"EFL Teachers Competences Insynchronous Telecollaborative Intercultural Communication Platform"

 
Current EFL classrooms enlarge the communicative competence notion to include intercultural competence. According to Byram (1997), successful interaction in communicative language teaching not only requires an effective interchange of information but also the capability to take up the perspective of the other’s culture, as well as to anticipate and resolve dysfunction in behavior and communication. Alongside this shift towards intercultural competence has been the growing influence of ICT in language learning and teaching.

The research will seek to investigate how intercultural competencies in EFL teachers can be improved using ICT.This teacher professional development project will seek to promote a critical and involved stance towards teaching theory used in EFL courses in Saudi Arabia as well as get EFL teachers to shift towards knowledge transforming and away from knowledge telling. For quite some time now, the concept of EFL teachers and teachers in general as reflective practitioners has become a major part of teacher training and education.

According to Bloomfield et al (2013), the integration of reflective practice in the intercultural EFL classroom implies that EFL teachers are encouraged to examine their strategies, theories, assumptions and values critically and particularly those that underlie their behavior by enabling them to make informed decisions in the classroom. Therefore, adopting a telecollaborative learning approach, this research study will design online interactions between the EFL practitioners to oblige them towards working together to complete common tasks that require both technological and pedagogical knowledge in an online virtual environment (Bloomfield et al, 2013).

Simultaneously, they will foster practice reflection in EFL teachers, augmenting their capacity for critical thinking and reducing their isolation and supporting the sharing of experiences, opinions and ideas in the intercultural classroom in Saudi Arabia. The multi-literacy concept in education has greatly influenced the learning of foreign language, which is evident in recent literature on culture instruction, along with the application of ICT in the EFL classroom.