Tableaux Vivants as Vehicles for Cultural Exchange

Intercultural simulations, such as Barnga (Thiagarajan & Steinwachs, 1990), along with the use of critical incidents (Gibson, 2002; Gropper, 1996), have long been a mainstay of intercultural communication courses and have found their way into English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms (Apedaile & Schill, 2007). In this paper, a computer-mediated communication (CMC)-enhanced cultural exchange project, which is in the spirit of these intercultural simulations, will be described and evaluated. In the process of the exchange project, conducted between universities and high schools in Japan and the United States, students in the respective settings exchanged word associations and tableaux vivants based on the same word prompts. A variety of web tools facilitated the project: the forms and spreadsheets available through Google Drive to gather the word associations; word cloud creation websites to visually represent the word associations; as well as online forums for the two groups to exchange impressions and interpretations. It was found that the exchange facilitated interesting insights and interpretations and allowed for the critical analysis of the concept of culture itself. Some of the artifacts produced through a series of these exchanges will be shown and applications of the project to tandem language learning will be explained. [For full proceedings, see ED565087.]