Fostering Critical Cultural Awareness Among Prospective Teachers of English via Virtual Exchange Project

Abstract

This study aimed to explore critical cultural awareness improvement of prospective teachers with a transnational virtual exchange project. Within the scope of this study, prospective teachers of English studying at English Language Teaching (ELT) department in Turkey attended a virtual exchange project that was organized with other prospective teachers of English from Germany and Israel. The prospective teachers weekly interacted with each other via online meetings, and they collaborated on assigned tasks to come up with a final product, which is an English teaching lesson plan. The research was designed as a qualitative study and the data were analyzed according to the the principles of directed qualitative content analysis. Directed qualitative content analysis is used when researchers start with a theory to code the qualitative data. In this study, Byram’s (1997) framework was used as a theory to direct analysis of the data. The participants’ weekly interactions were transcribed verbatim and were analyzed according to the principles of qualitative content analysis and Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) framework’s critical cultural awareness dimension. The analysis of the data revealed that the prospective teachers’ critical cultural awareness was significantly improved.