“Going down the Tower of Babel” through telecollaboration in the context of Internationalization at Home

Abstract

Belli et al. (2018) explain that the myth of the Tower of Babel, described in the Holy Bible, alludes to the intercultural relations in today’s world, because the Tower was located in a major economic and cultural center of the ancient world. Telecollaboration, defined as the use of online technologies in the area of language teaching and learning between students who are geographically distant (O’DOWD, 2013a), plays an important role in promoting intercultural interactions in the Internationalization at Home (O’DOWD, 2019) context. The latter stands for a more inclusive internationalization, achieved by domestic activities, and not only by international academic mobility (CROWTHER et al., 2000). For Luna (2018b), the process of Internationalization of the Curriculum occurs in the light of the intercultural approach (KRAMSCH, 2014), whereas Gil (2016) argues that such approach should be conceptualized based on the interaction between language and culture. This study aims at discussing how the interaction between language and culture related to the intercultural approach can lead students “to go down the Tower of Babel” through telecollaborative activities in the context of Internationalization at Home. With respect to the results, two telecollaborative domestic actions, under the author’s coordination, appear to indicate that there have been opportunities towards the process of “going down the tower”, since many concerns related to the current world, e.g. cultural differences, stereotypes and the environment, where students can to take both an insider and an outsider’s perspective (KRAMSCH, 2011), are at the heart of the discussions.

Keywords

• internationalization of the curriculum
• internationalization at home
• telecollaboration
• online teaching and learning of foreign language
• intercultural competence