FOSTERING FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING THROUGH TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED INTERCULTURAL PROJECTS

The main aim of learning English as an international language is to effectively communicate with people from other cultures. In Taiwan, learners have few opportunities to experience cross-cultural communication in English. To create an authentic EFL classroom, this one-year action research study carried out three collaborative intercultural projects using web-based tools (online forums, weblogs, Skype, and email) in a 7th grade EFL class. The projects were designed to improve students' language skills and intercultural communicative competence (ICC). To triangulate the findings, qualitative and quantitative methods were used to collect the data; specifically, questionnaires, interviews, and document analyses were used to investigate the learners' responses and learning processes. The results revealed that the participants had strong positive attitudes towards technology-enhanced intercultural language learning (TEILI), which enabled the learners to experience authentic language learning that fostered linguistic competence and ICC. The findings suggest that TEILI approximates real-life learning contexts by allowing students to use a language for the same purposes that they will use it outside school.