Telecollaboration for language learning in secondary schools: promoting interaction in the EFL classroom via a blended teacher education course.
Résumé
Reviewing 20 years of telecollaborative research, O’Dowd (2015) shows how online intercultural exchange has become a mainstay of the (university) foreign language (FL) classroom. He identifies two purposes for telecollaborative exchange: "‘authentic’ interaction with […] learners from other countries” and "experience of ‘real’ intercultural communication.” Much of the literature focuses on the second objective: FL culture (Kramsch, 2014), other cultures (Guth & Helm, 2010), technological mediation (Kern, 2014). Fewer studies focus on language learning per se; these often underline difficulties in promoting genuine negotiation of meaning or effective peer feedback (Belz & Reinhardt, 2004). Research also frequently highlights limitations of telecollaboration due to (a) technical difficulties, (b) artificial exchanges, limited to personal registers (Hanna & de Nooy, 2009), and (c) unchallenging task design (O’Dowd & Ware, 2009). If past approaches have been lacking in these respects, a new direction might involve focus on language (rather than (inter)cultural concerns), and learner interaction (not other technological affordances). Second language research has established a number of recommendations for effective instruction, such as purposeful interaction in communicative contexts with external interlocutors (Lee & VanPatten, 2003; de Bot, 2007). Telecollaboration can address all these requirements. The present study reports on an exchange involving the EFL learners of 37 secondary school student-teachers in two European countries. The student-teachers were enrolled in courses on technology for language education, and collaborated in a virtual environment to (a) devise interactive tasks for their learners, and (b) document instances of FL communication and learning. Data include student-teacher course contributions (audiovisual recordings, (a)synchronous group exchanges), the teaching/learning materials they designed and published as open educational resources, and their reflections on this work from a task-based language teaching perspective. Additional information is provided by participant attitude questionnaires on language teaching and learning, the role of technology, and their views of course outcomes.