Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter 6 2016 | Page 5
Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2016 Newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------competence as being comprised of five savoirs, or
types of knowledge, skills, and attitudes; finding
these savoirs complementary to learners'
communicative competence, he refers to this
model as Intercultural Communicative Competence.
Teachers can address interculturality in the
classroom with the help of a checklist of six steps,
which serves as a guide for planning with
interculturality in mind through a backward design
process:
1. Intentionally set learning targets for language
proficiency and intercultural competence.
2. Share learning targets with learners and
encourage them to set their own goals.
3. Design performance assessments that integrate
language and culture and assess interculturality.
4. Determine appropriate authentic resources.
5. Provide ample opportunities for learners to
interact with native speakers.
6. Create ways for learners to reflect on and selfassess their progress.
We all have the capacity to communicate with other
people, and to learn to understand them. In a world
where intercultural contact is increasing and
inevitable, it is important to find new ways to
communicate our values and beliefs to each other.
Internetworked media technologies have
gradually diffused throughout the world. They have
often been sparks for intercultural dialogue.
Facebook revolutions such as the 2011 Egyptian
revolution and the 2014 Romanian presidential
elections have been televised, blogged,
photographed, videoed, twittered. One effect of
these protests was to fuel intercultural
communication on a world-historic scale.
There are 4 main connections between digital
media and intercultural communicative
competence:
I. Digital media enable intercultural communicative
competence through publicity. Starting from
analogies between the printing press and the
Internet, we can say that the internetworked
communication obviates intermediaries such as
newspaper editors. The diffusion of digital media
into our everyday life invites us to consid er the free
speech issues that should accompany intercultural
dialogue.
II. Through multimedia forms of communication,
digital media offer new and unique 'spaces' for
intercultural communicative communication. The
richness of multimedia is evident, for instance, in
the stirring videos posted on the Internet of the
first and second rounds of voting for the Romanian
president, i.e. the long lines of Romanian citizens
in the diaspora waiting to be permitted to vote (in
November 2014). Visual representations offered an
enhanced experience compared to more traditional,
textualized narrative accounts. Building on the idea
of a "linguistic landscape", as E. Shohamy and D.
Gorter worded it in 2009 in their book "Linguistic
landscape: Expanding the scenery", the
ocularcentric culture of digital media can be seen as
creating an "imagistic landscape" in which the
richness of media provides a 'feel' of a place or
situation through visual representation. Digital
media thus offer new 'spaces' and
(re)conceptualizations of intercultural encounters.
III. Digital media facilitate intercultural
communication on a new scale: many-to-many not few-to-few intercultural communication, not
intercultural dialogue any longer, but intercultural
dissemination. Many-to-many communication
blends dialogue and dissemination on a broad scale.
Hence comes the increase in multiperspectivalism,
as several authors (A. Bruns, H. Gans, D. Pfister to
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