Adapting Intercultural Communication Course for Undergraduate English Language Students Using Digital Tools

Eva Reid, Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia;   

Abstract: The Covid 19 pandemic has caused real turmoil in the whole world, and impacted 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 at least a significant amount of time. The greatest impact from the need to change to online teaching, was on universities. All teachers around the world had to show 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 course of Intercultural communication is one of fundamental courses in the English language teacher training and also in translation programmes. Normally, I accept as many foreign exchange students as possible to the course, to help create a multicultural environment. However, a change from face-to-face teaching in a multicultural environment, to teaching via computer screens without personal contact and participation of foreign students, appeared to be an immense obstacle. Even though it seemed to be almost impossible to develop intercultural communicative competences within the online teaching format, I had to be creative and develop a new course that would fulfil the purpose. Via participatory action research a new online course of Intercultural communication was created and implemented. Data was collected by observation, self-reflecting journals and open-ended surveys. The aim of the online course was to develop intercultural communicative competences of students and by weekly assignments of reading texts, watching videos, completing quizzes, listening to lectures and discussions during seminars, I can evaluate the newly developed course of Intercultural communication as very successful.

Key words: intercultural communication, intercultural communicative competence, online course, action research