Acquiring Intercultural Awareness in a Virtual World: An Analysis of Intercultural Interactions between Dutch and Finnish High School Students

Abstract

This study presents the results of a case study that attempts to investigate how intercultural awareness may be gained from intercultural interactions with peers during culture-related episodes that occurred throughout virtual world-mediated telecollaboration. Through a case study of Finnish and Dutch high school students who performed collaborative tasks in the virtual world (VW) OpenSim, this study explored the intercultural learning opportunities, the students’ participation and engagement with each other, and the impact of the VW on the intercultural learning of the students. Following Jauregi et al.’s (2011) framework for task-based intercultural communicative language teaching, the tasks were designed by Bastian and Reinhardt (2016) with the aim to foster the students’ intercultural awareness and competence, and thereby create opportunities for the students to compare, contrast and reflect on their respective cultures. The results of the qualitative interaction analysis show that the tasks allowed for various moments of intercultural learning: the students became critically aware of their cultural norms and how they may differ across cultures, reflected on cultural stereotypes, and showed aspects of all five of Byram’s (1997) savoirs of intercultural communicative competence (ICC). However, the students were seen to have difficulties explaining cultural phenomenons and differences in-depth, and required teacher mediation for the progression of the majority of the discussions. This could be the result of the students’ inexperience with explaining and reflecting on culture. The analysis also demonstrated that the Dutch students tended to be more assertive in their engagement with the topics of discussion, whereas the Finnish were quieter and seemed to have more difficulties following and contributing to the discussion. A reason for this could be the differences in age, English levels, and communication styles between the Dutch and Finnish students (Bastian & Reinhardt, 2016). To benefit intercultural learning, it is important to include preparation and follow-up tasks to allow for the students to participate in collaborative tasks without teacher mediation and to allow for the reflection on differences in communication styles to create awareness and understanding among the students. Finally, the students expressed that they enjoyed working together in the VW because of its immersive nature and the sense of anonymity due to the absence of webcams, indicated by the side-sequences that enriched the authentic social interactions. However, the students indicated that the medium Skype also would have been suitable for the completion of the tasks. This suggests that the tasks could benefit from a more immersive task design that would allow students to interact with their environment and avatars to a greater extent.