Religious beliefs: a barrier to cross-cultural communication in the ClerKing telecollaborative project

Abstract

Globalisation amplifies the need to improve Intercultural Communicative Competences (ICC). However, telecollaborative cross-cultural communication may be affected by different factors such as morals, values, and differences in viewpoints, as observed in numerous European and North American projects. Still, there is a dearth of experiments from the Anglophone Caribbean’s stance. Therefore, this paper seeks to highlight how religious ideologies affect international communication in ClerKing – a Franco-Jamaican telecollaborative project that occurred in different phases over a three-year period with learners of English from Clermont Auvergne University (UCA) and learners of French from Shortwood Teachers’ College (STC) and the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona. Using the exploratory approach, pre- and post-project questionnaires, learning and reflective journals, and different multimodal exchanges were analysed. Preliminary findings suggest that religion was a major theme highlighted in all phases of the project, leading to challenged communication and somewhat negative perception of the target culture.