Online communication in EFL classes to foster prospective global engineers’ complex e-intercultural communication competence
Authors: Golikova Tatiana , Tarasova Anna 
Published: March 2023

Apart from core technical skills that should be envisaged by engineering program providers, the outcomes of such programs should project that upon their completion engineering and technology students are emboldened to get intelligence and be able to design technological and digital solution to meet global needs considering public healthcare systems, economic security, and well-being. Moreover, these should be amplified by a set of soft skills, including communicating effectively in a foreign language with a variety of audiences, perceiving ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering critical circumstances in order to make abreast conclusions. While the described above outcomes are crucial in building truly global engineers, they are repeatedly neglected by engineering programs’ developers, that is why when moving to the workplace young engineers might find it burdensome to deal with dynamic settings.
Objective: Our objective is to explore the dimensions that might contribute to the development of global engineers’ complex e-intercultural communication competence through intercultural online interaction in EFL classes. The paper presents the results of a year's observation and surveying of two cohorts of B.S. students in IT from Volga State University of Technology (Yoshkar-Ola, Russia) and IMT Mines Albi students (Albi, France).
Method: To synthesize the body of knowledge, we performed a systematic literature review (SLR), in which we selected a pool of 30 studies and then conducted a meta-analysis using data extracted from those studies. Thus, the literature reviewed showed the gap of the proper definition for the term complex e-intercultural communication competence, that was afterwards offered and deliberately described/explained by the authors.
The authors suggest the following methodology to evaluate the online interaction program’s efficiency organized for VolgaTech and IMT students that would foster students’ complex e-intercultural communication competence by addressing all the dimensions. Firstly, the program for online interaction focusing on personal, professional and global issues in English language classes includes pre- and post - surveys to identify students’ complex communication competence, and to assess their English level proficiency. Secondly, while implementing the program the students discuss common and specific trends vivid for international communities, specifically, Higher Education, social and cultural issues of concern relevant to their countries. Thirdly, students prepare final in-depth reports reflecting on the experiences of communication with their foreign partners. Totally, forty-eight B.S. students in IT from VolgaTech and twenty-five IMT Mines Albi students took part in five video conferencing sessions during the 2019-2020 academic year.
Results: Via a meta-analysis and using data from 48 pre and post-surveys and final reports and over 1700 data responses assessing the targeted dimensions that influence the development of the complex e-intercultural competence the authors grouped: (1) language proficiency and intercultural communication skills mastered; (2) use of software applications facilitated both synchronous and asynchronous e-communication; (3) the experience contributes to the growing respect towards each other tolerating cultural, personal, professional differences addressing all the targeted issues.
Conclusion: Overall, the feedback about the English course which included online interaction was positive. The second cohort of the VolgaTech and IMT students had their sessions during the Spring term 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Those sessions made the students feel less lonely and frustrated, giving them extra issues to talk about finding common and specific governmental decisions of social affairs (norms and regulations) in their respective countries and worldwide. Having analyzed the feedback among the obstacles for effective communication that might occur we found out that the majority of students listed the language barrier, technical issues (e.g. low internet connection, problems of the bandwidth). However, not a single student referred to personal limitations, such as being shy, not enough motivated and prepared to talk about issues under discussion. The authors conclude that the developed and implemented program for online communication is efficient for training digital engineering specialists that the globalized environment requires.