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 5