Building Cross-Cultural Competence in a Foreign Language through Technology-Enhanced Project-Based Learning

Abstract

In contemporary changing and innovative academic and working environment, tertiary schools need to rethink their approach to teaching and learning by gearing it towards the skills in most demand. Innovation in any sphere becomes more and more dependent on the collaboration between actors from very different backgrounds who combine their own expertise to create something new. This happens both on an individual- as well as on an institutional level. The organizations of the future will be forced to work more and more closely with people and institutional partners from all over the world in order to bring as many different perspectives and areas of expertise together as possible. This means that cross-cultural competence becomes one of the crucial factors in building a competitive profile of a prospective specialist. Therefore, this paper explores approaches to building cross-cultural competence using the English language as a tool and presents the findings of a pilot training on experimental collaborative cross-cultural project implemented with Master level Economics students in Ukraine. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to collect the data and examine participants' language proficiency. The findings suggest that participation in collaborative technology-enhanced cross-cultural projects has a significant positive effect on learners’ language proficiency and develops their cross-cultural competence facilitating development of productive skills on the basis of receptive ones.