TELECOLLABORATION IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING

Telecollaboration In Foreign Language Learning

Muhammad U Farooq

CSUMB

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Abstract

In a continually changing world, the role of instructional design keeps evolving with the advent
of technological revolution within last two to three decades. This paper will focus on the impact
of latest technological tools, mainly telecollaboration, on education, particularly second language
learning and how it is effecting instructional delivery methods. The aim of this paper is to
analyze the potential impact telecollaboration has on the foreign language education, both in-
class interactions and class-to-class interaction, forms of telecollaboration which we will discuss
in the coming paragraphs.

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In a general sense, the term tele-collaboration refers to a set of technologies that enables
the participants to share and edit documents, files, applications in real time while they are in a
video conferencing environment. Unlike a simple videoconference, it enables the participants to
collaborate with each other as they have face-to-face communication. Now people use
telecollaboration from all sectors and fields for training, education and other functions with the
help of latest technological tools like HTML5. It is believed that the telecollaboration
significantly changes the way the students used to learn a foreign language, particularly in the
distant learning classes.

Telecollaboration is defined in the context of education and foreign language learning.

Telecollaboration is defined by Julie A. Belz (2003) as “…internationally-dispersed learners in
parallel language classes use Internet communication tools such as e-mail, synchronous chat,
threaded discussion, and MOOC?s (as well as other forms of electronically mediated
communication), in order to support social interaction, dialogue, debate, and intercultural
exchange.”

In the context of foreign language education, Robert O'Dowd, 2010,defines

telecollaboration as, "the application of online communication tools to bring together classes of
language learners in geographically distant locations to develop their foreign language skills and
intercultural competence through collaborative tasks and project work." This definition of
focuses more on class-to-class interactions where various classes of foreign language students
from geographically distant locations interact with each other as compared to in-class interaction,
which refers to interaction among students within one class using online networks such as chats
and other interactive tools in a foreign language class.

With the advent of technological revolution and subsequent use of telecollaboration tools,
such as videoconferencing, the key question for researchers aroused was the physical separation
of the student and the teacher. Moore (1993) describes the physical space as transactional
distance or cognitive space, implying that students’ ability to learn may be hampered if they
perceive there is a distance between them and their teacher. Does the physical separation
between teacher and the student effects the students’ ability to learn, what do high school
students expects of their videoconference teachers in terms of presence, and what challenges
teachers face when teaching by videoconference?

Nicole A Rehn, Murdoch University (2017) in her research on impact of

videoconferencing finds the students’ felt little less presence of teacher in videoconference
classroom if the teacher lacked confidence and experience. She stated, “The finding shows that
experience and confidence better aligned with higher presence. Teachers need to learn how to
adapt pedagogy to the technology, but without resources and training readily available it takes
considerable time to trail and refine new strategies.”

Not only that the teachers require experience and confidence, she suggests “a complete
paradigm shift whereby teachers think about the affordances of a videoconference and then
design their courses to exploit these innovative aspects. The technology itself will not make
distance education courses good, not close the psychological distance felt by participations,

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instead teachers have a responsibility to adapt their pedagogy to suit the technological context so
that presence is developed to support their students’ learning.”

Moving on from the simple videoconference-based classroom to a telecollaborative

classroom where students were able to use tools such as e-mail, synchronous chat, discussion
boards etc. to see how online exchange effects students’ learning experience in a foreign
language class. Lin, W and Shie, J. and Holmes, P. (2017) analyzed whether students felt any
improvement in their English competence as a result of meaningful online peer interactions.
They also looked into whether different learning attitudes of students form different social and
educational cultures play any role in their learning.

The study found that “the Taiwanese students perceived that they developed their English
ability and intercultural communicative competence through meaningful social interactions at
knowledge, attitude and skill levels.” The study highlights the fact that when Taiwanese students
were paired with their British peers there discussion moved beyond merely linguistic issues as
they talked about intercultural topics as well. The study says, “In particular, through meaningful
social interactions with their British peers, the Taiwanese students grasped the opportunity to
clarify and thus justify some of their existing stereotypes towards British culture and its
language.”

The researchers appear to have believed that telecollaboration improves the foreign
language students’ intercultural communicative competence as through computer-mediated
communications (CMC) the students can communicate with the native speakers in a meaningful
way, which helps them in their learning process. In this paragraph, we try to explore how
telecollaborative classroom helps students improve their speaking skills. Schenker, T. (2017) in
her article aims to “explore the effects of a semester-long synchronous exchange with native
speakers on students' speaking skills.” She conducted a telecollaborative project between a small
US university and a rural high school in Germany to see whether telecollaboration effects
students’ speaking skills. She concludes in her study “students' interest in learning the target
language and studying abroad is positively impacted by a virtual exchange. The overwhelmingly
positive feedback on the exchange is encouraging and underlines the potential of
telecollaboration to be a successful tool for learning even in beginning foreign language classes.”

Though voice-based exchanges including voice-chat session did not show significant
improvement in students’ speaking proficiency, it did highlight the fact that if the students are
given opportunity to interact with the native speakers even at the very beginning state on regular
basis, there is a potential for them to improve their speaking skills in the foreign language
significantly.

The study in the above paragraph maintains that intercultural communication helps ESL
students their communicative competence, which apparently refers to only speaking and listening
skills. Do the telecollaborative tools help the students of foreign language to improve their other
skills i.e. writing and reading? Hsieh, J. and Wu, W. explore in their study whether intercultural
writing collaboration in an online as well as flipped classroom enhance English as Foreign
Language (EFL) learner’s writing outcome and whether intercultural writing collaboration
improve students’ intercultural sensitivity. In this research, EFL students from Taiwan interacted

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with their American partners via constructivist learning activities in an online setting. Their
research findings maintain the collaboration actually create a context for students to
communitive effectively, “leading to subsequent enhancement of writing proficiency.” The
conclude, “While intercultural collaboration is an appropriate instructional design in an EFL
context, step-by-step guidance and timely encouragement that helps students to take
accountability of their learning process and to recognize the final sweet outcomes is prerequisite
to successful maintenance of the given instructional design.” This study helps us understand how
intercultural telecollaboration facilities “the contextualization of an authentic learning” which in
the end help students improve their critical thinking and writing proficiency.

As for as the sage of technology tools as part of our instructional design, we are primarily
faced with technical challenge related to use of computer, technical equipment and social media
tools in the classrooms. The second challenge Emmanuel Abruquah, E. and Dosa, I. and Duda G.
(2016) in their paper Telecollaboration, Challenges and Opportunities state, “the second
motivational challenge became evident during group activities where leadership and time
management were in need. This created frustration among some students and affected their
participation.” If several groups are involved in telecollaborative class, it can become huge
challenge to organize groups of serval students to make sure they are able to work without any
interruption. Once in a while event may be easy to manage but if it is an everyday practice, then
it can cause serious problems for teachers and organizers.

Nonetheless, a significant number of researchers appear to have recognized the

effectiveness of telecollaboration in a foreign language class despite some risks and challenges
as mentioned in the above paragraph. Jauregi, K. (2016) in Researching Telecollaboration
Processes in Foreign Language Education: Challenges and Achievements concludes “language
learners’ oral communicative skills appear to grow more rapidly when they have the opportunity
to engage in telecollaboration sessions compared to students following traditional language
education systems.” Not only that, it is also observed that when the students of second language
learning were given chance to communicate with the native speakers in a telecollaborative
environment, they become more confident and less worried during the intercultural exchanges.
Students also noted that it is very important for them to talk to native speakers, as not only it
improves their learning process but also boosts their motivation to learn the language. Last but
not the least, the researchers observed that students got the opportunity to clarify their cultural
misconceptions about the target country, improving their understanding of the language and
culture.

Reference

Belz, J. A. (2003). "Linguistic Perspectives on the Development of Intercultural Competence in

Telecollaboration". Language Learning & Technology, 7(2), 68-117.[23]

O'Dowd, R. (2007). Online Intercultural Exchange: An Introduction For Foreign Language

Teachers (Vol. 15). Multilingual Matters.

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Moore, M. G. (1993). Theory of transactional distance. In D. Keegan (Ed.) Theoretical principles

of distance education. New York: Routledge.

Rehn, Nicole (2017) Video-conferencing in rural and remote secondary education in Canada: A
mixed-method collective case study of teachers' perceptions around presence, process and
professional learning. Professional Doctorate thesis, Murdoch University.

Schenker, T. (2017). Synchronous Telecollaboration for Novice Language Learners: Effects on

Speaking Skills and Language Learning Interests. Alsic. doi:10.4000/alsic.3068

Lin, W. and Shie, J. and Holmes, P. (2017) 'Enhancing intercultural communicative competence
through online foreign language exchange: Taiwanese students' experiences.', The Asian journal
of applied linguistics.,4 (1). pp. 73-88.

Hsieh, J. and Wu, W. (2017) Flipping writing classrooms via constructivist telecollaboration to
enhance cross-cultural sensitivity, critical thinking, and language learning.

Abruquah, E. I. and Dosa, I. and Duda G. (2016, March 31). Telecollaboration, Challenges and
Oppportunities. Retrieved October 21, 2017, from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED571370

Jauregi, K. (2016). Researching Telecollaboration Processes in Foreign Language Education:

Challenges and Achievements.