Keywords

Introduction

Online intercultural exchange (OIE), also referred to as telecollaboration or virtual exchange , refers to the engagement of groups of students in online intercultural interaction and collaboration with partners from other cultural contexts or geographical locations under the guidance of educators and/or expert facilitators (O’Dowd 2013). Online exchange has traditionally involved bilingual/bicultural interaction between students in different countries who were studying each others’ languages. For example, English students learning German may engage in online communication with students of English in a German partner institution. However, an increasing number of new exchange models and constellations are beginning to emerge across the globe which engage learners in online intercultural communication in a myriad of ways. It is not uncommon, for example, to see students using a lingua franca such as English in order to work on collaborative projects in online platforms such as Wikis or Second Life. At university level, 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.

Online intercultural exchange (henceforth OIE) has come to be seen as one of the main online activities for developing foreign language (FL) communication skills and intercultural awareness in the foreign language classroom (Corbett 2010; Thorne 2006) as it allows educators to engage their learners in regular semi-authentic 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 context of their classroom under the guidance of their teacher.

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 and Thorne 2006; Dooly 2008; Guth and 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 have also 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 and Warth 2011), and Integrating Telecollaborative Networks in Higher Education (O’Dowd 2013). In the USA, significant funding has also been invested in numerous projects in this area, including the Penn State Foreign Language Telecollaboration Project (Belz 2003).

Early Developments

The origins of OIE in FL education has been traced to the learning networks pioneered by Célestin Freinet in 1920s France and later by Mario Lodi in 1960s Italy, decades before the internet was to become a tool for classroom learning (Cummins and Sayers 1995, pp. 119–136). Freinet made use of the technologies and modes of communication available to him at the time to enable his classes in the north of France to make class newspapers with a printing press and to exchange these newspapers along with “cultural packages” of flowers, fossils, and photos of their local area with schools in other parts of France. Similarly, Lodi motivated his learners and helped to develop their critical literacy by encouraging them to create student newspapers in collaboration with distant partner classes. The link between the principles and activities of these educators and the online work being carried out today is discussed in detail by Cummins and Sayers (1995) and by Müller-Hartmann (2007).

Despite the emergence of the internet and local area networks (LANs) in the early and mid-1990s, initially there was relatively little telecollaborative interaction between classrooms in different geographical locations as educators did not yet have wide access to partner classes in other locations, and students found it difficult to access the internet outside of the classroom. In this context, online interaction was limited to learners in one class using synchronous text-based communication, such as chats, MOOs, and LANs, to interact together in the target language. The text-based nature of the communication was seen at the time as being a manner of allowing FL learners to reflect on and plan their utterances in the FL before committing them to the online interaction with their classmates.

Nevertheless, some isolated examples of online intercultural exchange in the early 1990s can indeed be found in the literature. Early reports include the work of the Orillas Network (Cummins and Sayers 1995), the AT&T Learning Circles (Riel 1997), as well as more in-depth research studies into tandem exchanges (Brammerts 1996; Eck et al. 1995). Warschauer’s publication, Virtual Connections: Online Activities for Networking Language Learners (1995), included a collection of “cross-cultural communication” projects that reported on students creating personal profiles, carrying out surveys, and examining cultural stereotypes with distant partners. At this stage a number of websites, including Intercultural E-mail Classroom Connections (IECC) and E-Tandem, also became available online in order to link up classrooms across the globe and to provide practitioners with activities and guidelines for their projects, while practitioners such as Ruth Vilmi in Finland and Reinhard Donath in Germany helped to make the activity better known by publishing practical reports of their students’ work online (Donath and Volkmer 1997). Vilmi’s work focused on online collaboration between technical students at universities across Europe, while Donath provided German secondary school teachers with a wide range of resources and information about how projects could be integrated into the curriculum.

The IECC website also contained a very active discussion forum between 1994 and 1995 where practitioners were often asked by the moderator and IECC co-founder Bruce Roberts to react to questions related to how online intercultural exchanges could be integrated into the classroom and what type of tasks were successful in online exchanges. The responses to these questions reveal not only many of the challenges which pioneering telecollaborators were facing during the infancy of the internet; they also demonstrate that many of the key pedagogical principles of the time are still highly relevant for twenty-first-century teachers using OIE. Practitioners wrote about the need for adequate time for students to reflect on their email interactions as well as for adequate access to resources to ensure fluid communication between classes. They also mention the importance of pedagogical leadership on behalf of the teachers in organizing and exploiting the exchange. Roberts summed up what he considered to be the key to success in email classroom connections as being the pedagogical integration of the activity into the class and the learning process: “when the email classroom connection processes are truly integrated into the ongoing structure of homework and student classroom interaction, then the results can be educationally transforming” (1994, n.p.).

Major Contributions

In the past decade, OIE has become one of the main pillars of network-based language teaching (NBLT), and the contribution of online contact and exchange to the development of intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has been one of the main areas of research in this area (Müller-Hartmann 2000; O’Dowd 2003; Ware 2005). Initially, however, the intercultural learning outcomes of such contact tended to be at times exaggerated or oversimplified. For example, it was common to read that intercultural learning could be “easily achieved through [email] tandem learning ” (Brammerts 1996, p. 122).

Soon, however, a more critical and in-depth body of research was producing findings which demonstrated the difference between intercultural contact and intercultural learning. Kern suggested that in the context of online learning, “exposure and awareness of difference seem to reinforce, rather than bridge, feelings of difference” (Kern 2000, p. 256). Similarly, Meagher and Castaños (1996) found in their exchange between classes in the USA and Mexico that bringing the students to compare their different attitudes and values leads to a form of culture shock and a more negative attitude toward the target culture. Furthermore, Fischer (1998), in his work on German-American electronic exchanges, warned that very often students, instead of reflecting and learning from the messages of their distant partners, simply reject the foreign way of thinking, dismissing it as strange or “typical” of that particular culture.

Over the past two decades, the main models of OIE that have been used in foreign language education have been e-tandem and blended intercultural models. Each of these will now be looked at briefly.

The first of these, e-tandem (O’Rourke 2007), emerged from the tradition of tandem language learning that has been widely practiced in many European universities. Tandem learning is essentially a language learning activity which involves language exchange and collaboration between two partners who are native speakers of their partners’ target language. Its online equivalent, e-tandem, thus involves two native speakers of different languages communicating together and providing feedback to each other through online communication tools with the aim of learning the other’s language. E-tandem exchanges are based on the principles of autonomy and reciprocity, and the responsibility for a successful exchange generally rests with the learners, who are expected to provide feedback on their partners’ messages and on their FL performance. In this sense, tandem partners take on the role of peer-tutors who correct their partners’ errors and propose alternative formulations in the target language. In the e-tandem model, the teacher assumes a facilitating role, and learners are encouraged to take responsibility for finding their own themes for discussion, correcting their partners’ errors, and keeping a learner diary or portfolio to reflect on their own learning progress. E-tandem began to gain popularity throughout European universities in the early 1990s, and a centralized internet site with resources, bibliography, and guidelines was financed by European project funding during this time.

In contrast to e-tandem models , the blended intercultural approach to OIE placed a greater emphasis on intercultural aspects of language learning and required students to work together with their international partners to make comparisons of their cultures. Belz (2002), for example, reports on a USA-German exchange which involved developing a website which contained bilingual essays and a bilingual discussion of a cultural theme such as racism or family. Another popular intercultural task for classroom-integrated exchanges has been the analysis of parallel texts. Belz defines parallel texts as ‘linguistically different renditions of a particular story or topic in which culturally-conditioned varying representations of that story or topic are presented’ (2005, n.p.). Popular examples of parallel texts which have been used in telecollaborative exchanges include the American film Three Men and a Baby and the French original Trois hommes et un couffin. In German, telecollaborative projects have engaged learners in the comparison of the German fairy tale Aschenputtel by the Brothers Grimm and the animated Disney movie Cinderella.

A further task which reflected this approach was the application of ethnographic interviewing in synchronous online sessions. O’Dowd (2005) trained a group of German EFL students in the basic techniques of ethnographic interviewing, and the students then carried out interviews with American informants in the USA using group-to-group videoconferencing sessions and one-to-one email exchanges before writing up reflective essays on their findings. The combination of synchronous and asynchronous tools allowed the students to develop different aspects of their intercultural competence. Videoconferencing was seen to develop students’ ability to interact with members of the target culture under the constraints of real-time communication and also to elicit, through a face-to-face dialogue, the concepts and values which underlie their partners’ behavior and their opinions. However, email was employed to both send and receive much more detailed information on the two cultures’ products and practices as seen from the partners’ perspectives. In other words, email was suited to foster cultural knowledge, while videoconferencing supported the development of students’ intercultural negotiating skills.

Another OIE activity which has become very popular in recent years is the Cultura exchange (Furstenberg et al. 2001; O’Dowd 2005). This intercultural exchange uses the possibility of juxtaposing materials from the two different cultures together on web pages in order to offer a comparative approach to investigating cultural difference. When using Cultura, language learners from two cultures (e.g., Spanish learners of English and American learners of Spanish) complete online questionnaires related to their cultural values and associations. These questionnaires can be based on word associations (e.g., What three words do you associate with the word Spain?), sentence completions (e.g., A good citizen is someone who…), or reactions to situations (e.g., Your friend is 22 and is still living with his parents. What do you say to him/her?). Each group fills out the questionnaire in their native language. Following this, the results from both sets of students are then compiled and presented online. Under the guidance of their teachers in contact classes, students then analyze the juxtaposed lists in order to find differences and similarities between the two groups’ responses. Following this analysis, students from both countries meet in online message boards to discuss their findings and to explore the cultural values and beliefs which may lie behind the differences in the lists. In addition to the questionnaires, learners are also supplied with online resources such as opinion polls and press articles from the two cultures that can support them in their investigation and understanding of their partner class’ responses. The developers of Cultura (Furstenberg et al. 2001) report that this contrastive approach helped learners to become more aware of the complex relationship between culture and language and also enabled them to develop a method for understanding a foreign culture. It is also important to point out that in this model, while the data for cultural analysis and learning are produced online, the role of face-to-face teaching is considered vital in helping the learners to identify cultural similarities and differences and also in bringing about reflection on the outcomes of students’ investigations on the Cultura platform.

Work in Progress

In recent years, alternative models and applications of OIE have begun to appear. These involve forms of online intercultural interaction which are completely free of institutionalized learning setups and others which are led, not by teachers, but outsourced to educational organizations specialized in setting up and facilitating online interaction initiatives. Each of these trends will now be briefly described.

The first of these “new-style” telecollaborative exchanges function completely outside the “traditional” class-to-class arrangement and engage learners in specialized online interest communities or environments that focus on specific hobbies or interests. Thorne et al. (2009), for example, describe the potential for intercultural contact and learning in online fan communities, where learners can establish relationships with like-minded fans of music groups or authors and can use Web 2.0 technologies to remix and create new artistic creations based on existing books, films, and music (see also Thorne et al. 2015). Learners also have increasing opportunities to use their FL skills and hone their intercultural communicative competence through participating in online multicultural communities such as multiplayer online games and public discussion forums (Hanna and de Nooy 2009). Researchers working in this area are finding a complex range of data sources emerging from these noninstitutionally located intercultural exchange contexts. Pasfield-Neofitou (2011), for example, analyzed a corpus of blogs, emails, social network site (SNS) interactions, chat conversations, game profiles, and mobile phone communications between 12 Australian learners of Japanese with Japanese partners they had contacted outside of their formal learning environment, in order to explore issues of language choice, identity construction, and feelings of national identity and “foreignness” online.

Models of OIE which function at this level of integration require learners to assume greater responsibility for how their linguistic and intercultural learning progress online as they are given greater freedom in their choice of potential intercultural learning partners and learning environments – many of which, as has been stated, may be completely independent of organized classroom activity. Thorne describes this form of telecollaborative learning as “intercultural communication in the wild” (2010, p. 144) and speculates that this learning may be “situated in arenas of social activity that are less controllable than classroom or organized online intercultural exchanges might be, but which present interesting, and perhaps even compelling, opportunities for intercultural exchange, agentive action and meaning making” (Thorne 2010, p. 144).

The second new-style telecollaborative approach involves “facilitated” models of OIE where trained online facilitators are hired by universities to guide synchronous online discussions between learners in different universities. The project Perspectives on the Euro(pean) crisis (Sharing Perspectives Foundation 2013), for example, involved eight European universities and was coordinated by the Sharing Perspectives Foundation, a Dutch organization which has been set up purely to promote virtual exchange. During each week of this exchange, lectures on the theme of the European crisis were recorded and broadcast online to students from the participating institutions. These lectures were then followed by synchronous discussions between the participants using a unique web-based videoconference tool. These discussions were hosted by professionally trained facilitators. At the end of the project, two students from each university were selected to go to Brussels to present the results of their research to members of the European Commission.

Another facilitator-based OIE project is the Soliya program which brings together students from the East and West with the aim of developing a deeper understanding of the perspectives of others around the world on important sociopolitical issues and also to develop critical thinking, intercultural communication, and media literacy skills (see Helm, this volume). Each iteration of the project connects over 200 students from over 30 different universities in the USA, Europe, and the predominantly Arab and/or Muslim world. Students are placed into small groups of 8–10 students and guided through a 9-week, English-language dialogue program by pairs of trained facilitators. Students receive credit from their local institution for participating in the project, even though the facilitators and the online exchange environment are contracted from the Soliya organization by the different universities.

Problems and Difficulties

The literature on online intercultural exchange demonstrates that these activities potentially result in negative attitudes toward the partner group and their culture, misunderstandings, and unachieved objectives. The main question which has occupied many researchers is why this is the case and whether these instances of intercultural communication breakdown should be seen as something problematic or as opportunities for learning.

Kramsch and Thorne (2002), for example, found that the reasons for online communication breakdown between participating French and American students were due to both groups trying to engage in interaction with each other using not merely different communicative styles but culturally divergent discourse genres. Neither group appeared to be aware of this difference in discourse genres. While the French students approached the exchange as an academic exercise and used factual, impersonal, restrained genres of writing, the American group regarded the activity as an opportunity for bonding with their French age-peer partners and subsequently favored the strategy of seeking interpersonal rather than academic solutions to the problems which arose.

Several other studies also looked at how the outcomes of intercultural exchanges could be influenced by both macro- as well as micro-level aspects of the environments in which they took place. Belz (2002), reporting on a semester long email exchange between German (studying English) and American (studying German) foreign language students, found that the context and the setting of the two partner groups had a major influence on the success and results of the exchange. Issues such as different institutional and course demands and varying levels of access to technology led to misunderstandings with regard to deadlines for teamwork and therefore hindered the development of relationships on a personal level.

Other research has revealed how individual students’ motivation and intercultural communicative competence can have an important influence on the outcome of online partnerships. In reference to motivation, Ware (2005) identified individual differences in motivation as being an important factor in the low functioning of an exchange. In her study, success in the asynchronous exchange required students to spend a substantial amount of time reading and replying to correspondence, and this often clashed with the amount of time students had put aside for such an academic activity. The importance of individual students’ intercultural competence is also illustrated in O’Dowd’s study (2003) of five Spanish-English email partnerships. He found that the essential difference between the successful and unsuccessful partnerships was whether students had the intercultural competence to develop an interculturally rich relationship with their partners through the creation of effective correspondence. This type of correspondence took into account the socio-pragmatic rules of the partner’s language, provided the partner with personal opinions, asked him/her questions to encourage feedback, tried to develop a personal relationship with the partner, and was sensitive to his/her needs and questions.

In order to prepare educators for the challenges that await them in their telecollaborative exchanges, O’Dowd and Ritter (2006) provided a structured inventory of possible reasons for the breakdown of telecollaborative exchanges. The inventory organized the reasons for failed communication into four different levels: socio-institutional, classroom, individual, and interaction levels. The individual level refers to the learners’ psychobiographical and educational background, the classroom level refers to how the exchange was organized and carried out in both classes, the socio-institutional level deals with the different levels of access to technology and institutional attitudes to online learning, while the interaction level looks at the actual quality and nature of the communication which takes places between the partner classes.

The question remains as to whether the repeated cases of communication breakdown and intercultural misunderstanding should be seen as a negative aspect of telecollaborative exchange or rather as a potential “jump-off” point for exploring why members of different cultures interpret behavior differently and how different cultural perspectives can be reconciled. Intercultural communication in face-to-face contexts and out of the classroom is also often characterized by misunderstandings and the need to deal with different behaviors and beliefs. It is therefore fair to argue that these cases of “failed communication” should be exploited as “rich points” for learning in the classroom. Belz goes so far as to argue that “the clash of cultural faultlines in telecollaborative learning communities …should not be smoothed over or avoided based on the sometimes negative results of a study such as this one; indeed, they should be encouraged” (2002, p. 76).

Future Directions

The chapter sets out to review how OIE has been employed to develop learners’ foreign language skills and intercultural awareness. After two decades of intense practice and research, the following conclusions can be drawn about this activity: First, OIE has at this stage demonstrated its educational potential and can make an important contribution to language learning and intercultural competence and clearly has the potential to form an important part of the foreign language curriculum. Second, it is an extremely complex activity that is both time-consuming and challenging for teachers and for students to engage in successfully. Third, in order for it to be sustainable, OIE needs to go beyond being an isolated activity practiced by practitioner-researchers in the area of computer-assisted language learning and should instead form part of the common battery of educational tools (e.g., MOOCs, the flipped classroom) used by educators across academic disciplines. Fourth, the long-term success of OIE also depends on support by school/university management and policy makers in the form of training for staff, academic recognition of students’ work, and acknowledgment of its value and importance in educational policy documentation. Finally, in order to achieve the wider mainstreaming of the activity, practitioners and researchers also have a role to play by providing further transparent research into the educational value of telecollaboration and by developing models of telecollaborative exchange which are adaptable to other university disciplines and which explicitly attend to the transversal competences that educators are required to develop in their teaching.

Cross-References

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