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The aim of this article is to present how a short-term virtual exchange (VE) can help raise intercultural awareness, as well as promote communicative intercultural and language competence among the students involved. The authors will also look at factors which are key for a VE to foster this learning. To this end, they present a small-scale case study based on an exchange project between the University of Groningen in The Netherlands (UG) and the University of Valencia in Spain (UV). The exchange was carried out in the fall semester of 2020/21 with the major goal of raising intercultural awareness and promoting meaningful intercultural interaction about the pandemic and its consequences in times of limited mobility. The students participating in the project were recruited from various language proficiency courses at the UG and Psychology/Social work students at the UV. They shared their experiences with ‘the new normal’ in their national contexts (with the term ‘new normal’ the authors refer to the changes in the way people act, live, and work due to the coronavirus pandemic and the measures taken to control it) and tried to understand the behaviour of ‘others’ (other cultures, age groups, professions, etc.) in these new circumstances.
During the pandemic one of the biggest concerns of the teachers of B2 level Spanish of at the UG was how to provide their students with an international experience to boost their language skills, intercultural communicative competence development, and help them to grow as global citizens despite the inability to spend a semester abroad. Although the initial focus was on the negative consequences of the lockdown, the authors soon realised that an online setting of the exchange in the form of a VE would bring numerous benefits to students, such as easier accessibility to an international learning experience for more students, availability of powerful online interactive tools which contribute to fast connection and collaboration (in comparison to a range of bureaucratic obstacles that a physical mobility exchange exchange involves), and enhancements of students’ autonomy by giving them choice on when, what, and how to learn. Relevant literature illustrates that a VE VE offers the perfect international, personalised, active, and flexible learning experience to all students, including those students who for personal reasons are not able or do not want to go abroad (Beelen & O’Dowd 2020; Evidence-Validated Online Learning through Virtual Exchange [EVOLVE] Project Team, 2020a; De Wit, 2013; Helm & O’Dowd, 2020). Moreover, two large-scale studies on the general impact of VEs in Higher Education (HE), which were carried out in the context of the European funded EVOLVE project (https://evolve-erasmus.eu/) (EVOLVE Project Team, 2020b) and the Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange Project (European Commission, 2020), confirm that VEs contribute to the development of international employability skills such as digital competences, foreign language skills, intercultural competences, and self-esteem and self-confidence.
We start by establishing the relationship between learning a foreign language and the development of intercultural awareness and competence. We then introduce then introduce the relevance of VEs. We will then explain the purpose of our research and describe the project design. Including research tools that were used and illustrate the outcomes of the research. We will conclude by discussing ideas on how to improve and further develop this project in the future.