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The relevance of the interaction content with the students’ learning style and life experience
According to Kaikkonen (1997), learners’ different previous experience, knowledge, belief and attitude made their learning, the process of making sense and possessing the world, in different ways. The students’ motivation for intercultural communication seemed to be related to their individual’s learning style. Since Daphne was an active learner who liked to learn new information through interacting with other people, she preferred to learn through discussion. The interactive phenomena of the blog environment increased her interest in this intercultural project. Teresa was interested in using multimedia resources to make cultural materials but felt stressed to express herself in the intercultural communication. Brian was a learner who liked to learn and share resources with other people on the Internet and did not like to follow the instructor’s guidance. He was quite used to the blog environment supported by different Internet applications. The openness of the blog environment gave him much freedom to decide what and how he wanted to say to the international partners.
Besides, he liked to play the roles of an informant and questioner in the discussion.
According to Kolb's Experiential Learning theory (Claxon & Ralston, 1978;
Svinicki & Dixon, 1987), these three students had different learning styles. Daphne and Brian’s learning styles showed that they tended to learn through concrete experimentation. Daphne was people-oriented and preferred to interact with people with her true emotion. She had broad cultural interests and liked to gather and
interpret cultural information as discussing with people. As for Brian, he was attracted to the real tasks of intercultural communication and liked to experiment with new ideas, to simulate, and to work with practical applications. Thus, the strong
interactivity of the intercultural communication project just matched their needs and
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learning styles. However, Teresa was a learner who tended to rely on others for information than carry out her own analysis. She preferred a well-planned and teacher-centered learning environment. She felt secure when following teachers’
instruction. She did not like ambiguity, uncertainty or fuzziness and lacked
self-confidence in asking questions and communication. Therefore, she felt stressful when she found she was unable to fit in the blog communication where students were required to face the challenge of interacting with people themselves. Thus,
individuals’ learning styles were closely related to whether or not they were able to get involved in the intercultural communication.
Another factor that might be related to students’ motivation for intercultural communication is the degree of relevance between the topics for intercultural
communication and their life experience. As mentioned earlier, most of the instances in which the three students showed their interest in knowing international partners’
life were observed in Phase 1. Besides, when interviewing with these three students, they all indicated they had great interest in knowing their international partners at Phase 1. The students’ high motivation at Phase 1 might have been related to the topic of Phase1: getting to know each other, which was what they were most familiar with.
They were eager to talk with their partners about what were really close to their life, such as hobbies, online games, pets and interesting information about their own country. Teresa stated that she felt interested in the intercultural project when she knew she could introduce her life to the international partners. Daphne thought that the topic of Phase 1 was similar to what she talked to her English teacher in England through emails. Her previous pleasant intercultural experience reinforced her
expectation toward interacting with international partners and would like develop close relationship with them on the blog. As for Brian, he was excited to know that one of the international partners, Andrea, would like to talk with him about Taiwan.
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And that made him more willing to contribute on the blog. Besides, in school, most of the time, these students learnt how to greet and ask people what they do in daily life in English. Therefore, they felt comfortable sharing what they were really familiar with and had high motivation for applying what they had learnt to the real communication with international partners.
In addition to students having high motivation for their familiar issues at Phase1, other instances of intercultural interests observed in other phases also supported that the relevance between task topics and their life experience was important for
individuals’ motivation for intercultural communication. For example, it could be seen that Daphne had great interest in knowing what learning courses the international partners leant in school through her involvement in the communication. She thought that the topic of learning courses was what she wanted to know most in this
intercultural project. Daphne loved to learn all the courses in school and therefore she felt the need to understand how the international partners thought about their learning.
She contributed more (7 instances) than other participants (3 instances for average) at Phase 2 as some of them did not show interest in knowing learning courses in their interviews. During Phase 3, it was observed that Brian and Teresa were quite concerned about the topic of school lunch as they had complained to the instructor that their lunch was horrible for several times. Therefore, when they discussed their school lunch with their international partners, their motivation for intercultural communication increased because the topic was just what they really cared about.
Brian asked more questions at Phase 3 to the international partners than he did at other phases and also expressed how he thought about their school lunch. Their instances that fell in Subcategory A1 also increased at Phase3. Interestingly, Teresa changed the way she interacted with international partners in order to understand more about them. She expressed her interest in the international partners’ lunch by not
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only presuming how their partners thought about their school lunch but also asking them whether or not her presumption was correct. These two strategies of making presumption and asking for confirmation were what she learnt from Daphne’s comments. Therefore, it was possible for learners more willing to adopt different ways and the new skills they acquired from other teammates if they had high motivation for the intercultural communication.
To sum up, the researcher observed that both the learning styles and familiarity with the intercultural tasks was related with the three students’ behaviors in the intercultural communication. According to Chao (2001), if learners’ previous
experience can support the new concept or challenge they meet in the learning tasks, their existing understanding can connected to the new learning. They may feel more interested in interacting with international partners when the learning environment is consistent with their learning preference or the learning content is what they are familiar with.