Telecollaboration and Intercultural Communicative Competence: Revealing Students’ Experiential Insights in Saudi Arabia and the U.S.

Abstract

As several intercultural communicative competence studies integrated telecollaboration, this practice has become popular in academia and other relevant disciplines such as bridging cultural differences. Nevertheless, most of such research has been conducted in South Asian countries such as China, Japan and Taiwan, as well as in North America and Europe, with the focus mainly on European languages, specifically English. The driving force of this research was because there has been a rapid increase in the number of learners of English and Arabic as foreign languages, who have rarely interacted together, either because of an existing limited understanding or narrow cultural awareness of each other’s cultures and perhaps languages. Accordingly, the researcher presented a comparative analyses of language learners' insights prior to and after their engagement in a telecollaborative experience. The research indicated that, in the past, there have been limited studies conducting similar investigations of those two settings, due to the tremendous differences in both the languages and cultures. The findings have shown the necessity of participants to understand each other’s needs and interests to result in successful telecollaboration during ICC process.