Introduction

In an ever globalizing, progressing world, teachers face more and more challenges. They face an educational landscape where technological and intercultural competences are becoming a part of learning standards across curriculum. A supposed “standard” English is becoming less of a reality, and the need to be able to use English communicatively is increasingly in demand. The challenges are not necessarily more difficult to accomplish than previous pedagogical requirements, but new these challenges necessitate new approaches. As we will illustrate, these challenges are not out of reach but can be met by normal classroom teachers in real-world by implementing tele-collaborative projects in their classroom.

Randall Sadler at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Melinda Dooly at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) demonstrated this to their respective classes of pre-service and in-service teachers, ranging from undergraduate students to those in the later stages of PhD programs, by giving them hands-on experience as students completing projects tele-collaboratively. The project was highly successful, both for native speakers of English (NES) and non-native speakers of English (NNES). This success is ultimately measured in student outcomes, but can be summarized here as having provided the students meaningful opportunities to use English. This means that it was used as a mediating tool to complete a complex task, or, in short, the students could not complete the collaborative task without one another and without communicating in English. This increased the authenticity of the language use, increased student motivation because they have a real reason to use the language, and allowed for negotiation of meaning and comprehensible input and output (Long, 1996; Long, 2015; Swain, 2000; Dörnyei, 1994). Furthermore, by doing it long-distance through tele-collaboration, it gives students practical use with meaningful technology as well as facilitating intercultural exchange and cooperation. This article examines the project from two students’ perspectives and explains the project in practical and generalizable ways to make it more readily applicable to teachers’ classrooms in both ESL and EFL contexts.

The Project

The project functionally lasted an entire 15-week fall semester, though the students did not meet their tele-collaborative teammates until the fifth week, making the collaborative portion of the project only nine weeks. The desired outcome of the project was for each team, consisting of both UIUC and UAB students, to create curriculum and class materials for a teachers to use in integrating a tele-collaborative project in their classrooms. This project was guided by instructions on what should be accomplished in each week’s meeting as well as private self and peer evaluation.

Several weeks before the project meetings began, the students at both locations created introductory videos and uploaded them to Youtube (the writers' introductory videos: 1 and 2). This activity was intended to reduce students’ affective filters, giving them a low-risk, rehearsed, and revisable opportunity to introduce themselves in their L2 before being placed in spontaneous, unrehearsed, potentially nerve-wracking conversation.

However, not everything in a project of this nature can be rehearsed, and some direct communication in English between peers of different L1’s must occur for progress to be made on the tangible student outcomes of the collaboration (the project) and the more intangible outcomes of improved English proficiency, intercultural competence, and technological prowess. For this, the students needed to decide what tasks were best conducted synchronously and which were best conducted asynchronously, though for younger students, this decision could be easily guided or mandated by the cooperating teachers.

For synchronous tasks, the groups used either Skype or Google Hangouts to conduct videoconferences, share written work, discuss elements of the project, make group decisions, and develop intercultural friendships. Jon Bair’s group because of its familiarity preferred Skype for all of the group members, while John Lee’s group used Google Hangouts, which is built into Gmail, an email service all of his group members used. Despite some superficial and underlying technological differences of how the two services work, they both offer the same tools that are critical for successful tele-collaborative projects, such as audio and/or videoconferencing for multiple students in multiple locations (potentially the minimum required), instant messaging, file transfers, and hyperlink sharing. Though these familiar tools have their own pros and cons, they both work to facilitate one call for whole group meetings, the main purpose we needed them for in our project.

To do asynchronous collaboration, both groups used Google Drive (Google Docs) to create documents similar to Microsoft Word documents that are hosted online and can be edited by any or all of the group members at any time, including all at the same time. One way that groups would use this is by having one person lead the writing while another follows a few sentences behind fixing grammatical errors. Different pairs in different sections of the document can reproduce this.

Perspectives and Applications

Of the many things written on tele-collaborative projects, much less has been written from the perspective of the student. However, from our perspectives as a native speaker of English and as a non-native speaker of English, and both professional teachers, we believe our points of view are unique and valuable to ensuring that tele-collaborative projects are as highly effective in-classrooms as possible.

NES Perspective

As a NES, I found the project to be compelling and challenging in the role that I assumed due to my perceived status by the rest of my group, which was made up of only NNES’s. In some ways, I started as the group leader, due to my comfort using the language, yet was weaned off of group leadership as NNES group mates were successively chosen to pick up the mantle of leadership. Additionally, I was put into a teaching role, which increased my own metalinguistic awareness and understanding of my own language. As a teacher of ESL, this comes somewhat naturally, but for our native speaking students, this is a huge opportunity for them to get to know the underlying semantic and syntactic structures of their language. Unfortunately, ESL/EFL pre- and in-service teachers conducted this project, so it was less of a language exchange or challenge to use English, but it was a cross-cultural, collaborative experience. However, it would be both even more fun and challenging in a less English-focused iteration of the project, such as a time when there are no NES of English and the students are L1 speakers of different languages, using English as a lingua franca.

NNES PERSPECTIVE

As a NNES, I had several interesting observations and experiences. My group originally consisted of seven members (UIUC- one American and one Korean; UAB- five Spanish), and the American student acted in a leading role. He called everyone’s name, asked questions, made jokes, and shifted topics whereas the rest of the members responded to his questions or suggestions. It was after three weeks when something interesting happened in our group. Due to personal reasons, he had to drop the course, and consequently leave our group. What was intriguing and even surprising was that Spanish students including myself suddenly became very talkative. Oftentimes, our “one-hour” online meeting lasted for around 90 minutes and even up to two hours. From a SLA perspective, it was a positive phenomenon that non-native speakers had more opportunities to hear and use the target language. Therefore, it can be inferred that non-native speaking students became more open and relieved linguistically and psychologically in the absence of NES in that varieties of Spanish English and Korean English are more acknowledged. When a NES was in our group, the NNES consciously and unconsciously strove to use and resemble one particular English variety – American English. Without NES, NNES as the owners of our Englishes shifted our focus more on the content than on the language itself.

Prompting Questions for Application

As you consider this example of a successful tele-collaborative project, reflect on these following questions to aid in brainstorming a tele-collaborative project in your classroom and in that of a cooperating teacher:

1. Use Melinda Dooly’s “School Bus Metaphor” to guide you:
   
   a. Where are the students coming from (prior knowledge/current abilities)?
   b. Where are they going (objectives/outcomes)?
   c. How are they going to get there?
   d. How will you know when they have arrived (assessment)?
   
   
2. How can you further accommodate for your students and their specific needs as you plan your project?
   
   
3. How can you give students who desire more planning time as opposed to pure, unrehearsed conversation or lower-level learners opportunities to prepare themselves to interact and collaborate?
   
   
4. As you are planning, what activities or tasks would be best conducted synchronously and which would be best conducted asynchronously?

References

Dörnyei, Z. (1994). Motivation and motivating in the foreign language classroom. The modern language journal 78(3), 273-284.

Long, M. (2015). Second language acquisition and task-based language teaching. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Swain, M. (2000). The output hypothesis and beyond: Mediating acquisition through collaborative dialogue. In J.P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 97-114). New York: Oxford University Press.

NOTE: This article has not been copy edited due to its length.

Jon Bair is an MA-TESL student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is interested in teacher training, project-based learning, tele-collaborative learning, and improving education in the developing world.

Ju Seong (John) Lee is a doctoral student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include World Englishes, Technology-integrated Learning in Second/Foreign Language Classroom (via Videoconference, Tele-collaboration, Wearable devices), Self-directed Teacher Professional Development (TPD).