Project Work as a Means of Teaching Intercultural Communication Skills

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show the benefits of  project work as an effective teaching approach to language and intercultural communication skills. A project work enhances students’ language skills, develops their metacognitive skills, their confidence, independence and interpersonal skills, which are very important for people’s lives .When students come from a mix of cultural and educational backgrounds project work improves the learning process and provides them with the necessary  intercultural communication skills. A case study approach was taken. It is a qualitative approach  where observation and interviews were the instruments used to collect the data. The questions that guide our study are how project work benefits students in developing students’ language skills and  group work skills. The other question is to what extent the use of projects in multilingual groups leads to developing intercultural communication skills. The study concludes that the use of project work is effective and in a multinational learning setting it is essential that the teacher must play the role of a guide as well as an intercultural facilitator.

Keywords: Intercultural communication, Language skills, Project work