How to Help EFL Students Gain Confidence in Intercultural Communication: A Case Study in Vietnam

Abstract

The article reports on action research on promoting English- major students’ confidence in intercultural communication through the social interaction project at a university in Vietnam. The aims of the research are to examine Vietnamese students’ problems in intercultural communication, including the difficulties they encounter and the reasons they ascribe for these communication problems; to describe their face-to-face cross-cultural interaction experience and their expectations to intercultural integration in language learning. 34 Vietnamese college students were engaged in an investigation and the data were collected from questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with the participants. The findings revealed that through the “Social Interaction Project” Vietnamese English- major students were provided more opportunities to communicate with foreigners face to face, then gained a significant amount of cross-cultural communication experience and acquired more communication strategies, which all promoted their confidence in intercultural communication. They seemed to be aware of the importance of intercultural competence in actual interactions as well as they had a strong desire to be developed intercultural communicative competence in their EFL classes. The findings also yield some significant implications including the need to create an intercultural curriculum, textbooks and teacher training programs to enhance intercultural awareness in order to help EFL students gain confidence in intercultural communication in English learning and teaching process.



Author Information
Ha Thi Chau Nguyen, University of Foreign Language Studies, The University of Danang, Vietnam

Paper Information
Conference: ACLL2018
Stream: Learning Environments

This paper is part of the ACLL2018 Conference Proceedings (View)
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Posted by James Alexander Gordon