Nice to E-Meet You Program to Facilitate EFL Lower High School Students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence: A Case Study from Indonesia

Abstract

Studies on cultural exchange through telecollaboration have been widely documented, yet more studies need to be done to explore the enactment of telecollaboration focusing on lower high school students in partnership with multiple partners situated in non-Anglophone contexts. In response to this empirical void, the present study delves into a case of telecollaboration by portraying how a school holiday’s English camp program, Nice to E-Meet You, facilitated students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) and how students conceptualized their ICC development. Five lower secondary school students in a private school located in the eastern part of Indonesia partook in the program for four weeks by engaging in a series of cultural exchange activities mediated by Zoom with fellow learners and English speakers from Egypt, Italy, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, and the Philippines. The dataset was collected from semi-structured interviews, stimulated recall interviews, classroom observation, and reflective journals.  The findings revealed that the Nice to E-Meet You program facilitated students’ ICC as manifested in five emerging elements of Byram's (1997) ICC model, and the students appeared to undergo an evolvement in each element during the program. The encouraging outcomes of the Nice to E-Meet You program were made possible by the application of different experiential learning methods, diverse topics on the surface and deep cultures, and the engagement of multiple partners.