‘Intercultural learning’ in Virtual Exchange

Putting the ‘intercultural’ back into virtual exchange

“People have been talking about virtual exchange as a way of engaging with people from other cultures, speaking other languages, for quite a long time now. But a lot of virtual exchange hasn’t really had the ‘intercultural’ as its focus. 

By that I mean that VE has often been seen as an opportunity for language use, or an opportunity to have an experience of just communicating with somebody who is a first language speaker of a language you’re learning. Or it may be in a lingua franca context.”

According to Tony, the ‘intercultural bits’ have often been more in the background.

However, since the pandemic, when virtual exchange became almost the only way of having exchange, more people are now thinking about it much more in terms of the explicit intercultural aspect of learning, and bringing that to the fore.

“I’m interested in the intercultural aspect of language learning, which is what I consider as really core to knowing about the language.

The reason you learn a language is to talk to somebody in that language. Therefore, the moment you use that language, you’re involved in intercultural communication.

And what we know about intercultural communication is that it’s not the difficulties of vocabulary and language that are often the big issues. It’s just not knowing how to navigate cultural meanings.

For this reason, becoming more aware of that, and how that impacts on communication is what I think is really important.”

Learning about yourself is key

One of the central themes in Tony’s work is the idea that intercultural learning isn’t learning about other people. It’s actually learning about yourself in relation to other people. So the focus comes back to the learner and what the learner is doing in that moment of engagement with another language and culture.

“Through a process of noticing what’s going on, thinking about that in terms of your existing linguistic and cultural starting positions and reflecting on things, you come to understand your place in all of that. 

And it’s only once you understand your place in all of that, that you can begin to understand the place of somebody else. This is because they’re sort of the mirror image of what’s going on for you. If you’re having trouble with them, they’re having trouble with you as well.”

Too much ‘othering’

But, Tony thinks we’ve put too much emphasis on ‘the other’ in this sort of learning. 

He gives an example of when he was a French student back at high school when he was always learning about ‘French’ people. When he actually set foot in France and spent time there as a young student, he says the sort of French people he discovered never existed anyway!

“You learn about them as some sort of national, cultural, ‘other’ and you are encouraged to think all French people are the same, and so on. 

“When I first went to France as a teenager, I was really shocked by the fact that French people weren’t actually like Australians who spoke French! They were something entirely different that I hadn’t been prepared for.

I can remember my very first full day in France. I needed to feed myself, so I went into a ‘boulangerie’ (bakery) to buy a loaf of bread.  And I suddenly realised, as soon as I walked in the door, I had no idea how to ask for a loaf of bread in a way a French person would.

I could think of dozens of different ways to do it. I could even think of some that had a subjunctive in them that would have got me extra marks on the exam.

But I didn’t know what a French person would say. And so, I suddenly realised that my knowledge of French, while it was pretty good – I was a PhD student in French at the time – it wasn’t adequate for everyday interactions, because I didn’t know how to participate.

And I think learning to participate is really important.”

Tony says that the moment someone is  engaged in a virtual exchange, or any other language use, you are engaged in linguistic and cultural diversity. 

“You’re engaged in intercultural communication. And what’s going on in the background of any virtual exchange is this negotiation of meanings between you and your interlocutor.

Where you’re trying to work out from your existing position, what they’re trying to tell you from their existing position. And then you’re trying to help them to understand your version from their position. Therefore, there’s something really complex going on there. That complexity needs to be brought much more to the surface. When it surfaces, it can become a learning experience. That is how my ‘boulangerie’ experience became a learning experience.”

Subtle language learning experiences

“I grew up and worked for most of my life in Australia, but for the last nine years, I’ve been here in the UK. In my very first weeks here in the UK I had an experience that was really unpleasant. It happened when trying to speak English with the English.

Frankly, from an Australian perspective, the English don’t know how to speak English,” he jokes.

He continues: “It all revolved around an expression that’s used quite a lot in the area around Coventry, where my university is based, which is, are you all right?

“I was sitting in my office at work, and I work with my door open, so my colleagues were dropping by to introduce themselves, and just to have a chat.

Every interaction began with, are you alright? And I was thinking, ‘oh, what nice people they are’.

I’m new here, and they’re coming to sort of find out what’s going on. I thought they were being supportive colleagues.”

But two weeks later, when they were still doing exactly the same thing, he began to panic, as he became convinced they thought he wasn’t coping.

“This wasn’t happening with just colleagues. It was happening all over the place. And I recognised there was something going on that I needed to learn,’ he explains.

“One day, I was in a butcher’s shop, queuing  to be served. And the person behind the counter said, are you alright? I said no. Next ,a look of absolute horror appeared on this woman’s face, as if she didn’t know what to do with that.

It was at that moment,  it suddenly clicked for me. What I subsequently realised is that if you say, are you all right in Australia, it implies you’ve got a problem.

So I had thought my colleagues were coming by saying: ‘Are you managing things? Are you dealing with things? And my first days in the job, my first days in a new country, I thought, this was really caring.

But two weeks later, I think…they think I’m not coping. They think I’m not managing. Something’s obviously going wrong that makes them think that I’m not settling in, or whatever.” 

Tony was flummoxed as he  thought things had been going just fine.

So then, when it happened in the shop, what was intended as a greeting – in an Australian context – would have meant, ‘are you being served?’

“And so, I heard, ‘are you being served?, ‘ says Tony, ‘and she heard, how are you?

I said, ‘no, I’m not being served’, and she heard this, and thought that I wasn’t well. But of course, the thing you have to do in English if somebody says that, is… ask, what’s wrong?

But that was totally inappropriate in a service encounter. And so…

What I really want to emphasize here is that anything can be that learning moment.

And it can be very small, and it can be very trivial.

But it can be very impactful.

It is also nothing to do with your language ability, because as a first language speaker of English, I like to think my English is pretty good.

At least for that basic everyday interaction and in your relationships with people. Because if I hadn’t sorted that out, it could have really had a negative impact on my working relationship with my colleagues.”

Intercultural lessons learned

Tony explains that the experience he had with his colleagues was extremely impactful, and a deeply emotional experience ranging from initially thinking they were very caring, to ultimately a profound learning experience beginning with incomprehension and ending with a deep understanding that what had occurred was not dependent on the knowledge of a particular language, but was entirely to do with a cultural context leading to a grave misunderstanding.

This wasn’t something confined to a shop either.

“I’m sort of thinking back, apart from the sort of the everyday practicalities of setting up bank accounts and all of that sort of thing. 

I think this is the biggest issue that I faced coming to live in the UK… it could have had a very profound impact, as I said, on relationships.”

“Now, if you put that in the context of virtual exchange”, he continues, “the chances are somebody’s going to say hello to somebody at some point. And there is this potential that these very simple sorts of things could lead to very profound consequences. That’s what’s interesting.”

Limassol UNICollaboration Conference

 Tony will be expanding on this theme at next year’s conference in Cyprus. 

“I’m planning to talk about the idea that exchange is an engagement in linguistic and cultural diversity at every moment. Teachers need to be aware of that and work with the learners on this.”

Prior to the exchange, he says there are things that educators can do following the exchange, and following each event in the exchange. 

“So, it’s really about integrating the exchange in a programme of intercultural learning, rather than something more simplistic, where people get together and do cultural comparisons that say ‘the UK is like that and France is like that’, and you come up with a bunch of stereotypes about each other.

But rather, thinking about what actually happened in that moment-by-moment interaction. How did you understand it? How did you deal with it? How did you feel about it? Because I think the emotional dimension can be quite important in all of this. Intercultural communication is profoundly emotional. It’s not just this cognitive thing. It’s a thing you feel. And if those feelings don’t get brought to the surface and explored and reflected on, they risk poisoning your relationship with people forever.”

Tony believes educators are beginning to see virtual exchange not as the intercultural learning, but as the resource for intercultural learning. “I think that’s a very important shift because intercultural learning doesn’t happen simply because you’ve spoken to someone from another culture.

“It happens because you learn from the experience of speaking to somebody from another culture. And that’s what we need to have very much at the forefront of these sorts of experiences to make them really valuable for student learning. I say it’s not about vocabulary and grammar and things like that. It’s about something that’s hidden. And that hidden thing needs to come to the surface.”