Amongst Kiwis and Swedes: Developing an intercultural competence with young learners through written telecollaboration

This study investigates the intercultural development with young learners from Sweden and New Zealand, when using written telecollaboration as a tool. Telecollaboration; is a tool used for online collaboration, it provides for a possibility of connecting students from across the globe and can function as a supplement to traditional teaching. The exchange, took place over a couple of months, connecting two remote and quite unknown corners of the world, from the students’ perspective. Students shared cultural topics with their peers through the course of two emails each, as well as, creating an overall multimodal presentation of their school. The telecollaborative exchange was done in the quest to develop the students social and self-awareness regarding culture through authentic meetings. The data collected is in the form of mind-maps, multi-choice surveys and unstructured observations. Visible themes, found during the project, is unpacked and analysed in accordance with Byram’s (1997) theoretical model of ICC. These themes are also compared with findings of previous research on telecollaboration in educational settings. The results of the study revealed that a development of the young learners’ intercultural understanding was partially achieved. Furthermore, implications met, was the limitation of time as well as the range of technology available