| Description |
Current research devoted to intercultural communicative competence (ICC) development stresses the necessity of inclusion of multimodal communicative competence (MCC) into its concept since the number of research and teaching projects using CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) for students’ ICC development has been rising and more prominent than traditional in-classroom research (Hauck, 2007; Liu, 2019). Nowadays, research focuses on multimodal exchanges (Avgousti, 2018), substituting former research limited to studies involving synchronous communication based solely on work with texts in their design (Zerzová, 2022a, 2022b). The fact that students (and teachers) use Web 2.0 tools in their personal lives doesn't necessarily mean they can use them for effective learning and teaching in intercultural contexts (Guth & Helm, 2010). Therefore, O’Dowd and Waire (2009) introduced a typology of online collaborative tasks aspiring to develop ICC by grouping them into three categories (information exchange tasks, comparison and analysis tasks, and collaborative and product creation tasks), attempting to gradually lead them from ethnocentric phases to ethnorelative phases of DMIS (Developmental Modal of Intercultural Sensitivity: Bennett, 1993). Many other authors researched tasks suitable for ICC development in CALL as well, of course (e.g., Hauck & Youngs, 2008; Dooly, 2010). There is a strong agreement among the researchers on the necessity of including competencies needed for online collaboration and awareness of task design into ICT competency standards for ICC teachers, which necessarily leads us to a reconceptualization of the whole concept of ICC (O’Dowd & Waire, 2009; Liu, 2019). The concept of digital literacy is necessarily closely connected to this endeavour (Jenkins et al. (2006). The utmost goal of the attempt at developing teachers’ MCC is their final ability to consciously select suitable tools for specific aims in teaching intercultural communication (Hauck & Youngs, 2008). Research confirms that it is not easy for teachers to interconnect theoretical concepts describing new digital literacies with their practice and succeed in developing students’ ICC in telecollaborative projects (Hauck & Lewis, 2007; Hauck, 2010; Li & Wang, 2014). Yet the teachers' role in telecollaborative projects focused on ICC development highly influences their success (O’Dowd & Waire, 2009). Therefore, the aim of this paper is to introduce examples of telecollaborative tasks suitable for the development of ICC, paying attention to task design and criteria for the selection of the tasks. It seems that the choice of digital tools in telecollaborative projects strongly influences ICC skills (Hauck, 2007), although not all research confirms that (Hauck, 2010). An overview of current research on ICC development and an overview of telecollaborative tasks suitable for students’ ICC development were published in two book chapters in Czech previously (Zerzová, 2022a, 2022b). This paper would like to bring the topic to an English-speaking audience.
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