Effects of Virtual Exchange in the EFL classroom on Students' Cultural and Intercultural Sensitivity

Abstract

Some aspects of simple Virtual Exchange (VE), such as it not being academically challenging enough, have been criticized in the past (Ware & Kramsch, 2005; O'Dowd, 2016). However, students with very limited language skills often cannot realize all the advantages of VE. Nevertheless, there are many positives they can attain when participating in simple VE. Since 2016, almost 17,000 beginner level EFL students and some 300 teachers from 15 countries have participated in the International Virtual Exchange Project (IVEProject). They interact online using English as a lingua franca on a Moodle platform. In each 8-week exchange researched, students completed pre- and post-questionnaires measuring their intercultural sensitivity and understanding of their own culture. The surveys incorporated components from the Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (Chen & Starosta, 2000) and a developmental model of intercultural sensitivity (Bennett, 2011). Mean scale scores showing the significance of differences were checked using the non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test for hypothesis testing of repeated measurements on a single sample. This paper looks at the results from 2 separate VE in 2016 and 2017 when 303 and 264 Japanese students, respectively, completed the questionnaires. Improvements in students' intercultural sensitivity, appreciation of other cultures, interactional confidence, and motivation to learn the L2 resulted. Discussion of the implications of using VE with beginner level EFL students follows.