Fostering foreign language learning through technology-enhanced intercultural projects

The main aim of learning English as an international language is to effectively communicate with people from other cultures.In Taiwan, learners have few opportunities to experience cross-cultural communication in English.To create an authentic EFL classroom, this one-year action research study carried out three collaborative intercultural projects using web-based tools (online forums, weblogs, Skype, and email) in a 7 th grade EFL class.The projects were designed to improve students' language skills and intercultural communicative competence (ICC).To triangulate the findings, qualitative and quantitative methods were used to collect the data; specifically, questionnaires, interviews, and document analyses were used to investigate the learners' responses and learning processes.The results revealed that the participants had strong positive attitudes towards technology-enhanced intercultural language learning (TEILI), which enabled the learners to experience authentic language learning that fostered linguistic competence and ICC.The findings suggest that TEILI approximates real-life learning contexts by allowing students to use a language for the same purposes that they will use it outside school.