INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATIVE

COMPETENCE FOR GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP

Identifying cyberpragmatic rules of engagement in telecollaboration

Marina Orsini-Jonesand Fiona Lee

Intercultural Communicative Competence for Global Citizenship

Marina Orsini-Jones • Fiona Lee

Intercultural Communicative Competence for

Global CitizenshipIdentifying cyberpragmatic rules of engagement in

telecollaboration

ISBN 978-1-137-58102-0 ISBN 978-1-137-58103-7 (eBook)https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58103-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959335

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Marina Orsini-JonesSchool of HumanitiesCoventry UniversityCoventry, UK

Fiona LeeSchool of HumanitiesCoventry UniversityCoventry, UK

To Marco, Matteo, David, Astrid, Nancy and MarkThe best times

The worst timesOur greatest joys

With love

vii

In this book, Orsini-Jones and Lee offer us a master class in theorisation and exemplification of the importance (and pitfalls) of telecollaboration in today’s HE landscape and beyond for language learners, linguists but more importantly towards the attributes of global citizenship. Erudite, theoretically robust and extremely enjoyable, this work is a must read for all teacher trainers, language teachers, educators and trainees across the world. It clearly demonstrates how, through well-crafted telecol-laboration activities educators—in any field of study—may and should shape the development of a genuine Intercultural Communicative Competence in their learners—far from the simplistic and reductive notions of intercultural competence that are currently supposedly woven in many HE syllabi and often ill understood by faculty and learn-ers alike.

This book also has the unique merit of casting a light on everything that is wrong and inept with most language teaching practice—from text-books to formulaic applications of the communicative approach to lan-guage teaching and it offers all practitioners an opportunity to reposition their pedagogy in more meaningful ways.

At a time when our “globalised” world is retrenching with inevitable and devastating violence around extremism, protectionism and exacer-bated forms of nationalism, the need to re-conceptualise intercultural communicative competence is central to any valid notion of global citizen-

Foreword

viii FOREWORD

ship. This book does so in a way that suggests genuine solutions for educa-tors. As such it should be on every library shelf and on the reading list of any teaching and learning form of certification.

London, UK Marion Sadoux20th August 2017

ix

This work aims to report on and discuss the lessons learnt from the engagement with an Online International Learning (OIL) project, also known as a telecollaborative project, carried out at Coventry University (CU) in the UK in collaboration with the Université de Haute—Alsace (UHA) in Colmar (France).

CU is fully committed to the internationalisation of its curricula through OIL. The authors of this work have been engaged in telecollabo-ration aimed at enhancing the intercultural awareness of both staff and students involved in it with various different overseas partners since 2010.

The authors believe that staff in Higher Education (HE) must prepare students for effective online interaction and explore the linguistic compo-nents of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) for global citi-zenship, including the development of students’ critical digital literacies.

Web 2.0 affordances have contributed to re-shape both telecollabora-tion models and the conceptualisation of ICC. They have led to a hybridi-sation and blurring of physical and digital, of online and offline personal and academic representations of self. In these digital liminal spaces partici-pants in OIL projects struggle to understand what communicative modus operandi to adopt, some manage to negotiate and reconfigure their iden-tity via language, but others are, literally, ‘lost for words’. This work aims to provide insights on how to support students to engage effectively online in professional and academic settings and illustrates this with the telecol-laborative case study CoCo (Coventry/Colmar).

PreFace

x PREFACE

The Internationalisation of the Curriculum (IoC) is becoming a prior-ity for all Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This work is aimed at academics teaching languages and linguistics, but could provide ideas on how to internationalise the curriculum in other subjects. It is hoped that it will provide insights on the teaching and learning of ICC in general and cyberpragmatics in particular, defined as understanding the intended meanings of others in online communication.

Chapter 1 introduces the main themes covered in the book: IoC, devel-opment of global citizenship competences and ICC. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the evolution of the concept of ICC. Chapter 3 discusses cyberpragmatics, the main politeness and pragmatic filters used for the CMC analysis of the CoCo asynchronous discussion exchanges and intro-duces threshold concepts (TCs). Chapter 4 illustrates the OIL case study CoCo and discusses the action-research-informed model of role-reversal threshold concept pedagogy adopted for the project. In Chapter 5 the research methodology underpinning the cyberpragmatic analysis is out-lined. Chapter 6 discusses the issues and challenges arising from the research data. Chapter 7 provides concluding remarks and final recom-mendations on how to integrate telecollaboration for ICC (or possibly ICCC—Intercultural Cyberpragmatic Communicative Competence) development into the HE languages and linguistics curriculum.

Coventry, West Midlands, UK Marina Orsini-JonesCoventry, West Midlands, UK Fiona Lee

xi

We would like to thank all the staff and the students involved in the tele-collaborative/Online International Learning (OIL) projects CoCo and MexCo to date and in particular Elwyn Lloyd in Coventry and Régine Barbier in Colmar. We would also like to thank the Higher Education Academy for awarding us the initial funding (Teaching Collaborative Grant, £60,000) to carry out the action-research on the OIL projects. A big thank you to Francesca Helm and Sarah Guth for allowing us to edit and re-use their Telecollaboration 2.0 table and to Benjamin Fröhlich, commissioning editor at Peter Lang, for granting us permission to edit ad re-use the table. We are also grateful to the OIL support colleagues in the Centre for Global Engagement. Finally we would like to thank the learn-ing technologists both in our former Faculty of Business, Environment and Society and in the ‘cuonline’ technical support unit at Coventry University.

acknowledgements

xiii

1 Introduction 1

2 Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) Revisited 7

3 Cyberpragmatics 25

4 The CoCo Telecollaborative Project: Internationalisation at Home to Foster Global Citizenship Competences 39

5 CoCo Research Questions and Answers 53

6 Emerging Online Politeness Patterns 63

7 Conclusion 93

contents

xiv CONTENTS

Appendix 1: Intercultural Digital Learning Project (IDLP)—Mahara Checklist 99

Appendix 2: Participant Information Form 103

Appendix 3: Sample Brown and Levinson Analysis 107

Appendix 4: Sample Leech analysis 115

Index 121

xv

CC Communicative CompetenceCoCo Coventry/Colmar (OIL project)CMC Computer Mediated CommunicationCOIL Collaborative online international learningCP Cooperative Principle (Grice, 1975)CU Coventry UniversityECTS European Credit Transfer SystemFEA Face-enhancing ActFLE Foreign Language EducationFTA Face-threatening ActGCE Global Citizenship EducationGSP General Strategy of Politeness (Leech, 2014)H Hearer = the hearer or addressee of an interactionHE Higher EducationHEA Higher Education AcademyHEI Higher Education InstitutionIC Intercultural CompetenceICC Intercultural Communicative CompetenceICCC Intercultural Cyberpragmatic Communicative CompetenceIDLP Intercultural Digital Learning ProjectIoC Internationalisation of the CurriculumL1 First LanguageL2 Second LanguageMexCo Mexico/Coventry (OIL Project)OIE Online International Exchange

list oF abbreviations

xvi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

OIL Online International LearningPIS Participant Information SheetRQ Research QuestionS Speaker = the speaker or addresser in an interactionTC Threshold ConceptVLE Virtual Learning Environment

xvii

Fig. 2.1 Telecollaboration 2.0, Hem and Guth (2010, p. 74) 18Fig. 3.1 Role-reversal model of threshold concept pedagogy, “through

the looking glass” of the “expert students” 33Fig. 4.1 Screenshot of the Open Moodle CoCo course web 43Fig. 4.2 Word cloud for “individualism” (UK responses) 45Fig. 4.3 Word cloud for “individualisme” (French responses) 45Fig. 4.4 Chart of strategies: positive politeness (Brown & Levinson,

1987, p. 102) 47Fig. 4.5 Chart of strategies: negative politeness (Brown & Levinson,

1987, p. 131) 48Fig. 4.6 Chart of strategies: off record FTA (Brown & Levinson,

1987, p. 214) 49Fig. 4.7 The component maxims of the General Strategy of Politeness

(Leech, 2014, p. 91) 49Fig. 4.8 The categories of constraint violation of the “General Strategy of

Impoliteness” (Leech, 2014, p. 221) 50Fig. 6.1 Pie chart summary of Brown and Levinson analysis of all 3

exchanges 66Fig. 6.2 Pie chart summary of Leech analysis of all 3 exchanges 78

list oF Figures