Planning and evaluation of an adapted online intercultural communication course for undergraduate English language students

Abstract

The Covid 19 pandemic has caused real turmoil, impacting every aspect of society. Education is one of the most significant fields that was the most influenced by the pandemic. All levels of education had to change to online teaching for a significant amount of time. Teachers worldwide had to demonstrate flexibility and creativity to change not only the form of learning - from face-to-face to online teaching - but also to modify their course methods and materials to be equally efficient. The Intercultural Communication course, a compulsory component of the English language teacher training program at the university where this research was conducted, required extensive planning to ensure its effectiveness. Typically, the course accepts as many foreign Erasmus students as possible to foster a multicultural environment. However, the transition from face-to-face teaching in a multicultural setting to remote teaching via computer screens, without the personal contact and participation of Erasmus students, proved to be an immense challenge. Even though it seemed to be almost impossible to develop intercultural communicative competences within the online teaching format, we had to be creative and develop a new course that would fulfil the purpose. Participatory action research was employed to develop and implement a new online course Intercultural Communication, aimed at effectively fostering intercultural communicative competences of English language teacher trainees. The study addressed three research questions: 1. How did English language teacher trainees develop their intercultural communicative competences during the online teaching? 2. How successful was the structure of the online course of Intercultural communication? 3. How successful was the content concerning the development of intercultural communicative competences of English language teacher trainees in the online teaching? Data were collected through observation, self-reflecting journals, and open-ended surveys. The collected data were analysed using descriptive narrative and coding with the NVIVO qualitative data analysis software. The new online course comprised weekly assignments involving reading texts, watching videos, completing quizzes, and engaging in lectures and discussions during seminars both in break-out rooms and as a whole class. Findings from individual research methods were triangulated, and the newly developed course of Intercultural Communication was evaluated as highly successful.