Telecollaboration to promote intercultural communicative competence: Insights from Indonesian EFL teachers

Deisyi Anna Batunan, Siusana Kweldju, Anik Nunuk Wulyani and Khusnul Khotimah
Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia

Informed about the significance of incorporating intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in EFL classrooms, the reported research on promoting ICC through telecollaboration from the teachers' side has gained limited attention. The present study addresses this gap by exploring teachers' perceptions of telecollaboration and illustrating how telecollaboration promotes EFL teachers' ICC. The telecollaboration project we report here brought together teachers from Indonesia and other countries in the outer and expanding circle for EFL. Based on an intercultural teacher training framework proposed by Lallana and Salamaca (2020), this project involved three Indonesian EFL teachers at state-owned and private schools, along with tandem teacher partners from Belarus, Japan, and Myanmar. As a qualitative interpretative study focusing on the Indonesian participants, a dataset was collected from observations, post-session reflections, and video-recorded interviews. The findings suggest that the participating teachers formed positive views about telecollaboration, wherein they shared transforming beliefs and attitudes towards interculturality in EFL teaching and learning. Further, they embraced the principles of ICC in their current teaching and intended to continue it in their future praxis. Some practical implications of infusing ICC in EFL teaching and learning are presented.
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Authors: Deisyi Anna Batunan is a faculty member in the Department of English Education, Universitas Negeri Manado, Indonesia and currently a doctorate student in English Language Education at Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia. Her current research interests include intercultural communication and teacher professional development. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6934-2955 Email: deisyibatunan@unima.ac.id Siusana Kweldju has been a full professor at Universitas Negeri Malang since 2002 and a lecturer since 1986. She has written extensively on syntactic and semantic language acquisition, gender, and lexically-based language teaching. Recently she has been interested in linguistic landscapes and educational neuroscience. Email: siusana.kweldju.fs@um.ac.id Anik Nunuk Wulyani is a faculty member in the Department of English, Universitas Negeri Malang. She obtained her Masters degree from Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Bandung, Indonesia and doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her research interests include teacher professional development and TEFL. Email: anik.nunuk.fs@um.ac.id Khusnul Khotimah is a faculty member in the Department of English Education, Universitas Mataram, Indonesia. She is currently doing her doctorate program in English Language Education in Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia. Her research interests include language teaching methodology, teacher-learner autonomy, language learning motivation and engagement, and teacher professional development. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5309-443X Email: khusnul_pena@unram.ac.id Please cite as: Batunan, D. A., Kweldju, S., Wulyani, A. N. & Khotimah, K. (2023). Telecollaboration to promote intercultural communicative competence: Insights from Indonesian EFL teachers. Issues in Educational Research, 33(2), 451-470. http://www.iier.org.au/iier33/batunan.pdf