English in the Global Age: Preparing students for ELF (English as a lingua franca) in CMIC (computer-mediated intercultural communication).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

In this talk, I present an international curriculum collaboration in the area of Computer-Mediated Intercultural Communication (CMIC). This is a rich curriculum space for exploring the intersection of: intercultural communication; computer-mediated communication; and English-medium interactions. The CMIC course at Manchester is offered to undergraduate students of Language, Literacy and Communication. They are not students of foreign languages – indeed, many of them are only fluent in English (as a mother tongue). During the CMIC course, they communicate online in English with one or two ‘epartners’, i.e. students from our collaborating institutions in countries including Bulgaria, Germany, Slovenia, South Korea, Syria, Uruguay and (new for 2011) Indonesia. The epartners are drawn from a variety of programmes but each has its own local variant of the CMIC (i.e. a local operationalisation of collaborative curriculum thinking by all the partner institutions). Unlike their Manchester peers, these students have reached a high level in English (typically as a foreign language). Most of the telecollaboration projects described in the literature on foreign language education tend to focus on each student’s continued learning of their epartner’s language (and culture), i.e. a reciprocal foreign language learning interaction. In contrast, the CMIC project focuses on the complexities and affordances of English-medium CMIC. Inherent in the project is the use of English in this CMIC space by either (a) a traditional foreign language pairing comprising a native-speaker and an EFL-user or (b) a lingua franca trio comprising, for example, one Manchester student and epartners from Germany and Slovenia.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationConference paper
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2010
EventIntercultural Communication - University of Cordoba, Spain
Duration: 1 Jan 1824 → …

Conference

ConferenceIntercultural Communication
CityUniversity of Cordoba, Spain
Period1/01/24 → …

Keywords

  • computer-mediated intercultural communication (CMIC)
  • Computer-mediated communication
  • English as a lingua franca (ELF),
  • telecollaboration
  • international curriculum collaboration
  • internationalisation
  • intercultural communication

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