Although many online intercultural exchanges have been conducted based on the groundbreaking Cultura model, most to date have been between and among European languages. This volume presents several chapters with a focus on exchanges involving Asian and Pacific languages. Many of the benefits and challenges of these exchanges are similar to those…

This article explores the use of group work strategies to increase student interaction and learning. Despite the growing linguistic and cultural diversity in tertiary institutions, there is strong evidence of minimal interaction between "domestic" and "international" students in classrooms and in wider university contexts. This study investigates…

What is considered effective teaching varies across cultures, institutions, and disciplines. Concepts of effective teaching reflect the values and expectations of the educational culture and language in which it occurs. This study examines how participation in a course on intercultural communication affects the observable teaching behaviors of…

This paper aims to contribute to the current debate on British Studies from the perspective of eight international students attending a British Studies module in part completion of a foundation/access programme in the UK. Drawing on three sets of in-depth student interviews and 15 classroom observations used to triangulate findings, the analysis…

Research on transnational literacies has generally focused on youth who live in one country and communicate using digital literacies across national boundaries. Our work contributes to this literature by providing a view of transnational literacies that are unique to the USA-Mexico border region. The students in this ethnographic study navigate…

This study examined the influence of cultural congruency between societal and organizational cultures on Mexican supervisors' and employees' communication behaviors and employees' work alienation, satisfaction, and commitment. The participants were full time nonmanagement adults working for Mexican owned organizations located in Mexico. This study…

In several European countries the number of the Roma represents approximately 10% of the total population. Due to the global economic crisis, the rise of the far right in places like Hungary, and failed policies of the past, their present social and economic situation continues to become more vulnerable. Mediation is one of the measures used…

The current study investigated the impacts of a program that employed a blend of sports and cultural enrichment, known as Olympism, to build bridges between Greek and Turkish Cypriot children residing on the island of Cyprus. The four-month long program included two months of instructor training, meetings with the parents and a six-day summer camp…

This paper documents the approach taken by an Australian University to enhance student study skills, development of academic language, and writing skills. The Curtin Business School (CBS) has the only fully faculty-based student learning support centre at Curtin University in Western Australia. Called the CBS Communication Skills Centre (CSC) it…

Competence in intercultural communication has become a necessity for functioning effectively in our increasingly globalised and multicultural society. This study reports the use of a group project to enhance students' learning of intercultural communication. Participants were from a large undergraduate class in an Australian university. The aim of…

The authors describe a short-term study abroad program for business and engineering students at the end of their freshman year, and then present the results of a later survey of the participants as upperclassmen that was conducted to determine whether the program met its objectives. The primary objectives of this first-year program were to…

Researchers at "Facebook" and the University of Milan have dismissed the idea of 6 degrees of separation between two people and maintain that it has shrunk considerably in the past few years to 4.7 degrees. This may not seem surprising until they realise that the original experiment published in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram…

Recent years have witnessed rapid growth in language learning within online collaborative learning projects constructed between educational institutions in different cultural and pedagogic contexts. This qualitative case study investigated the role of teacher communication in a short online project between language classes in secondary schools in…

In this paper, we examine some of the tenets of the current conceptualisations of communicative competence. Drawing on the empirical data collected in linguistically diverse university classrooms, we show that meaning-making in social interaction is considerably more complex and fluid than is envisaged in theoretical models of communicative…

This article reports on an action research case study conducted at a university in Japan, which explored how student identity-development can be made visible in potentially assessable ways through materials design in intercultural communicative competence (ICC)-oriented foreign language education. It suggests that identity-development can be…