The Development and Change of Intercultural Awareness in Online Collaborative Context
Abstract: Intercultural communication competence is widely acknowledged as one of the key competencies for contemporary college students. The two ways to promote the development of intercultural competence are service learning and foreign education. Virtual collaborative learning has become an important way to develop students’ intercultural communication skills and intercultural awareness. This study is based on a Sino-US cooperative course for postgraduates in an online collaboration environment, aiming to examine the change of intercultural consciousness and middle school students’ partnership during three collaborative stages (early, middle and late stage). The findings show that: There is evidence of students' intercultural awareness during intercultural learning activities in the online collaborative environment; During intercultural collaborative learning, the willingness of students to understand foreign cultures is an important factor that affects the online collaboration consequence.