Integrating Intercultural Communicative Competence into Tertiary Education for Sustainable Development: a Coil Project-Based Perspective

Current trends in tertiary education reflect the importance of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) for the globalized job market. In this research, using a mixed-methods approach, we investigated the influence Intercultural Communicative Competence has on students’ performance within a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project. We also explored students’ views on how participating in Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project helps them develop their Intercultural Communicative Competence. This study took place in an authentic educational setting of a COIL project with 44 student participants from Vasyl Stefanyk Carpathian National University (Ukraine) and the University of Applied Sciences Landshut (Germany). The research applied two complementary questionnaires to assess students’ prior knowledge of ICC, identify specific aspects of their intercultural teamwork, and examine the challenges they faced during the project as well as the strategies employed to overcome them. The findings revealed the benefits of using Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) to enhance the process of students' Intercultural Communicative Competence development through COIL projects. Furthermore, a cognitive-pragmatic perspective allowed us to analyse how students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence development fostered the acquisition of sustainable educational outcomes. The obtained results signified the objectification of students’ skills essential for responsible global citizenship, as well as a range of transferable competencies, including critical thinking, cultural sensitivity, adaptability, and effective communication. Consequently, the scientific novelty of this research is the empirical confirmation of an interconnected model in which Collaborative Online International Learning, Content and Language Integrated Learning, and Intercultural Communicative Competence development dynamically interact to promote Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) applying the foundations of cognitive pragmatics.