Intercultural Virtual Exchange as An Alternative to Develop Global Citizenship: A Review of Weaknesses and Effectiveness

Online interaction exchange and intercultural issues have developed rapidly in the last century. As part of global citizenships, nations have several ways to build transnationalism, which can be seen in many countries collaborating, including in global education. The online interaction exchange has been mentioned as telecollaboration (Guth, S.,& Thomas, M, 2010; Belz, 2002; O’Dowd, 2018), e-tandem or tele-tandem (O’Rourke, 2007), Virtual Exchange (Lenkaitis, 2020, 2022), and intercultural virtual exchange (Dooly, M., 2021) is a part of the digital transformation of education. Parallel learners that consist of students and teachers from different countries and cultural backgrounds are integrated into one line through synchronous and asynchronous media (Belz, 2003; Dooly, 2017; O’Dowd, 2018; Lenkaitis, 2022). This article begins by reviewing intercultural virtual exchange (IVE) to develop global citizenship and analyzing the effectiveness and the weaknesses of IVE through several previous studies. Global citizenship is defined as acceptance, awareness, and sympathy for cultural differences while socializing universal values and sustainability integrated with others. However, several studies found that IVE has often been criticized for failing to produce the intended learning outcomes (O’Dowd, 2018), artificial and based on phatic interaction between students who lack curiosity about other cultures (Kramsch, 2014), and unconducive to genuine interaction and learning (Hanna & de Nooy, 2009). Compared with this, the effectiveness of IVE showed that learners could engage in authentic interaction with native speakers or with learners from other countries (O’Dowd, 2018), to give them first-hand experience of real intercultural communication (Hanna and de Nooy, 2009), and to gain global awareness development (Lenkaitis, 2018).Keywords: Intercultural Virtual Exchange (IVE), Global citizenship, parallel learners, universal value