Table Of ContentINTERCULTURAL
COMMUNICATIVE
COMPETENCE FOR
GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP
Identifying cyberpragmatic
rules of engagement
in telecollaboration
Marina Orsini-Jones
and Fiona Lee
Intercultural Communicative Competence for
Global Citizenship
Marina Orsini-Jones • Fiona Lee
Intercultural
Communicative
Competence for
Global Citizenship
Identifying cyberpragmatic rules of engagement in
telecollaboration
Marina Orsini-Jones Fiona Lee
School of Humanities School of Humanities
Coventry University Coventry University
Coventry, UK Coventry, UK
ISBN 978-1-137-58102-0 ISBN 978-1-137-58103-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58103-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959335
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Pattern adapted from an Indian cotton print produced in the 19th century
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United
Kingdom
To Marco, Matteo, David, Astrid, Nancy and Mark
The best times
The worst times
Our greatest joys
With love
F
oreword
In this book, Orsini-Jones and Lee offer us a master class in theorisation
and exemplification of the importance (and pitfalls) of telecollaboration
in today’s HE landscape and beyond for language learners, linguists but
more importantly towards the attributes of global citizenship. Erudite,
theoretically robust and extremely enjoyable, this work is a must read
for all teacher trainers, language teachers, educators and trainees across
the world. It clearly demonstrates how, through well-crafted telecol-
laboration activities educators—in any field of study—may and should
shape the development of a genuine Intercultural Communicative
Competence in their learners—far from the simplistic and reductive
notions of intercultural competence that are currently supposedly
woven in many HE syllabi and often ill understood by faculty and learn-
ers alike.
This book also has the unique merit of casting a light on everything
that is wrong and inept with most language teaching practice—from text-
books to formulaic applications of the communicative approach to lan-
guage teaching and it offers all practitioners an opportunity to reposition
their pedagogy in more meaningful ways.
At a time when our “globalised” world is retrenching with inevitable
and devastating violence around extremism, protectionism and exacer-
bated forms of nationalism, the need to re-conceptualise intercultural
communicative competence is central to any valid notion of global citizen-
vii
viii FOREWORD
ship. This book does so in a way that suggests genuine solutions for educa-
tors. As such it should be on every library shelf and on the reading list of
any teaching and learning form of certification.
London, UK Marion Sadoux
20th August 2017
P
reFace
This work aims to report on and discuss the lessons learnt from the
engagement with an Online International Learning (OIL) project, also
known as a telecollaborative project, carried out at Coventry University
(CU) in the UK in collaboration with the Université de Haute—Alsace
(UHA) in Colmar (France).
CU is fully committed to the internationalisation of its curricula
through OIL. The authors of this work have been engaged in telecollabo-
ration aimed at enhancing the intercultural awareness of both staff and
students involved in it with various different overseas partners since 2010.
The authors believe that staff in Higher Education (HE) must prepare
students for effective online interaction and explore the linguistic compo-
nents of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) for global citi-
zenship, including the development of students’ critical digital literacies.
Web 2.0 affordances have contributed to re-shape both telecollabora-
tion models and the conceptualisation of ICC. They have led to a hybridi-
sation and blurring of physical and digital, of online and offline personal
and academic representations of self. In these digital liminal spaces partici-
pants in OIL projects struggle to understand what communicative modus
operandi to adopt, some manage to negotiate and reconfigure their iden-
tity via language, but others are, literally, ‘lost for words’. This work aims
to provide insights on how to support students to engage effectively online
in professional and academic settings and illustrates this with the telecol-
laborative case study CoCo (Coventry/Colmar).
ix
x PREFACE
The Internationalisation of the Curriculum (IoC) is becoming a prior-
ity for all Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This work is aimed at
academics teaching languages and linguistics, but could provide ideas on
how to internationalise the curriculum in other subjects. It is hoped that
it will provide insights on the teaching and learning of ICC in general and
cyberpragmatics in particular, defined as understanding the intended
meanings of others in online communication.
Chapter 1 introduces the main themes covered in the book: IoC, devel-
opment of global citizenship competences and ICC. Chapter 2 provides
an overview of the evolution of the concept of ICC. Chapter 3 discusses
cyberpragmatics, the main politeness and pragmatic filters used for the
CMC analysis of the CoCo asynchronous discussion exchanges and intro-
duces threshold concepts (TCs). Chapter 4 illustrates the OIL case study
CoCo and discusses the action-research-informed model of role-reversal
threshold concept pedagogy adopted for the project. In Chapter 5 the
research methodology underpinning the cyberpragmatic analysis is out-
lined. Chapter 6 discusses the issues and challenges arising from the
research data. Chapter 7 provides concluding remarks and final recom-
mendations on how to integrate telecollaboration for ICC (or possibly
ICCC—Intercultural Cyberpragmatic Communicative Competence)
development into the HE languages and linguistics curriculum.
Coventry, West Midlands, UK Marina Orsini-Jones
Coventry, West Midlands, UK Fiona Lee
a
cknowledgements
We would like to thank all the staff and the students involved in the tele-
collaborative/Online International Learning (OIL) projects CoCo and
MexCo to date and in particular Elwyn Lloyd in Coventry and Régine
Barbier in Colmar. We would also like to thank the Higher Education
Academy for awarding us the initial funding (Teaching Collaborative
Grant, £60,000) to carry out the action-research on the OIL projects. A
big thank you to Francesca Helm and Sarah Guth for allowing us to edit
and re-use their Telecollaboration 2.0 table and to Benjamin Fröhlich,
commissioning editor at Peter Lang, for granting us permission to edit ad
re-use the table. We are also grateful to the OIL support colleagues in the
Centre for Global Engagement. Finally we would like to thank the learn-
ing technologists both in our former Faculty of Business, Environment
and Society and in the ‘cuonline’ technical support unit at Coventry
University.
xi
