Online Intercultural Exchange

Policy, Pedagogy, Practice

Robert O'Dowd, Tim Lewis, Robert O'Dowd, Tim Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317392668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume provides a state of the art overview of Online Intercultural Exchange (OIE) in university education and demonstrates how educators can use OIE to address current challenges in university contexts such as internationalisation, virtual mobility and intercultural foreign language education. Since the 1990s, educators have been using virtual interaction to bring their classes into contact with geographically distant partner classes to create opportunities for authentic communication, meaningful collaboration and first-hand experience of working and learning with partners from other cultural backgrounds. Online exchange projects of this nature can contribute to the development of learner autonomy, linguistic accuracy, intercultural awareness, intercultural skills and electronic literacies.

Online Intercultural Exchange has now reached a stage where it is moving beyond individual classroom initiatives and is assuming a role as a major tool for internationalization, intercultural development and virtual mobility in universities around the globe. This volume reports qualitative and quantitative findings on the impact of OIE on universities in Europe and elsewhere and offers comprehensive guidance on using OIE at both pedagogical and technological levels. It provides theoretically-informed accounts of Online Intercultural Exchanges which will relevant to researchers in Computer Assisted Language Learning, Computer-Mediated Communication, or Virtual Education. Finally, contributors offer a collection of practitioner-authored and practically-oriented case studies for the benefit of teachers of foreign languages or in other subject areas who wish to engage in developing the digital literacy and intercultural competences of their learners.

Part I An Overview of Online Intercultural Exchange

Introduction to Online Intercultural Exchange and This Volume

Tim Lewis and Robert O’Dowd

DOI: 10.4324/9781315678931-1

Online intercultural exchange (OIE), also referred to widely as telecollaboration or virtual exchange, is our preferred nomenclature for denoting the engagement of groups of students in online intercultural interaction and collaboration with partner classes from other cultural contexts or geographical locations under the guidance of educators and/or expert facilitators. In the context of university education, online exchange traditionally has involved bilingual and bicultural interaction between students in different countries who were studying each other’s languages. For example, students learning German at an Irish university may engage in communication on a weekly basis using email and Skype with students of English in a German partner institution. However, in more recent years an increasing number of new exchange models and constellations have begun to emerge in universities across the globe which engage learners in online intercultural communication in a myriad of ways. It is not uncommon, for example, to see students of business studies in different universities using a lingua franca such as English to work on collaborative projects in online platforms such as wikis or Second Life. There are also a growing number of facilitator-led models which have intercultural experts who take part in and guide the online communication between students (see Helm in this volume).

In the area of university foreign language education, OIE has come to be seen as one of the main tools for developing intercultural awareness in the language classroom (Corbett, 2010; Thorne, 2006) as it allows educators to engage their learners in regular communication with members of other cultures in distant locations, and it also gives learners the opportunity to reflect on and learn from the outcomes of this intercultural exchange within the supportive and safe context of their classroom under the guidance of an informed languacultural expert—that is, their teacher or facilitator. Furthermore, Kern, Ware, and Warschauer (2004) suggest that online intercultural collaboration gives language educators the opportunity to put into practice innovative language learning approaches as it allows them to ‘use the Internet not so much to teach the same thing in a different way, but rather to help students enter into a new realm of collaborative enquiry and construction of knowledge, viewing their expanding repertoire of identities and communication strategies as resources in the process’ (2004, p. 21).

Over the past two decades, OIE has begun to receive a great deal of attention in the academic literature and in research circles. Several book publications have dealt exclusively with the topic (Belz & Thorne, 2006; Dooly, 2008; Guth & Helm, 2010; O’Dowd, 2006, 2007; Warschauer, 1995) as well as two special editions of the journal Language Learning & Technology (volumes 7/2 and 15/1). Significant amounts of funding also have been made available for research projects dedicated to the area, including the European Commission’s projects Moderating Intercultural Collaboration and Language Learning (Dooly, 2008), Intercultural Communication in Europe (Kohn & Warth, 2011) and Integrating Telecollaborative Networks in Higher Education (O’Dowd, 2013a). In the United States, significant funding also has been invested in numerous projects in this area, including the Penn State Foreign Language Telecollaboration Project (Belz, 2003). There also have been chapters on OIE in many of the recent overviews of foreign language methodology including the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (2007), the Routledge Handbook of Language and Intercultural Communication (Jackson, 2013) as well as reflections on its application to intercultural foreign language education in publications such as Liddicoat and Scarino (2013) and Corbett (2010).

From an institutional perspective, OIE has offered universities a new, low-cost tool for internationalising their curricula and providing preparation (and motivation) for student mobility. In the European Union, so much importance is attributed to the benefits of student mobility that the communiqué of the Conference of European Ministers Responsible for Higher Education in 2009 urged that by 2020 ‘at least 20% of those graduating in the European Higher Education Area should have had a study or training period abroad’ (2009, p. 4). However, despite the advances made in Europe as a result of the Bologna process and the establishment of the European Higher Education Area, achieving this aim is proving much more difficult than expected. Barriers such as the economic cost of mobility, the recognition of international qualifications and the lack of student proficiency in foreign languages have meant that currently only 4 percent of European university students are availing themselves of their institutions’ international mobility programmes. With this in mind, it is not surprising that universities are looking increasingly to online options such as OIE to support student mobility or to provide ‘virtual mobility’ alternatives for students who are unable or unwilling to take part in physical mobility programmes (Kinginger, 2009).

OIE is clearly a form of online engagement which holds great potential for university education. Indeed, some authors have pointed out online exchange’s greater potential for interactive learning than massive open online courses (MOOCs)—a form of online learning which is currently popular in third-level education. De Wit argues, ‘[w]hile in MOOCs the teaching stays more or less traditional, using modern technology for a global form of delivery, in COIL [Collaborative Online International Learning] the technology is used to develop a more interactive and collaborative way of international teaching and learning’ (2013, n.p.). Attempts to harness the power of MOOCs to an expanded set of intercultural learning aims or multilateral symbolic competences (Kramsch, 2009) in the name of global citizenship are surely already afoot. But OIE will continue to exist alongside MOOCS, often in a relationship of complementarity. This makes it all the more important to reflect on the specific role of collaborative online exchange. Frustratingly, despite the widespread interest it has aroused, OIE continues to be a relatively peripheral activity, carried out by motivated practitioners who often struggle to maintain long-term exchanges without the necessary recognition, support and training from their institutions or their departments (Guth, this volume; Guth, Helm & O’Dowd, 2012; O’Dowd, 2011, 2013a). With this in mind, this volume sets out to provide a representative overview of how the activity of OIE or telecollaboration currently is being employed in university education around the globe. We will evaluate the contribution which this activity has made to language and intercultural learning in university classrooms, and we will look for ways to overcome the barriers to integration—institutional, practical and others—which it has encountered to date. We will also argue that the long-term success and mainstreaming of OIE will not only depend on innovation by practitioners and researchers but also on greater support and recognition at the policy level from university management and educational decision makers.

Some Comments on Terminology

It is important to begin this volume by discussing briefly the terminology used in this area as many terms have been employed to designate variants of the same activity, and this may cause confusion amongst newcomers to the field. The activity of OIE originally was referred to as ‘telecollaboration’ by Mark Warschauer in his publication Telecollaboration and the Foreign Language Learner (1996). The definition of telecollaboration was delineated in the special edition of Language Learning & Technology (2003) in which Belz identified the main characteristics of foreign language telecollaboration to be ‘institutionalized, electronically mediated intercultural communication under the guidance of a languacultural expert (i.e., teacher) for the purposes of foreign language learning and the development of intercultural competence’ (2003, p. 2). However, since the emergence of the Internet in the mid-1990s, this activity has gone under many other names, and it is worthwhile to identify them and review briefly their different connotations.

The terms ‘e-pals’ or ‘key-pals,’ for example, were popular in the outset of these exchanges, and the terminology stems from the traditional activity of pen pals which linked together young learners in different countries through letter exchanges. As a result, these terms generally are used in primary and secondary school contexts and on websites which aim to link pre-university classes of learners in different countries (see, e.g., http://www.epals.com/). In more academic contexts, apart from ‘telecollaboration,’ terms such as ‘e-tandem’ (O’Rourke, 2007) and ‘Internet-mediated Intercultural Foreign Language Education’ (Belz & Thorne, 2006) all have been used. The term ‘e-tandem’ emerged from the work done in tandem learning in the 1990s, and as such, e-tandem exchanges involve a specific bilingual, student-to-student model of exchange which will be outlined in more detail later in this chapter. Belz and Thorne’s term ‘Internet-mediated Intercultural Foreign Language Education’ was an attempt to highlight the focus on both foreign language learning and intercultural exchange, aspects which, they argued, were missing from other terms such as ‘telecollaboration’ and ‘e-tandem’ (Thorne, 2006). In France the term Échanges Interculturels Exolingues en Groupe en Ligne (EIEGL) has been employed widely (Audras & Chanier, 2008), whereas in Brasil there is a growing body of work in this area under the umbrella term of ‘teletandem’ (Telles, 2009). In recent years, new terminology has begun to emerge, coming from areas of education which are not focussed necessarily on foreign language learning. For example, the SUNY group of universities in the United States use the term ‘collaborative online international learning’ (COIL) for their online international exchange initiatives, whereas the educational organisations involved in the Exchange 2.0 coalition use the term ‘virtual exchange’ to describe the engagement of students in online interaction for educational purposes.

However, for the purposes of this volume, the term ‘Online Intercultural Exchange’ (OIE) (O’Dowd, 2007; Thorne, 2010) will be used, although we will treat ‘telecollaboration’ and ‘virtual exchange’ as synonyms. We find the term ‘OIE’ clearly highlights the virtual and intercultural aspects of this activity, and yet it is sufficiently inclusive as to act as an umbrella term for the many different incarnations and models of online educational collaboration which will be described and evaluated in this volume.

Why Engage in OIE at University Level?

Whereas this volume will take a realistic and critical approach to the contribution of OIE to the overall goals of university education, it is important at this stage to identify briefly some of the main reasons why educators are engaging their students in virtual collaboration with distant peers.

Firstly, it has been argued that OIE can be an effective tool in the development of students’ foreign language and intercultural communication skills (see Lewis & O’Dowd in Chapter 2 of this volume for a detailed review of this area). Being able to communicate effectively in two or more languages is seen as one of the basic competences necessary for full participation in the knowledge society. This is relevant not only for specialised ‘foreign language students’ per se but also for students of engineering, business and other vocational disciplines who need to be able to gain employment in a globalised labour market. The ability to communicate in foreign languages is one of the European Commission’s ‘Key Competencies for Lifelong Learning’ (2007), and publications have suggested that telecollaborative exchange is a powerful tool for the development of students’ language skills because it is motivating, engages them in using language that is more authentic than the discourse of classroom interaction, provides ample opportunities for spoken and written communication with speakers of other languages and enables a relatively inexpensive form of elaborated contact with other cultures.

Secondly, OIE also is seen as having the potential for developing various generic, interrelated and transferable skills that are invaluable for graduates entering the global workplace. These include intercultural communicative competence and e-literacies or e-skills. Intercultural communicative competence is the ability to establish relationships and work effectively with people of other cultural backgrounds using a second language (Byram, 1997) and has become a necessity for many professions where work involves travelling abroad and collaborating with colleagues and clients from other linguistic and cultural backgrounds. For example, Grandin and Hedderich (2009) suggest that in the case of 21st-century engineering, ‘the future belongs to those who learn to work or team together with other groups without regard to location, heritage, and national and cultural difference’ (p. 363). Similarly, the growing importance of online technologies for the ways in which we work and learn means that contemporary European students are obliged to learn how to combine foreign language skills and intercultural competence with electronic literacies to carry out a wide variety of activities in virtual environments. Electronic literacies include knowing how to carry out effective online research, create multimodal presentations in a foreign language using Web 2.0 applications and the ability to communicate clearly and effectively in a foreign language with distant collaborators through asynchronous tools such as email and through synchronous tools such as online telephony (e.g., Skype) and videoconferencing (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006; Shetzer & Warschauer, 2000; Thorne, 2013; Trilling & Fadel, 2009).

With the increasing complexity of communication, as outlined, university educators are being challenged to create learning environments that integrate the tools and communicative practices which learners will later face in their working lives. The European Commission’s document “New Skills for New Jobs: Action Now,” for example, calls on educators to develop new methodological techniques which facilitate the integration of digital, linguistic and intercultural skills and competences. This goal, it is suggested, is best achieved by integrating ‘more cross-curricular and innovative approaches, such as learning-by-doing or project-based learning’ (2010, p. 26). OIE supports an approach to learning which combines the development of intercultural competence and e-literacies. Successful online intercultural exchange projects being carried out across the globe are bringing together students from distant international universities, helping them to use Web 2.0 tools to create digital artefacts for and with distant peers, and creating opportunities for collaborative project work. In this way, OIE provides students with hands-on experience that is directly related to successful professional practices in the global workplace.

But OIE offers more than benefits to participating students. This activity also can support senior management at universities as they strive to develop a successful internationalisation strategy in their institutions. By engaging students in online intercultural projects with classes at other institutions, universities are bringing their students and teachers into contact with other perspectives and practices and are providing them with the opportunity to learn from these in the supportive environment of their own classroom. In contrast to other internationalisation strategies, OIE also can be seen as a relatively ‘low-cost’ form of international activity as many of the online tools used in online exchanges are already freely available.

In relation to student mobility, it has been suggested that OIE can be an excellent form of preparation for subsequent physical mobility, allowing students to engage in virtual interaction with partners in their future destination and raise intercultural awareness of daily life and educational systems in the target culture (Kinginger, 2009, p. 221). Not only does this better prepare them for the challenges of studying and living in the target culture, but it also can support greater integration between exchange students and local students, two groups that tend to remain quite separate. Of course, OIE also can serve as a viable alternative for those students who cannot take part in physical mobility programmes be it for personal, financial or any number of other reasons. The recent European Commission Green Paper on promoting the learning mobility of young people acknowledges the role of OIE as a tool for preparing for physical mobility and as a viable alternative for those students and young people who are unable to engage in traditional mobility programmes (Commission of the European Communities, 2009, p. 18). Unfortunately, reports of pre-mobility online exchanges remain quite rare (see Kinginger, 2009).

Institutions also may consider that the integration of telecollaborative projects with physical student mobility programmes such as the European Union’s Erasmus+ programme can facilitate the development of more stable partnerships amongst European classrooms. The report of the High Level Expert Forum on mobility suggests the following: ‘Virtual mobility is widely available, quick and cheap… . Developing the synergies between virtual and physical mobility is a central part of a new way of life’ (2008, p. 11). With this in mind, various projects and initiatives are currently exploring how telecollaboration can be integrated with physical mobility (see the Mobi-blog project—http://mobi-blog.eu/—for an example of such an initiative).

In short, OIE has been shown to have great potential for enriching the learning of students in higher education institutions (HEIs) across the globe. Whether these claims are supported by rigorous research studies will be looked at in greater detail in the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• PART I An Overview of Online Intercultural Exchange
• PART II Integrating Online Intercultural Exchange in University Education
• PART III The Pedagogy of Online Intercultural Exchange
• PART IV Online Intercultural Exchange in Practice
• PART V The Future of Online Intercultural Exchange
• List of Contributors
• Index