Virtual Cultural Communication: Establishing Dialogues Between China and Poland

Abstract

The overall aim of the current paper is to establish best practices for developing, engaging and working critically in virtual intercultural communication. The need to build practical language communication skills is not a new idea or a new part of methodology. With the development of technology, the range of communicative opportunities has grown and allowed virtual intercultural dialogues to take place. The focus of these situations is not only language development and practice, but also critical cultural awareness and intercultural skill development. The paper presents contrasting approaches in the methodological construction of one such programme between young students in Entel Foreign Language School, China, and Krosno State College, Poland. Over the course of the link from Spring to Summer 2017, different approaches were taken by the instructors and students in both countries resulting in varying levels of engagement and critical understanding. The Chinese approach stresses communication as an outcome and delivers more time to oral activities in the classroom, which contrasts with the Polish approach of a stricter language-based teaching strategy. As a result, the paper will discuss the relative merits of the two methodological frameworks in the communication project. This will be achieved by evaluating the overall success of the communication based on interviews with the student participants and observations of interaction during the link meetings. Finally, the paper will illustrate a methodology for working with such links and developing intercultural communication.

Keywords

• global cooperation
• intercultural communication
• online learning
• china
• poland
• efl methodology