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different strategies to maintain the intercultural conversation and how to present themselves through multimedia resources. Besides, they also had to overcome the difficulties and frustration of being not able to get involved in the intercultural communication and found their roles in the blog community. The students’ learning process was recorded through their blog comments, multimedia products and the researcher’s observation of the students’ change in the learning project. After finished a topic, students would be asked to write down their reflections, including the
knowledge of their own culture or the target cultures (i.e., the U.S. and Italy) that they have learnt, their interpretation about the knowledge, processes of solving problems if any. Students would then be interviewed by the researcher to clarify issues and
problems identified from observation, questionnaire, and their reflections.
After the four topics had all been completed, students were required to fill out the second questionnaire which asked about their attitudes toward learning and using English in the weblog. Then, they were interviewed again to clarify issues and problems identified from observation, their final reflections, and the questionnaire.
Collection of students’ products continued until the end of the project.
Data analysis
Following case study methods and interpretivist tradition (Garratt& Hodkinson, 1998), this researcher analyzed the data by adopting the grounded theory approach (Strauss& Corbin, 1990), using both open and axial coding to investigate what and how intercultural communicative competence is developed. Besides, the researcher used Liaw’s (2006) adaption of Byram’s (2000) guideline of intercultural
communicative competence as the initial guiding framework and anal yzed students’
intercultural experience. Byram’s model has been used for teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence for many years and thus is extensively applied to studies examining the outcomes of intercultural exchanges (Belz, 2002,
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2003; Liaw, 2006; Lomicka, 2006; Műeller-Hartmann, 2006; O’Dowd, 2003, 2006;
Schneider& von der Emde, 2006). Byram advocated that the successful intercultural communication depended on different social competences to maintain interpersonal relationship. Thus, Byram defined the five components of intercultural competence which were complementary to a language learner’s communicative competence:
attitude, knowledge, skills of interpreting and relating, skills of discovery and interaction, and critical cultural awareness. According to the five components of intercultural competence, Byram developed the guideline of intercultural
communicative competence. There are four categories of intercultural communicative competences: a) Interest in knowing other people’ way of life and introducing one’s own cultures to others, b) Ability to change perspective, c) knowledge about one’s own and other’ culture for intercultural communication, and d) Knowledge of the intercultural communication process. And in each category, there are descriptions used to identify the students’ intercultural competence (See Table 3.2).
Table 3.2: The categories and Definitions of Byram’s (2000) Adapted Guideline
Definitions
A. Interest in knowing other people’s way of life and introducing one’s own culture to others
A1. To be interested in other people’s experience of daily life, or presenting one’s own experience of daily life to others, particularly those things not usually presented to outsiders through the media.
A2. To be interested in the daily experience of a variety of social groups within a society and not only the dominant culture.
B. Ability to change
perspective -To realize that other cultures by seeing things from a different point of view and by looking at one’ own culture from their perspective.
C. Knowledge about one’s own and others’ culture for intercultural communication
C1 To know some important facts about living in one’s own or the other cultures and about the country, state and people
C2 To know how to engage in conversation with people from both one’s own and the other cultures and maintain a conversation by explaining to them the differences and similarities between cultures D. Knowledge about
the intercultural communication process
D1 To know how to resolve misunderstandings which arise from people’s lack of awareness of the view point of another culture.
D2 To know how to discover new information and new aspects of the other culture for oneself.
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The definitions of the categories were adapted to the study context and
represented the different types of data collected from students’ intercultural learning.
The units of analysis varied from the short sentences to entire paragraphs of the students’ blog posts, comments and response in the interviews and reflection journals (see Appendix E). The researcher would interpret the data by identifying them with the relevant categories of intercultural communication competence and analyzing the instance number which fell in each category.
By constantly comparing and contrasting different data sets (i.e., questionnaires, students’ multimedia products, their discussion on the blog, and interviews, the
teacher’s logs, the result of the students’ instances analyzed by Byram’s guideline, and others), the researcher identified emerging themes and provide proper interpretations to address the three research questions (see more in Chapter5). To examine the interrater reliability of the adapted guideline, questionnaire, interview, and reflection journal, first, the researcher and an English teacher of Mingde elementary school gave each of the data an independent reading. Then they triangulated their own comments with blog content and the response in questionnaire, interview, and reflection journal.
Second, the researcher and the English teacher maintained a steady correspondence to share their findings and discussed students in which there were doubts until reaching an agreement on how to treat the data. They individually analyzed the data to achieve an interrater reliability of 0.83.
To address research question one: What critical events do the students in a Taiwanese elementary school experience when interacting with their international partners through weblogs and multimedia sources?, the researcher provided a general description of the critical events that happened during the project as the six students experienced them. Then using results from the above data analysis procedure, the researcher discussed the success and challenges and emotional changes the students
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had as they interacted with international partners
Through discussing the overview of the students’ behaviors in intercultural communication, there were some issues which emerged and needed to be further analyzed. Among the six students, there were three students who not only recorded their thinking about their learning process of intercultural communication more completely than the other three students but also respectively represented three different types of learning experience observed from the six students’ in this project.
The three students’ complete and representative data led to the second research question: How do three students in a Taiwanese elementary school develop
intercultural competence through presenting their school life to their foreign partners through weblogs and multimedia sources? These three students’ experiences and reflections data were presented in chapter 4 separately through content analysis on the observation of the researcher, individual performance on the blog, reflection journals, individual interviews. Besides, the three students’ result was analyzed under Byram’s frameworks. The goal is to provide an account of how each of the three participants played a role in the critical events and how their intercultural competence developed.
As for the research question three: How do their attitudes toward learning English change as they learn to discuss school life with international partners in the weblog and the online environment?, the researcher interpreted the result of the questionnaire on the three students’ attitude change toward learning English through communicating on the blog, and the follow-up interviews served as support to the interpretation and explanation of students’ attitudinal changes in the project.
Finally, the researcher presented the challenges and successes that the students encountered during the project, from which conceptual implications or pedagogical suggestions were derived. Suggestions for further studies were also provided in Chapter 6.
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As a summary of Chapter 3, it is clear that repeated patterns of teaching and research activities characterized the data collection and analysis procedure for this study. Teaching activities included how the teacher/researcher assisted students to complete a series of tasks while research activities include what and how the
researcher collected and interpreted data. Detail activities for both are presented in the timeline (See Table 3.3) below.
Table 3.3: Timeline of the intercultural project “A day at my school”
Month Teaching Activities Research activities
Sep.
(Phase 1)
1. Explained the intercultural project “ A day at my school” to students
2. Students introduced themselves and got to know their international partners through practicing publishing the blog posts on the blog titled “A day at my school”
1. Students completed the background questionnaire 2. Conducted the first interview 3. Started the teacher’s log 4. Observation and teacher’s log
Oct (Phase 2)
1. Assisted students to discuss what they are going to do in the first topic: Learning courses.
2. Assisted students to design, develop, and post the intercultural materials based on the topic,
“Learning course” on the blog ‘A day at my school’
3. Assisted students to express their opinions on the blog ‘Research Diary’
1. Students kept the reflection journal
2. Conducted the second interview 3. Observation and teacher’s log
Nov.
(Phase 3)
1. Assisted students to discuss what they are going to do in the topic: Our lunch in school.
2. Assisted students to design, develop, and post the intercultural materials based on the topic,
“Our lunch in school” on the blog ‘A day at my school’
3. Assisted students to express their opinions on the blog ‘Research Diary’
1 . Students kept the reflection journal
2. Conducted the third interview 3. Observation and teacher’s log
Dec.
(Phase 4)
1. Assisted students to discuss what they are going to do in the topic: “Extracurricular activities.”
2. Assisted students to design, develop, and post the intercultural materials based on the topic,
“Extracurricular activities.”” on the blog ‘A day at my school’
3. Assisted students to express their opinions on the blog ‘Research Diary’
1. Observation and teacher’s log 2. Students kept the reflection
journal
3. Conducted the fourth interview
Jan.
(Phase 5)
1. Assist students to discuss what they are going to do in the topic: “School rules.”
2. Assisted students to design, develop, and post the intercultural materials based on the topic,
“School rules.” on the blog ‘A day at my school’
3. Assisted students to express their opinions on the blog ‘Research Diary’
1. Observation and teacher’s log 2. Students kept the reflection
journal
3. Conducted the fifth interview 4. Students completed
Questionnaire of attitudes 5. Conducted the sixth interview
Feb.
↓
1. Transcribed the audiotape of interviews
2. Analyzed and coded the data collected from Sep. to Dec.
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CHAPTER 4
CRITICAL INCIDENT OVERVIEW AND INDIVIDUAL CASE
This chapter consists of a description of the intercultural experience of six sixth graders in this project: Daphne, Teresa, Brian, Ryan, Larry and Ben. To better understand the development of these students’ intercultural understanding, there is a need to document how their intercultural competences evolved, how they presented their own culture to the international partners, and what were their reactions toward the critical incidents during the project.
Critical incidents in this study refer to the distinct occurrence or events which are neither negative nor positive but require some attention and multiple interpretations (Fitzgerald, 2001). These incidents can possibly facilitate students’ intercultural learning by fostering comparisons of different perspectives on the same issues, which sometimes leads to change in students' views on other cultures (Műller-Hartmann, 2000). Another way to look into students’ intercultural learning is to analyze how they reflected on the weblog intercultural learning. According to McAllister et al (2006), exploration of learners’ reflection upon critical incidents in intercultural practices can offer a promising way in understanding the development of learners’ intercultural competences.
Besides, since the goal of the intercultural approach to English learning is to help students use English freely both in global and local contexts (Hung, 2006), it is
necessary to analyze how this intercultural learning project on the blog helped students change their attitude toward learning English.
Therefore, this chapter is divided into two sections and presented in the following order: (1) A general description of how students dealt with the critical incidents during the project, and (2) further analysis of three of the students’
intercultural experiences and their attitude change on English learning.