USING FACEBOOK TO PROMOTE KOREAN EFL LEARNERS' INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE

초록

Foreign language learners often have limited opportunity to interact with people from the target culture and develop their intercultural competence (IC) through those interactions both inside and outside of the classroom. To identify a new opportunity to engage Korean EFL learners in innovative ways to maximize target language interactions and develop their IC, this study adopts Facebook as a new computer-mediated communication (CMC) tool in a university classroom-based telecollaborative project between the U.S. and South Korea. The results revealed that Facebook offers Korean EFL learners an effective platform for intercultural interactions with people from the target culture, and Korean EFL learners demonstrate the abilities of the overall components of IC by showing many instances that fall well within Byram's (2000) assessment criteria, although some conflicting results exist. This study suggests that the adoption of Facebook is a new, innovative, and practical way to facilitate effective intercultural interactions as well as promote IC in the EFL classroom.

키워드