Acquiring Intercultural Communicative Competence through Virtual Exchange

Abstract Intercultural communicative competence (ICC) is an indispensable skill when interacting with people from other cultures, given the clash of perspectives that intercultural encounters may bring about. Being a skill that can be taught and learned, there is a wide concern for developing ICC through formal education. This involves designing specific training tasks that can enhance the acquisition of ICC with the help of virtual exchange (VE) activities. The aim of the present paper is to highlight a specific way in which the educational goals associated with ICC development can be achieved. To this end, an analysis of 55 eTwinning intercultural projects has been conducted in order to determine the relationship between ICC and VE. The statistical data described here indicate that VE fosters the development of ICC. Moreover, they are indicative of the fact that the VE task types that are most effective in the development of ICC can be identified through computation.