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them look for support and the resources on the blogs which could help them solve the difficulties. With the instructor’ encouragement, the students observed the dialogues between other students and international partners, and understood the benefits of learning how to reuse some of these to express their own ideas. In addition to learning the strategies for intercultural communication, the students gradually developed intercultural awareness. As interacting with the international partners, they
experienced the process of clarifying the cultural misunderstandings, adjusting their assumption about other cultures, and finally appreciating the differences and
similarities between cultures. Besides, the intercultural discussion with peers also helped the students think cultures from different perspectives. They were more willing to think from the international partners’ views, reflect on their own culture as other local students indicated their opinions about cultural issues with critical thinking.
The development of the three students’ intercultural communicative competences
As for the second question: How did three students in a Taiwanese elementary school develop intercultural competence by sharing their school life to theirinternational partners through weblogs and multimedia sources?, the researcher focused on three of the students’ learning experience. Through analyzing their production, questionnaires and individual interviews, these three students demonstrated their own challenge and achievements in this intercultural blog communication project. For example, Daphne always had high motivation for the intercultural communication. With the email experience with her English teachers for years, Daphne could use many strategies to maintain frequent communication with international partners. Her enthusiasm for learning by interacting with people was supported by both the international partners and the onsite instructor. She also created the learning opportunities for other peers and became the model of writing comments for other students. At the beginning, Teresa was interested in using multimedia
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resources to interact with international partners on the blog. However, without the experience of voicing out her opinions before, Teresa was once frustrated about being unable to fit in the intercultural communication until she realized that it was allowed to take other participants’ responses as the reference of writing comments. Most eminently, she found her new identity as being a “supporter” in the group discussion and utilizing multimedia to present her life in a more interesting way. Brian was under the impression that Internet was the tool for online games and funny pictures.
Although he had frequent interaction with one of the international partner, Andrea, his motivation for communication faded then. His dissatisfaction with the communication with too much emphasis on cultural information sharing and his perception about Internet use stopped him from getting involved in the intercultural communication actively. Then the question-based group discussion on “Research Diary” initiated by the instructor made Brian enjoy being both an informant and a questioner when his contribution would be noticed by the instructor and other local students. Table 5.1 summarizes the three students’ learning styles, and the challenge and achievement they had in the project.
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Table 5.1.Summary of the three students’ intercultural experience
Learning style Challenge Achievement
Daph ne
1. Having strong motivation for learning through the
interaction with other people.
2. Having conflicts with
classmates and teachers due to her high self-expectation and lack of attention to lectures.
Feeling unsecured for the lack of rules in the project and having no
2. Discovering some new information about the
international partners’ life as she thoughts cultural issues from different perspective, and analyzing cultural differences.
3. Developing positive interaction with other local students.
Teres a
1. Always following the teacher's instruction 2. Having no confidence of
expressing opinions in class.
3. Having interest in learning the use of Internet and multimedia applications.
Brian 1. Using English as medium for learning new information on the Internet
2. Building relationship with people through exchanging online games or pictures.
3. Preferring to look for “new answers” but having low motivation for class
1. Being elicited more intercultural thinking and more motivated to join the intercultural discussion with local teammates on the blog with local teammates.
2. Enjoying the role of both a cultural information provider and a “questioner” to elicit other students’ intercultural thinking.
Besides, the researcher used Liaw’s (2006) adaption of Byram’s (2000) intercultural guidelines as the framework to analyze the three participants’
intercultural experience encountered in blog exchanges and their responses revealed in the interviews and reflection journals (See Appendix E). To develop more
understanding about these students’ different intercultural development, the researcher compared the result of the three participants’ intercultural experience on the blog of
“A day at my school” and “Research Diary”, and the students’ response in reflection journals and the students’ instances at each phases (See Table 5.2 and Table 5.3).
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Table 5.2.The numbers and percentages of the three students’ blog entries and
reflection journal instances that fell in Byram’s guideline
Daphne Teresa Brian
Note: AD, the blog titled “A day at my school”；RD, the blog titled “A day at my school”；RJ, Reflection journal
Table 5.3.The numbers of the three students’ blog entries and reflection journal
instances that fell in Byram’s guideline at each phase
Daphne Teresa Brian
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D2 3 1 0
From Table 5.2 and Table 5.3, it can be seen that most of the students’
intercultural instances fell into Subcategory A1, Category B and Category C. Around 40~50 percent of each student's instances fell in Subcategory 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. It showed that the three students all had great interest in intercultural
communication and tried to maintain conversation by expressing their interest in other cultures or presenting their own cultures. Besides, according to Table 5.3, around half of the instances in Subcategory A1 were observed in Phase 1.
In Category B: Ability to change perspective, the three students’ instances collected from the group discussion between the local students on the blog “Research Diary” (8 instances for average) were much more than those from the blog “A Day at My School” (1.5 instances for average). The result showed that the students could interpret cultural issues from more perspective as they interacted with other local students.
Regarding Category C: Knowledge about one’s own and others’ culture for
intercultural communication, Daphne presented more instances in this category than
the other two students, especially in the Subcategory C2: to know how to engage inconversation 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
(16 instances for Daphne, 8 instance for Teresa, and 6 instances for Brian). The result indicated that Daphne might have better abilities to observe and analyze the cultural differences and similarities in the intercultural communication than Teresa and Brian.Brian had more instances in the Subcategory C1: To know some important facts about
living in one’s own or the other cultures and about the country, state and people. It
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illustrated that Brian was acting as a cultural informant for both the local students and international partners. The results of the three students’ instances analyzed by
Byram’s guideline showed that the three students demonstrated different intercultural communication skills as they learnt to interact with the international partners and other local students.