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CHAPTER FIVE DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSSION
This chapter begins with an overview, followed by the discussion and implications, limitations, and a conclusion.
Overview of the Research Findings
The case study focused on the development of the fourth graders’ intercultural communicative competence, as well as their perceptions of a cultural project.
Overall, the study has shown that the cultural project helped foster students’
development of intercultural competence; particularly their better understanding of the target culture. The findings can be summarized as follows: (a) the cultural project helped the students develop their intercultural competence in three domains:
knowledge, attitude, and skills of relating and interpreting; (b) students showed positive attitude toward the cultural project; (c) the cultural project arose their curiosity towards the other culture but also increased their awareness of their own Taiwanese culture; (d) the students felt that they needed to improve their language ability to complete the learning task as well as to better communicate with the Australian teacher .
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Discussion and Implications
Firstly, in this research, the cultural project was used to develop elementary EFL students’ intercultural competence. In addition, Byram’s Model of ICC (1997) was used as the basis to analyze and evaluate the student participants’ intercultural competence. Among the five domains in the ICC criteria, the students performed the best in knowledge. This study indicates that integrating the cultural project into language courses could strengthen the participants’ knowledge of their own culture and the target culture. These results are consistent with those of Huang (2014) and Chang (2010). Both studies emphasized cultivating learning experiences by communicating with foreigners. Byram (1997) indicated that knowledge can be characterized into two categories: knowledge of self and other and interaction.
Compared with the previous studies which recruited participants from high schools and universities, the student participants in this study were much younger. This research could provide valuable implications for elementary school teachers who aim to conduct a cultural project.
Secondly, students’ intercultural development of the attitude domain was also worth noticing. While accumulating the knowledge as the foundational understanding of both cultures, the students showed strong curiosity which fostered their inner
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motivation for exploring the other cultures, as well as the motivation for learning the target language. The results are remarkably consistent with the studies of Tsou (2005), Chen and Yang (2014), and Hsu (2014). Moreover, in this study, the cultural project included diverse activities which allowed the students to work together and to exchange their information during the activity. The interview results show that the project has successfully stimulated their thoughts and generally improved their learning attitude. They demonstrated the eagerness to learn about the other countries in the coming semester. These findings are in accordance with the results of previous studies (Chang, 2010; Su, 2011; Freiermuth & Huang, 2012), which also emphasized broadening students’ international vision.
Thirdly, the students also showed some development in the domain of skills of relating and interpreting, which were mostly found in the students’ works and in responses to lessons about the double bubble map mission and mini book. These activities required the students to summarize knowledge, to illustrate it into mini-books, and to categorize the findings. They needed to draw out their knowledge and modify it during the process. Also, activities like comparing the two different cultures, having a short talk with the Australian teacher, and some hands-on learning activities tended to lead to more discussion about cross-cultural misunderstanding and
stereotypes. Moreover, students seemed to benefit a lot from their short talk with the
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Australian teacher. The results seemed to echo the finding from the previous research in which face-to-face and interactive events not only fostered students’ learning attitude but also removed certain stereotypes and overcome some prejudice (Abrams, 2002; Hsu, 2016).
Fourthly, the interview results showed that the students pointed out that they lacked confidence in speaking English, and they were not familiar with the learning content because they did not have enough background knowledge. Teachers need to take students’ linguistic barriers into consideration when delivering cultural lessons (Tsou, 2005).
Lastly, in the present study, the participant showed a positive attitude toward the cultural project. However, the results also showed that the students were confronted with challenges in My Country Study section, which was full of factual knowledge of the target country. Byram (1997) indicated that factual knowledge can be part of social identity which plays an important role in intercultural communication because it is something to be shared. Since factual knowledge is the fundamental element, the units were needed in this research. It is suggested that the first lesson of the study should be modified in the future so that students can learn the facts of the target culture in a less intimidating way. For instance, it would be better to lead students into completing a situational design, such as a travel brochure introducing the target
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culture. Piaget (1971) claimed that cognitive growth is a process of constructing and reconstructing knowledge based on the learner’s prior knowledge and existing environment. In this research, the key to conducting a cultural lesson successfully in the fourth-grade class was to build a structured schema for students. For example, the instructor tried to provide her own travelling experiences and helped the students to adopt the thinking map strategies to distinguish the similarities and differences. These ways of support helped the learners to accumulate knowledge of the target culture and to foster them to modify and internalize those factors in their mind. In addition, in the interview, the students had more discussion about those authentic activities, especially for the last section. The students’ reflections also showed that those hands-on learning activities helped them to learn the culture naturally, instead of having to memorize information.
Limitations
Although the present study has shown the positive effects of the cultural project on elementary students’ development of intercultural competence, much more research into this topic is needed and the results of this study should also be
interpreted with caution. One limitation of the study is that the study focused on the development of students’ intercultural competence and understanding of their
perceptions. Future research may investigate teachers’ perceptions or their comments
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and feedback on the project.
Another limitation of this study has to do with the content of the cultural lessons, which only focused on one foreign culture (i.e. the Australian culture). To better prepare students for communicating with people from different parts of the world, future studies should incorporate more diverse cultural content which include both cultures of English and non-English speaking countries.
Finally, the higher order skills of Byram’s five domains did not appear in this study probably because of the relatively young age of the participants. Young learners may need more teachers’ guidance in practicing high order thinking skills. Therefore, it is suggested that future studies may have the instructor provide students with
scaffolding strategies, which would guide them to apply their critical thinking skills towards both their own culture and foreign cultures.
Conclusion
In summary, the use of cultural project in the EFL classroom can have positive effects on students’ development of intercultural competence even for younger learners. Although students held positive attitude towards the project, they also experienced some challenges mainly about their own lack of English ability. Also, based on the results of this study, engaging students in cross-cultural interactions with
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a native speaker, also the target cultural informant, benefits intercultural learning and could help students to internalize their intercultural competence. It is believed that the findings as well as the instructional design of this study can provide insights to
teachers and researchers who are interested in integrating culture into EFL classrooms.
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