Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2012 Newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------make sure that people stay on topic. It is a fine line
that a moderator must walk in order to maintain
the good disposition and decide which things hurt
the discussion, and which things, while slightly offtopic, only enhance it. What is more, a moderator
will have to try and involve everyone in the
conversation, which can be nerve-wracking and
time consuming to say the least. He/she will also
propose new threads/topics when conversation lags
or has come to a halt. A moderator is really the
lifeline of a board, and no self-respecting board can
function without one.
To conclude, we must once again weigh in the
benefits of message boards: they are highly
effective in communicating and in quickly getting
the message across – the message is transmitted
instantly, they still hold an aura of novelty,
especially for projects and other teaching purposes,
and last but not least, they are spot-on on the new
direction in teaching, with integrating the new
technologies into the classroom. I would even
venture as far as recommending that an entire
eTwinning project take place over the internet.
Are We Promoting Intercultural
Communicative Competence in
eTwinning?
By Helena Serdoura
Helena Serdoura from Portugal is a teacher of
English as a foreign language and of Portuguese as
mother tongue, at a lower secondary school with
children 10 to 14 years of age.
“(…) the most important goal of foreign language
education is to help learners grow out of the shell of
their mother tongue and their own culture.”
(Kaikkonen, 1991, cit. by Kaikkonen, 2001:64)
As far as foreign language is concerned, reinforcing
language learning and intercultural dialogue, as
much as collaborative work and ICT skills, seemed
to be the key aspects of integrating eTwinning as
part of language teachers’ approach for a more
authentic and meaningful way of promoting the
intercultural communicative competence.
With the aim of understanding how eTwinning
action develops processes of intercultural
communication mediation among individuals of
multiple and diverse contexts and identities, a
study was carried out. It sought to understand to
what extent eTwinning action can bridge the gap
between cultures and boost intercultural
communicative competence among students of
different participating countries. It was both a
descriptive and evaluative study, based on an
interpretative approach, involving the analysis of
official documents, its online working environment
and a survey to foreign language teachers that
develop eTwinning projects.
The results lead to the conclusion that eTwinning
action provides the conditions for intercultural
encounters to take place, in the sense that
promotes the use and the learning of foreign
languages in an authentic communicative context
where, through the projects, students my compare
cultural similarities and differences among the
participant cultures. However, it also showed that
the development of the intercultural communicative
competence isn’t an easy task, for the teachers’
perceptions revealed problems in their
understanding of the extent on how communicative
competence can be promoted.
This reflection aims to bring some light regarding
the concepts that shape the intercultural
communicative competence in foreign languages,
providing guidelines for teachers that wish to
research further into these matters.
Presently, foreign language education is concerned
with plurilingual and pluricultural competences’
development which is built in linguistic and cultural
experience encounters. To reach this goal,
researchers like Byram (1997) have suggested a
change of language learning and teaching
paradigm, switching from a ‘native-speaker’
approach to an ‘intercultural speakers’ proposition
in order to provide students with the necessary
tools to explore multiple cultural perspectives and
negotiate differences and meanings. Kaikkonen
(2001) adds that the use of ICT tools pave the way
for these intercultural and interactive experiences,
which with eTwinning take place among students
from various levels of education across Europe.
24