Development of Critical Thinking Skills and Intercultural Awareness in Bilingual Telecollaborative Projects

This reflective practice will examine and report on students' experiences of three different bilingual (English-Spanish) task-based telecollaborative projects. The observations indicate that throughout these different projects the students were able to develop their intercultural awareness and their critical thinking skills via different online tools and learning contexts like a videoconferencing platform and Facebook. This paper employs both a qualitative and quantitative approach and data were collected from various sources, namely, the questionnaires administered at the beginning and end of the projects. As a conclusion, it is argued that the projects helped students to exchange views about cultural aspects and ask and clarify questions that arose during their interactions, which provided them with the opportunity to develop their critical thinking skills. Sharing thoughts and views on Facebook and videoconferencing has been a meaningful learning experience and students have been able to discover and reflect on useful information about each other's cultural traits. [For the complete volume of short papers, see ED590612.]