Symposium for AILA Conference, 23-28 August 2011 in Beijing

"Enhancing online literacy: Skills, attributes and knowledge

for students and teachers in the digital age." (Uschi Stickler and Regine Hampel)

Title: Preparing our students for the intercultural reality of todays online learning spaces.
Aline Germain-Rutherford, University of Ottawa and Middlebury College

1. Intercultural Pedagogy for Language Learning

In his Seven complex lessons for the education of the future1, Edgar Morin suggests that the
education of the future has to get past a compartmentalized vision of learning that "is deeply
drastically inadequate to grasp realities and problems which are ever more global, transnational,
multidimensional, transversal, polydisciplinary and planetary". For knowledge to be pertinent,
the philosopher believes that we must learn about the world as world in its contextual, global,
multidimensional and complex reality.

Language study, today, certainly fits this belief. Already in 1993 Claire Kramsch was writing
about Foreign Languages for a Global Age, and of the changing nature of language study in
the United States where learning a foreign language, then, has become not a way of celebrating a
recognized cultural canon but a way of discovering another people's multifaceted culture and the
multiple voices that constitute one's own2.

Fourteen years later, the authors of the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2007 report
Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World advocated an
interdisciplinary and transcultural approach, situating language study in cultural, historical,
geographic, and cross-cultural frames within the context of humanistic learning.

The sharp increase in transnational migration and the globalization of social and economic
processes stimulated by rapid innovations in communication technology create new challenges
and opportunities for education systems in general and language study in particular, such as the
role of education systems and community institutions in the preservation and transmission of
plurilingualism, the reality of multilingual and multicultural classrooms, and the definition
(discovery?) of ones identity in the linguistic choices that one makes.

In Europe, it is in the early 1970s, that, in the context of migrating populations, and pressures
from governments on foreign language educators to help solve social and economic tensions, that
important work on Intercultural pedagogy, acknowledging diversity, otherness, and cultural
relativism (Porcher, 1998, Abdallah-Pretceille, 1998, Visonneau 1997) was done paralleled with
the advent of the communicative approach and a more learner-centered perspective in language
classes. At the time, The Council of Europe, whose actions changed the perception of linguistic
and cultural challenges for migrants children at school into mutual cultural enrichment,
emphasized the fact that all societies were multicultural and therefore the best pedagogical option
was to foster reciprocal fertilization (Porcher, 1998, Vinsonneau 1997).

1
Morin, Edgar. 2007. Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future. UNESCO
2
Kramsch, Claire. Foreign Languages for a Global Age, ADFL Bulletin, Fall 1993,
Vol. 25(1), 5-12, retrieved from <http://web2.adfl.org/adfl/bulletin/V25N1/251005.htm>
April 2010
Research in lexicology and linguistic semantics emphasized the notion that Language and in
particular, vocabulary is the best evidence of the reality of culture, in the sense of a
historical transmitted system of conceptions and attitudes, and that words are therefore
seen as an important medium to understand the culture of the other (Wierzbicka, 1997: 5 & 21).

More recently, Lera Boroditsky (2009, 2010, 2011), working in cognitive psychology, looks at
How Language Shapes Thought. Indeed: how we think influences the way we speak, but also
how we talk shapes even the most fundamental dimension of human experience: space, time,
causality and relationships to others.( Boroditsky, 2010). She quotes studies showing how
bilinguals change how they see the world depending on which language they are speaking: how
for instance teaching people new color words changes their ability to discriminate colors, or
teaching people a new way of talking about time gives them a new way of thinking about it.

Following this school of thoughts, and exploring the process of juxtaposition , projects like the
Cultura project (Furstenberg and Levet , 2001) designed online intercultural spaces where
students would develop simultaneously their cross-cultural literacy and their linguistic skills by
observing, comparing, sharing hypotheses and analyzing word associations, everyday life
situations, articles from the press, films, etc in an online asynchronous dialogue with their
transatlantic partners. At the core of the Cultura project is the belief that cultural literacy is an
ongoing dynamic process of negotiating meaning and understanding differences of perspective
(Furstenberg and Levet , 2001), and that it is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign
culture reveals itself fully and profoundly (Bakhtin, 1981, quoted by Furstenberg and Levet ,
2001:58).

In this perspective, culture is seen as a dynamic process where students, cultural constructs,
generate through their interactions, new cultural behaviours (new identities).

In a study looking at mediated communication in an e-learning context, Reeder, Macfayden,

Roche and Chase (2004) referred to a culture that is negotiated rather than given; this
characterization follows Hall's definition of culture, for whom there is a link of near-synonymity
between culture and communication: "Culture is communication and communication is culture"
(Hall, 1990, p. 186). The focus is not any more on differences between Them and Us, but on
the production of cultural meaning within what Bhabha calls the liminal or hybrid space, a
space at the interstice of two domains of difference, "that does not simply revise or invert the
dualities, but revalues the ideological bases of division and difference" (Bhabha, 1992: 58).

An important consequence of this perspective is that in the context of intercultural

communication, the focus is not on cultural idiosyncrasies, which are still constituent of
individual participants, but, through the online interaction, on creating new visions, new ways of
being, new understandings defined by, and emerging from, specific contexts, fully anchored in a
social here and now.

In the field of second language teaching, this means addressing learners not as deficient
monoglossic enunciators, but as potentially heteroglossic narrators. The texts they speak and the
texts they write have to be considered not only as instances of grammatical or lexical
enunciation, and not only as expressing the thoughts of their authors, but as situated utterances
contributing to the construction, perpetuation or subversion of particular cultural contexts. Thus
the development of linguistic and communicative competence can be enriched by such a growth
in aesthetic and critic consciousness that we can define as "critical cross-cultural literacy".
(Kramsch, 1996:8)
This reflects also a shift in Applied Linguistic in the 1980s, where we started to differentiate
between the notion of language learners developing a Cultural identity, (referring to the
relationship between an individual and members of a particular ethnic group - such as Mexican
and Japanese - who share a common history, a common language, and similar ways of
understanding the world) and the notion of a Social identity (Bonny Norton, 1995): in this more
recent second language trend of research, identity is seen as socioculturally constructed, and
scholars draw on both institutional and community practices to understand the conditions under
which language learners speak, read, and write the target language.

Interaction is therefore the basis of an intercultural pedagogy, where a language course is no

longer defined only in terms of linguistically and culturally appropriate content within which
students work, but in terms of creating environments fuelling interactive dynamics generating
new ways of being and new ways to perceive and speak the world with the other. (A.Germain-
Rutherford, 2009)

Today, Web2.0 technology and the recognized role of the learner as a social actor allow for an
intercultural pedagogy to flourish.

2. Online Intercultural Pedagogy

However Mediated communication can be very challenging, and for several reasons:
The research of Kramsch and Thorne (2002) indicates, for instance, that not all transnational
Internet communication leads to positive identity outcomes and that a mediated intercultural
communication can be challenging. In their study of the synchronous and asynchronous
communication between American learners of French in the United States and French learners of
English in France, they found that students had little understanding of the larger cultural
framework within which each party was operating, leading to problematic digital exchange.

Kramsch & Thornes study (2001) offers indeed a good example of how miscommunication in
an intercultural asynchronous online dialogue between American and French students was
caused, not so much by deficient individual linguistic styles, but mostly by a lack of
understanding cultural genres in each others discourse leading to a misunderstanding of roles in
this interaction. We can conclude from their study that students would have been better prepared
to deal with global communicative practices if they had received training in intercultural
communication skills, allowing them to critically analyze and appropriately interpret the
differences of cultural communication genres they were faced with during their online
discussions.

By the mid 1990's, Henderson (1996) was calling attention to the possible impact of culture in
online learning environments and the "need to respond to increasingly diverse learner
populations"

Indeed, there are some overarching traditions that mark a culture's particular way of approaching
education. The discussion of Western (Euro-United States and other Anglo-Saxon perspectives)
emphasis on individualism and of Eastern emphasis on collectivism is well documented in the
cross-cultural literature and several studies examining students behaviours in online learning
environment show that Eastern and Western students have different learning processes,
interaction patterns and communication styles.

Hall's model distinguishes cultures according to the extent of their dependence on the context of
the message. According to this model, "high-context cultures" have a tendency to depend on
non-verbal, situational and contextual elements to reinforce the meaning of the message. In
contrast, "low-context cultures" depend on the explicitness of the verbal message itself for
effective communications (Hall, 1976; 1990).

Studying the impact of cultural factors on the behaviour of students in an online course, Morse
(2003) identified elements that differentiate high-context learning cultures from low-context
learning cultures.

In the case of online courses developed for students in African countries, Kinuthia (2007), citing
the work of Semali (1999), showed that differences with regard to the importance of team work,
consensus and group participationcharacteristics of most African culturesmade it imperative
to rethink instructional approaches to be more consistent with students' behaviours and cultural
contexts.

Here are two concrete examples:

Kyle Yu was 10 years old in 2003 when his family emigrated from China to Canada. He
soon found that language was not the only difference in Canadian classrooms: In
Eastern schools, the teaching is very direct and linear, whereas here there are different
pathways in getting the context. A teacher might ask you to build something or draw
something. [] In China, my job is to study, in Canada, my job is to learn. (Kyle Yu ,
Chinese student in Canada, Globe & Mail, Jan. 22, 2011).
The personal account of Simone Conceio (2002), a young Brazilian woman who decided
to study in the United States, provides us with a concrete example of the culture shock
felt by some students who are placed in a learning situation in which the pedagogical
approach and dynamics differ from the cultural context and values to which they are
accustomed: Even though immigrating to the United States freed me somewhat from
traditional female roles, it challenged my assumptions about my learning. I came from a
culture where group cooperation was emphasized, time was relative, thinking was
 holistic, affective expression was evident, extended family was the norm, the worldviews
of other cultures were generally accepted, and interactions were socially oriented. In
Brazilian culture, I displayed a field-dependent cognitive learning style, which is
relational, holistic, and highly affective. A cognitive style comprises perception and
personality that presents characteristics of being socially dependent, eager to make a
good impression, conforming, and sensitive to social surroundings. Conversely, field-
independent and analytic thinking with limited affective thinking are characteristics of
the Euro-American cognitive learning style. . . . Moving to the United States and joining
its higher education system required that I adapt and expand my learning style to
accommodate the independent cognitive style of my new environment (Conceiao 2002,
p.38).

It seems that to successfully interact in the liminal space we were describing earlier, participants
of an online multicultural community have to develop, more than linguistic proficiency and
accuracy to transmit ones culture, strong intercultural communicative skills to negotiate an
emerging cyberculture.

Already in 2001 Anita Pincas was proposing to open the discussion of the "hidden international
problems that globalisation of education creates" because of "pedagogical and linguistic
cultures", and O Dowd suggested that Educators should take into account differing cultural
attitudes to online collaboration and interaction when planning online learning tasks for groups
of international learners. (2007:27)

To paraphrase Byram (2000), developing intercultural competence would mean developing an

attitude of curiosity and openness, acquiring knowledge of societal and individual interaction, and
developing skills to and critically interpret new cultural knowledge. As we can see, it is not a
simple matter to design a teaching environment that takes into account the impact of cultural
dimensions on the perceptions of students and teachers.

Tylee (2002) explored the impact of cultural dimensions on the perception of online learning
environment accessibility. More specifically, she examined the validity of online technology as a
learning medium and the role in learning of a culturally appropriate interface design. She
proposed a list of questions for the online course designer:

What degree of personal interaction should be developed?

What motivational aspects should be included?
What balance should there be between group and individual opinions?
How will high uncertainty avoidance cultural groups' need for certainty be addressed?
Will learning emphasize individual or group work?
How should social and contextual dimensions be addressed?
Does the nature of the work promote a critical, unconventional or conservative
perspective?
Is the teaching style didactic rather than interactive and participatory?
How should the issue of the different learning styles of learners from culturally diverse
backgrounds be addressed?
Is it preferable to develop separate interfaces and courses for different cultural groups?
Should different learning approaches be offered to cater to different learning styles?
Should there be a choice of evaluation activities that addresses cultural differences?

Seufert (2000) proposed a three-dimensional model with three interacting categories of

considerations that should be taken into account when designing an online course that responds to
cultural diversity, with the notion flexibility at its core:
1. "flexibility" and "variety" of technological and communications tools, methodologies, the
roles of instructors and students in a variety of learning situations, and the resources
drawn on as part of a course's pedagogical framework;
2. simplicity in the choice of technological tools and their utilization, and regarding the types
of interactions, structure of activities, etc.
3. Awareness of the multicultural context and cultural differences, and thinking about
online discussions and interactions, course format, content and progression, materials, etc.

Henderson goes further and proposes The multiple cultural model for e-learning (Henderson,
2007): A multiple cultural model strives for a coherent interplay among three cultural logics:
global academia or training cultures, the dominant culture and the minority cultures .
An eclectic approach, more than a single socio-constructivist approach, allows the inclusion of
multiple pedagogic philosophies and perspectives built into the design of the online course. In
this model, questions and activities centered on epistemological pluralism help raise students
awareness of cultural diversity and allow them to co-construct, in their interaction with their
peers, a learning space where multiple cultural contexts are made visible and debatable.

- Whose knowledge is privileged in this theory?

- How is this particular epistemology socially constructed?
- How do various epistemologies or worldviews reveal themselves in mathematical, medical,
technical, social theories?

3. An Application: the MIL courses

Following this trend of research and the models it resulted, Middlebury College, a U.S. higher
education institution long involved in foreign language teaching and the company Middlebury
Interactive Languages (MIL), developed an original online collaborative language learning-
environments for French and Spanish level 1. Based on authentic, task-focused and project-
oriented materials each language-learning environment created includes three interrelated,
interactive and inter-referential components: a core course, a virtual collaborative space for
students to perform a diversity of tasks while interacting with peers and native speakers, and a 3D
immersive environment. In accordance to the ACTFL National Standards, and thanks to media
rich and authentic materials used in the MIL courses, the goal is that students gradually develop
linguistic skills and cross-cultural understanding, interacting with the online material, their peers
and native speakers.