Abstract
This study intends to introduce a content based curriculum design for the course "cross cultural communication" in an EFL context. It also explores students' perspectives regarding their perceived learning outcome with both content knowledge and language skills. Sixty non-English major EFL students from a university in Northern Taiwan participated in this study. Content knowledge from the definition of culture to cultural differences, and issues in cross cultural communications were introduced throughout the course. A variety of tasks such as readings of various genres, group discussion, group report, movie-viewing, summary writing, and a final group project were employed to have students actively explore the content and concurrently work on their language skills. Students were also required to evaluate their peers' final group project with provided evaluation criteria. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore what students were able to learn from this course and the challenges they've encountered during the course. The results from the students' feedback revealed their positive gains in the areas of content knowledge as well as the enhanced language skills. Some perceived difficulties among students such as inability to fully comprehend the input or to produce effective output were reported and the possible solutions were suggested. Other perceived benefits such as constructive cooperative learning from group project, enhanced critical thinking from the designed tasks, and boosted confidence in the target language use were also reported. Other findings, suggestions and pedagogical implications will be discussed in this paper.
Author Information
Chia-Ti Heather Tseng, Ming Chuan University, School of Education and Applied Linguistics, Taiwan
Paper Information
Conference: IICAHHawaii2017
Stream: Arts - Teaching and Learning the Arts
This paper is part of the IICAHHawaii2017 Conference Proceedings (View)
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