than likely to find themselves speaking the foreign language using the e-mail and the phone if not video-conference, but this is not something that is generally practised or taught in university despite its compounding impact on issues of intercultural communication. To turn now to the Tagebuch activity.
• #15: The diary entry activity is one which was recommended by our partner this year, Wiebke Mueller, on the basis of an activity she had taken part in in a course run by Alison Phipps and John Corbett at the University of Glasgow. The idea is for students to write a diary entry about an everyday event they have been involved in, such as going to the supermarket or the dentist or eating in the cafeteria and chatting to friends. Students write up the event, including any conversations and these are used as a basis for cultural comparison and discussion. As you can see in the entry on this slide, this student has chosen to talk about a visit to the dentist. The conversation is interesting from a pragmatic point of view. The directness of the German has been translated almost word for word into the English description. There is also the issues of gate-keeping – interactions with people such as receptionists who allow you access and the extent to which this varies culturally. Turning now to the Word Association activity.
• #16: �ݺ�ߣ 14-15: Activity C: Word Association and Sentence Completion Collating answers to word association and sentence completion task using WebCT. Comparison of collated answers across groups as basis for discussion of cultural values in class.
• #17: In discussing this activity the German students were surprised at the negative connotations of ‘religion’ expressed by some of the Irish students, though otherwise this activity did not raise a huge number of striking cultural differences on the level of national culture, but raised issues of similarity across different layers of culture e.g. Professional, national, generational. Here an over-arching student culture was identified. The other issue with it from a technical point of view was that the platform did not allow for automatic collation of responses – instead individual student responses were sent to me which were then collated manually. One of the issues here was with the fact that our use of WebCT was experimental. When we set out to use an e-learning tool we weren’t sure what the tool was capable of with the result that all of the activities ended up being embedded in WebCT, whether or not it was exactly suited to the activity.
• #18: The next activity the students engaged in was a critical incident analysis type activity. This activity was conceived with a view to encouraging student interaction online. The activity was set up as a blog in webct with each critical incident scenario posted as a separate blog entry which individual students could add a comment to. A sample scenario written by Wiebke Mueller is shown above. I’ll just give you a moment to read through it. Each student was assigned to a cross-cultural team with partners either in Ireland or Germany. Once every student had posted a comment to the scenario, one hour of the class time was set aside for interaction with the members of their team in the other country. The idea behind having teams was that students would not have to interact with a large number of other individuals at once and could benefit from being able to contribute more – just as in real-life interactions. In order to facilitate the teams different blog boards were set up. In class students were able to benefit from WebCT’s chat function in order to discuss the scenarios and the related comments synchronously.
• #19: Activity E was an online discourse completion exercise, which, as for the word association and sentence completion task involved the collation of data submitted via WebCT and received via e-mail. The collective responses from each national group to a particular discourse prompt were collated with both groups responding to the same prompts. There were two sets of prompts, one group in English and one in German. Each group of prompts aimed to elicit two examples of either a request, an offer or an expression of thanks. Students found this to be the most enjoyable and engaging activity. Examples – Austrian students less likely to use please.
• #20: Here are a few examples of scenarios to elicit specific speech acts (request, offer, thanks) This kind of discourse elicitation can be criticised for eliciting written rather than spoken data – written responses are likely to be more elaborate and don’t take account of paraverbal and nonverbal features of communication such as stress, intonation, volume, pitch etc. This activity raised issues of levels of directness in making requests in German and English.
• #21: The final task made use of video-conferencing and aimed at drawing together all of the theory and discussion of intercultural communication gathered in the previous activities so as to put it together in real-time interaction. Transferable skills: Negotiation, Communication; Cultural awareness; Video-Conferencing. Strange products provoked humour and helped to break the ice between the two groups. High motivation to succeed in task – communication is not for its own sake but subsidiary to task completion.