Exploring students' language awareness through intercultural communication in computer-supported collaborative learning

Students seldom think about language unless they are instructed to do so or are made to do so during learning activities. To arouse students’ awareness while learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP), this study formed a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) community to engage teachers and students from different domains and countries in intercultural communication. Participating were 208 students, including 83 international students from one of the eight vocational and technological universities which composed the CSCL community. Organized according to activity theory, the results indicate that students’ language awareness was stimulated when students monitored the accuracy of their language usage (process-oriented) and assessed their language performance (product-oriented) during intercultural communication with their peers from different backgrounds (across majors, colleges, and universities) and countries (China, Denmark, Indonesia, Malaysia, Netherlands, Thailand, and Vietnam). The intercultural characteristics of the CSCL community fostered students’ language awareness as they acquired expressions from different cultures and contexts on the levels of lexical, syntactic, and textual organization. As a result of such intercultural communication, students’ improvement of language awareness was further revealed by nine assessments examined by means of a repeated one-way analysis of variance. This study lays a foundation for promoting online intercultural interaction.