Telecollaborative desktop-videoconferencing exchange: The case of Mark

This presentation is a case study of the Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) development of Mark, one of ten American students engaged in a desktop-videoconferencing telecollaborative exchange with a class of French students. Due in part to its inherent complexity, this context has not been widely researched. To observe ICC development, I used a combination of a priori categories based on the “Attitude” component of Byram’s (1997) model, that is, the willingness to show value to one’s partner or relativize one’s self, and a set of emerging themes (Boyatzis, 1998) gathered from the data. The video-recorded sessions are analyzed in conjunction with data from background surveys, autobiographies, journal entries, and email exchanges. This methodology sheds light on the behavioral choices of a participant who, despite a high level of engagement and motivation, does not appear to take advantage of the exchange for the purpose of ICC development, a behavior that I noticed in other members of his class. While linguistic development can be observed, there is little display of “self-relativizing” and “valuing others” (Byram, 1997, p. 34). These results raise the question of how the methodology could be modified to better foster ICC development in students like Mark, or whether it is even possible to reach this goal within such a mediated environment.