www.unesa.ac.id
Unesa.ac.id., SURABAYA—Faculty of Languages and Arts (FBS) Surabaya State University (UNESA) held an intercultural guest lecture activity entitled "Enhancing EAL Students' Intercultural Awareness Using TikTok" in the Room FBS T14 Seminar, on Tuesday, 31 October 2023. This activity, which was attended by students from various study programs around FBS, is one of several neat collaboration programs between UNESA and the University of York, UK. Associate Professor at the University of York, Andrzej Cirocki, Ph.D., was present offline as a resource person.
On his occasion, he expressed the importance of intercultural awareness to become an effective communicator in cross-cultural situations. A meeting between one or more people with different cultures will definitely give rise to something that seems "foreign".
The culture in Indonesia is certainly different from the culture in Europe. Let's take the example of religion. If there are Indonesian Muslim students who have to carry out the obligation to perform Friday prayers in the middle of lectures in Europe where the culture of the people is mostly non-Muslim, how do they get around this? How can Muslim students communicate this without offending the feelings of lecturers or other students? This will be very difficult to do without understanding the other person's culture. "Therefore we must show awareness of cultural differences," he said.
According to Andrzej Cirocki, the topic of cross-cultural communication is important and shows how FBS prepares its students for effective communication using English. Participants actively discussed the concept of intercultural communication and various problems around it, including intercultural experiences within and outside Indonesia, as well as barriers to effective intercultural communication.
This activity, he continued, could increase first year students' awareness of competency. interculturally and show how they can master these competencies to become effective communicators in English as an international language.
How about fostering intercultural awareness using Tiktok? According to him, new technology is taking over education. Teachers and students find it difficult to imagine a classroom without technology today. Technology can be integrated into teaching in various ways, one of which is TikTok.
TikTok allows students to create short videos about any topic discussed in class. This gives students a fun opportunity to practice what they learn. However, most importantly, it engages them in active learning using English.
Because the workshop focuses on intercultural communication, the assignments that participants are asked to complete revolve around this topic and encourage them to practice cross-cultural communication culture.
"The students really enjoyed the TikTok experience and were able to show their other skills and talents, for example acting skills, etc.," he said to Public Relations.
Based on the evaluation results Finally, Andrzej Cirocki explained that his lecture was received positively and the participants were very enthusiastic about following it. Apart from that, the results showed that the participants gave a very good assessment of the workshop.
"I am very happy to hear that because the academic team who prepared this event, Cicilia Deandra Maya Putri, Uci Elly Kholidah, Rizki Ramadhan, Fariq Shiddiq Tasaufy worked hard to ensure the event lived up to the participants' expectations," he explained.
Andrzej Cirocki hopes that FBS can offer Intercultural Communication modules to students throughout the university, not only to students taking English-based programs at FBS , like all other students.
UNESA students should explore intercultural communication topics and use newly learned information and skills to their advantage, especially in today's competitive job market.
Dean FBS, Syafi'ul Anam, Ph.D., in his speech said that students must have an understanding of global culture with an intercultural perspective, as one of the provisions that can be used to continue their studies abroad.
“With this "I hope that with this activity, FBS students can increase their cultural competence and intercultural awareness and work together in building an inclusive society," he concluded.
For information, public lecture with Andrzej Cirocki, who is also a Visiting Professor in the field of TESOL at the University The State of Surabaya is UNESA's adaptive-collaborative effort in creating, developing and disseminating innovations in the educational and non-educational fields. []
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