Telecollaboration and Foreign Language Education: A Brief Introduction

By Robert O'Dowd

   Telecollaboration is defined by Belz in the following way:

“…internationally-dispersed learners in parallel language classes use Internet communication tools such as e-mail, synchronous chat, threaded discussion, and MOOs (as well as other forms of electronically mediated communication), in order to support social interaction, dialogue, debate, and intercultural exchange.” (2003a: 1)

As this definition suggests, telecollaboration covers a wide range of activities and exploits a wide variety of on-line communication tools. On a technical level, while early intercultural exchanges were almost exclusively e-mail based (Warschauer, 1995), educators now exploit a wide variety of communication tools including MOO’s (von der Emde, Schneider and Kötter, 2001; Kötter, 2003), web-based message boards (Furstenberg, Levet, English and Maillet, 2001) and videoconferencing (Kinginger, Gourvés-Hayward and Simpson, 1999; O’Dowd, 2001). The use of different communication tools (and/or combinations of them) offers both teachers and learners various advantages. While videoconferencing, for example, may allow learners to see and speak to their partners in real time, MOO’s and discussion boards provide easy access to transcripts of the interaction which can facilitate reflection and further study. 

On a content level, telecollaborative exchanges deal with a varied and productive range of topics and tasks. In the past, writers such as Warschauer (1999) had been critical that many practitioners were simply engaging their learners in superficial pen-pal exchanges which involved an unreflective exchange of information and did not exploit the activity to the maximum. However, modern reports reveal a rich and creative range of projects which involve learners in comparative reviews of literature (Müller-Hartmann, 1999), in-depth investigation into aspects of the foreign culture and society (Kern, 1998), collaborative creation of websites (Belz, 2001) and carefully structured analysis of on-line cultural questionnaires (Furstenberg et. al., 2001). 

On a research level, recent literature on telecollaboration appears to focus less on reporting general examples of good practice and instead is providing in-depth qualitative studies which deal with issues such as cultural differences in on-line behaviour (Kim and Bonk, 2002; Kramsch and Thorne, 2002), the influence of institutional and social factors on the outcomes of exchanges (Belz, 2002; Belz and Müller-Hartmann, 2003) and the importance of task and task design (Appel and Gilabert, 2002; Müller-Hartmann, 1999). Research studies which involve action research and the collection of qualitative data have been found to be particularly suited to exploring the complex relationship between teachers, learners and interaction both on-line and in the classroom which telecollaboration involves (Warschauer and Kern, 2000).

As regards the pedagogical benefits of intercultural exchanges, telecollaboration via e-mail and other electronic media has been found to support learner autonomy (Schwienhorst, 2000: Tella; 1991), to foster language awareness (Appel, 1999), to develop learners’ writing skills (Eck, Legenhausen and Wolff, 1993; St. John and Cash, 1995), to improve grammatical correctness (Brammerts, 1996) and to develop higher order thinking skills (von der Emde, Schneider and Kötter, 2001). The activity has also been seen as particularly suited to developing learners’ intercultural communicative competence (Belz, 2003; Byram, 1997; O’Dowd, 2003). The misunderstandings and communication breakdowns which often occur in such exchanges have been shown to contribute to learners’ understanding of the complex relationship between language and culture, and the need to describe one’s own culture to others can encourage learners to engage in a more critical reflection of their own social reality. Interacting with members of the target culture can also enable learners to move away from a definition of culture learning as being merely a matter of collecting facts and figures and instead to move towards an ethnographic understanding of culture which involves seeing cultural practices from the perspective of members of the foreign culture.

[All references can be found in the bibliography elsewhere on this website]