Telecollaboration – Foreign Language Learning through International Encounters

by | 18 January 2021

Summary

– Main objectives of the Virtual Exchange

    • Engage students in international collaboration using English as a lingua Franca
    • Have students develop intercultural communicative competences which obviously includes foreign language competence
    • Develop students’ pedagogical-digital competence by having them use and reflect on various digital tools
    • Facilitate students’ competence development in the area of analyzing, designing and reflecting abut online-based tasks for their respective future classroom contexts

– Targeted learning outcomes

    • To engage in international collaboration
    • To develop intercultural communicative competences, pedagogical-digital competence, and analyzing ability

– Global task description

Following the progressive exchange model students engage in a getting-to-know phase doing various tasks (forum post, short video, picture description task, online conduct rules). The following two phases are task design phases, where students first analyze an intercultural task and then create one on their own and finally in the third phase create a longer task sequence, most probably by using  a Weekly site for presenting the tasks online.

Partners

Partner / department Course Language of instruction Number of students
Jan Dlugosz University, Department of Humanities MA seminar in Teaching English as a Foreign Language English 10
Pädagogische Hochschule Heidelberg, English Department Telecollaboration – Foreign Language Learning through International Encounters English 9

Start and end date

20 October 2019 – 2 February 2020

Duration

13 weeks

Discipline

Training for pre-school teachers (English as a foreign language)

Integration and assessment

The VE tasks are the tasks of the seminar, there are no additional tasks, since the VE runs the whole term and is fully integrated with course content. If students need a grade (not all do), they have to write a portfolio which is specifically geared towards the VE experience, reflecting about their learning process (see objectives above)

Technology tools used

– Learning environment

Canvas

– Collaboration tools

Zoom; Google Docs; Padlet; Weebly