This study investigated the impact of a telecollaborative project with Australian peers on development of Korean elementary school students’ intercultural communicative competence. 57 Korean elementary school students of grade five participated in the project with 11 topics for 8 months. The responses from the 46 participants in the three ICC surveys and the data from 11 voluntary interviewees were analyzed to discover the changing process of their ICC over time within the Bennett’s DMIS framework. The research revealed that the participants were ethnorelatively oriented at the onset of the project, and at the end of the project even though they temporarily displayed an enthnocentric orientation while participating in the project. Among the participants, some shifted toward ethnocentric orientation; however, they still kept the ethnorelative orientation more intensively than the ethnocentric orientation. Examining in great detail, prior to the start of the project, they were ready to accept cultural differences uncritically, and finally reached at the adaptation stage, which is the last second stage in DMIS. Lastly, the pedagogical implication and the limitations of the study were also discussed.

Recent advancement of information, communication, and technology has brought changes in EFL instruction. Of these changes, telecollaboration is introduced as one of the innovative EFL instructional methods and the telecollaborative instruction under the ‘Smart Education’ policy has been applied to K-12 EFL class in Korea. Based on the changes in K-12 EFL class, the study was designed to investigate how telecollaboration with Australian peers influences on Korean middle school students’ English learning, especially their motivation to learn English and their intercultural communicative competence development. Over a 9-month school academic period (from March to December), the subjects in the experimental group engaged in 40-45 minute-long telecollaborative classes, guided by a total of 15 tasks. Right after completing the 15 telecollaborative classes, at the early December, the data were collected using the survey questionnaire with 43 items adapted from Gardner’s AMTB and Chen and Starosta’s Intercultural Sensitivity Scale. The responses to the questionnaire from 75 subjects were analyzed using independent- samples t-test. The results showed that (1) telecollaboration with native peers of English helped Korean middle school students stimulate their motivation to learn English, but (2) telecollaboration with native peers of English did not make any contribution to development of Korean middle school students’ ICC. The limitations and suggestions for future research were concluded.