Global Partnership in Teaching Intercultural Communication: A Tale of the Interaction of Two Cultures

Globalization has been generating changes of a magnitude comparable to the emergence of conducting business. These changes have demanded fundamental rethinking of the aims and processes of education, particularly in the area of teaching English as a lingua franca and its impact on language education and instruction. This presentation describes a joint semester-long research project via video-conferencing between Hong Kong and US student groups. The optimal goal of this partnership project is to develop students' business knowledge and enhance the intercultural communication and decision-making competencies of undergraduate students in this increasingly global and technologically mediated environment. Students majoring in the English for Professional and Corporate Communication at City University of Hong Kong and the University of Delaware formed intercultural research teams to pursue a semester-long, intercultural virtual project. This semester-long project consisted of three phases; namely pre-videoconference planning, actual videoconference, and post-conference debriefing phases. Communication was facilitated through email, the Internet, and videoconferences. During the phase of pre-videoconference planning, student groups met asynchronously via email to introduce themselves, share information concerning the project, and complete a pre-videoconference questionnaire. The pre-videoconference interaction served as the basis for information exchange and analysis for the actual videoconference. At actual videoconference, student groups participated in a 55-minute videoconference, where they discussed, negotiated, and jointly proposed the transferable and non-transferable business practices of the Hong Kong or US KFC business operations. At the post-conference, self-reflection debriefing was also conducted during which students filled in a post-conference questionnaire and assessed the effectiveness of the videoconference as a business communication tool. Consequently, the objectives of the project was: (1) to examine similarities and differences in business practices and how culture affects these practices in US and Hong Kong; (2) to discover how students experienced and developed their cross-cultural communication competencies; and (3) investigate how communication through video-conferencing affects overall communication efficacy.