Robert O'Dowd

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A Concrete Example of Blended Learning in VOLL
Online Collaboration and Exchange

• Robert O'Dowd
• The University of León,
• Spain
• ECML, Graz 25.02.2009
• robert.odowd_at_unileon.es
• http//www3.unileon.es/personal/wwdfmrod/

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Development of Communicative Proficiency
Development of Learner Autonomy
The Aims of Blended Learning in VOLL Contexts
Development of Intercultural Communicative
Competence
Development of New Online Literacies
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• it is no surprise that language teachers and
  learners are having difficulties trying to find
  the right balance between the many competing
  elements that authors and commentators argue are
  important in responding to the needs and goals of
  the contemporary language learner (Levy and
  Stockwell, 200677).

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What is Telecollaboration?

• In telecollaboration, language learners in
  different locations use on-line communication
  tools (such as e-mail, blogs and social networks)
  in order to engage in collaborative project work,
  debate and intercultural exchange with each
  other.
• Why? On-line interaction with distant partners
  when organised within a structured format - has
  great potential for the development of
  intercultural communicative skills, language
  awareness and learner independence.

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Issues when Designing Telecollaborative Projects

• How to combine the L1 and L2?
• Which online communication tools to use?
• What should the students do/discuss together?
  Task Design
• Should there be an explicit focus on form?
• What should be the role of the teacher?
• How should telecollaboration be assessed?
• What are the new online literacies which learners
  need in this learning context?

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1) How to combine the L1 and L2?

• The Tandem Approach this entails that each
  partner should communicate as closely as possible
  to half in his/her mother tongue and half in
  his/her target language. This grants both
  learners the opportunity to practise speaking and
  writing in their target language and listening to
  and reading text written by their native speaking
  partner.
• http//www.slf.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/etandem/etindex-
  en.html

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• Hey Pablo!It was great to receive your letter. I
  was so happy to see that you responded to my
  questions. Thank you. Your responses were very
  informative and definitely showed me that family
  life in Spain was not all I'd expected it to be
  (I was surprised, for example, that your family
  is not religious. I assumed that most families in
  Spain are, and I'm sure you have many assumptions
  about life in America as well).
• Your English is very good. There are only a few
  suggestions that I have to correct it. Some of
  your sentences are too long, and would make more
  sense if you separated them into two or three
  sentences instead. For example, "My parents are
  not divorced in Spain there are very few cases of
  divorced" could be rewritten as "My parents are
  not divorced. In Spain there are very few cases
  of divorce." Your letter was great and made sense
  despite these things. Good work. Las fiestas en
  the ciudad de Nueva York son muy locas y
  emocionantes. Voy a las discotecas con mis amigas
  los jueves, los viernes, o los sabados. Vamos a
  los bars tambien. Nosotros volvemos a nos salons
  de dormitorio a las cuatro de la manana. Queremos
  bailar a las discotecas. Necesita tener veintiuno
  anos por beber el alcohol pero la mayoria de
  estudiantes en las universidades tenen los "fake
  IDs" y ellos beben el alcohol. No sabo mucho
  de Espana. Sabo que hay un museo de Guggenheim en
  Bilbao y sabo que hay muchos castillos bonitos.
  Que sabes de los Estados Unidos? Como es la
  fiesta en Espana? Elena

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• The Cultura Approach
• To have students write in the forums in their
  "native" language was also a deliberate choice.
  We wanted to make sure that students were able to
  express their thoughts in all their complexity as
  fully and as naturally as possiblewhat students
  may "lose", by not writing in the target
  language, is largely offset by the gains they
  make by getting access to a rich, dynamic and
  totally authentic language.
• http//web.mit.edu/french/culturaNEH/

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Which Online Communication Tools to use?

• In your opinion, what are the different
  advantages to an online exchange offered by the
  following tools?
• Asynchronous v. Synchronous tools?
• E.G. E-mail Message boards v. Messenger Chat
• Oral v. Text-based tools?
• E.G. Skype, Wimba Videoconferencing v. All above
• Web 2.0 v. Traditional tools?
• E.G. Blogs, podcasts wikis V. All above

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Understanding Technology in Context

• Successful implementation of CMCdepends on
  having clear pedagogical objectives in mind,
  knowledge of the technical options and an
  awareness of the needs, goals, and skills of the
  learners (Levy and Stockwell, 2006 107)
• Spanish student feedback comparing oral and
  written discussion boards
• I prefer the written one because you dont get
  so nervous and you have more time to think about
  what you want to say. Also I did not like to
  speak in the computer lab with my classmates
  listening to what I was saying.
• Its easier to understand them in the written
  forum because its very difficult to speak with
  someone that you dont see.

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• Telecollaborative Tasks (Type 1) Information
  Exchange Tasks
• Provide partners with information about their
  personal biographies, towns, work or aspects of
  their home cultures.
• Telecollaborative Tasks (Type 2) Comparison and
  Analysis Tasks
• Require learners to go a step further and carry
  out comparisons or critical analyses of cultural
  products from both cultures (e.g. books, surveys,
  films, newspaper articles).
• Telecollaborative Tasks (Type 3) Collaborative
  Tasks
• Require learners to work together to produce a
  joint product or conclusion (e.g. an essay or
  presentation, a linguistic translation or
  cultural adaptation of a text).

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Issues when Designing Tasks

• Should tasks be chosen by the instructors and/or
  by the students themselves?
• Should task outcomes be more or less focussed in
  nature (i.e. do they require students to simply
  discuss a topic or to reach a specific outcome
  or conclusion at the end of the interaction)?

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E-mail from Alex (Tutor in Spain) to Susan (Tutor
in USA)

• Another worry is the first Spanish activity -
  students are being very general and vague about
  their choices and according to our timetable we
  have only one week left before moving on to task
  two. What can we expect students to do this week?
  Who should make the final decision as to what
  film/ad/ song they should discuss together? How
  much time will they have to then carry out this
  discussion? Do you share my worry about this? Or
  maybe I am being overly-teacherly about this and
  should just sit back and let the students work
  out all this for themselves...

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Reply from Susan to Alex

• As far as the students being very general and
  vague about the choice of Spanish activities, I
  would have to say that, in all honesty -  thats
  their problem. They know how telecollaboration
  functions and what impact it has on their grade.
  If they dont intend to take it seriously on
  their own, their grade will suffer. Although they
  might not learn a lot of Spanish from that, itll
  be a valuable lesson in other senses namely, I
  always tell my students that part of their
  academic experience is not only to learn about
  the subject matter, but also to learn
  responsibility, (self)discipline,
  time-management, collective awareness as well as
  many other concepts and principles on which the
  adult world operates. So, if my students don't
  grasp the subjunctive fully, but I manage to
  teach them some of the afore-mentioned principles
  - that satisfies me as a teacher as well.
  Ideally, I'd want to have them grasp both
  aspects, but that's not always possible

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Issues when Focussing on Form

• Students dont know how to correct their
  partners mistakes- How many English natives
  could explain the difference between practice
  and practise to a non-native Spanish speaker?
• A Spanish student after her exchange with an
  American partner Its ok but I think there is a
  bad point. That is that they are not teachers.
  They can make mistakes too. In the correction she
  sent me of firstly she didnt realise you can
  say this in British English.

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Some more Problems

• Difficulties correcting your partner
• I thought, I would seem arrogant if I tried to
  correct their grammar and their spelling in a
  casual conversation about the topics. When youre
  speaking to somebody, you dont expect them to
  correct you and it could actually insult them.
  Dana from the USA speaking about her Spanish
  partner
• Schwienhorst (2000) even though students were
  explicitly encouraged to correct their partners
  grammar errors, very little evidence of error
  correction appeared in the transcripts.
  Perception by students that tandem was primarily
  a communicative activity?

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What should be the Role of the Teacher?

• Two opposing approaches
• A teacher writes to partner teacher Do you
  think there is any need to monitor the
  discussions or just exchange e-mail addresses and
  let the students handle the rest? (E-mail to
  author, 2001)
• Another teacher writes to partner teacher
  On-line exchanges should be integrated into the
  regular classes in the way which the teacher
  finds most effective. When students are left to
  themselves they lose interest in the process
  fairly soon. As any other teaching/learning
  process, this should be well-planned, organized
  and controlled then it brings results.

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Should online interaction be read and shared in
class?

• Q Do you find it useful and interesting when we
  talk about the exchange in class? 
• A I think it might be necessary, just to keep it
  going. But on the other hand it seems
  uncomfortable to me that I would actually like to
  discuss (up to a certain degree) rather
  private, or non-superficial subjects, but my
  e-mails have to be forwarded to at least two
  people. And the content might be topic of our
  next meeting...
• But Zensur und Internet wollen nicht zueinander
  passen, aber E-mail Projekte sind keine
  Privatangelegenheit von Schülern, sondern Teil
  schulischer Arbeit (Donath, 1997264).

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How should the Exchange Activity be Assessed?

• What do we want to assess?
• Participation?
• Development in the L2?
• Electronic Literacies?
• Intercultural Competence (skills, attitudes,
  cultural awareness)?
• How should it be assessed?
• Proof of participation
• Products of interaction (essays, blogs, websites)
• Reflection on learning (portfolios, diaries)

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One Critical Perspective

• Look at the widespread practice of linking
  participation to assessment. You must contribute
  at least 5 messages in order to pass the course.
  Why would we need to say this, if we had an
  engaging and effective tool for interaction to
  offer them? (Goodfellow, 2007NP)

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Evaluating Affective or Sociable Online
Behaviour

• I look for to see if they have demonstrated
  social or intercultural competence, responding to
  people thoughtfully, expressing interesting
  ideas
• How much did they exchange and how well they do
  it . Did they push the envelope or did they stay
  with the tried and true (and trite)? Did someone
  share a personal experience (not touchy feely,
  but this happened to me when I was in a foreign
  country)

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Problems Evaluating Intercultural Competence

• An interview with Michael Byram
• Although I have written about assessment for the
  reasons that we all know, i.e. that what isnt
  tested isnt taught, nonetheless there are
  problematic aspects of assessment and we cant be
  sure what the answers are. Particularly about
  attitude. Assessing skills is OK, assessing
  knowledge is OK, assessing the ability to
  evaluate is OK, but not assessing values or
  attitudes. Thats where there are problems of a
  moral nature, as well as a technical nature.
• http//elt.britcoun.org.pl/elt/forum/byrint.htm

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What are the new literacies which learners
need in this learning context?

• Task The students from Spain should find a
  Spanish advertisement on youtube and publish it
  in their exchange blog. They should then develop
  an adaptation of the advert for the American
  market. You can change the content as well as the
  linguistic register so that the ad is appropriate
  for the other culture. The American partners
  should comment on the language, style, and
  cultural appropriateness of the new version and
  suggest changes. Both groups should agree on a
  final version of the adaptation which is
  agreeable to all group members.

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Electronic Literacy?Task Present a
representative picture of young Spaniards lives
to a group of American students of Spanish.
http//castanaspilongas.blogspot.com/
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Our work together

• During our time together I propose that we aim
  to
• Examine a categorisation of telecollaborative
  tasks (ODowd Ware, in press) and develop a set
  of tasks which are specifically suited to your
  VOLL contexts.
• Review existing models of 'new online literacies'
  for foreign language learners and draw up a list
  of literacies which reflect the needs and future
  aims and working contexts of VOLL students.
• Develop assessment rubrics and portfolio
  guidelines for online interaction and
  telecollaborative activity - taking into account
  intercultural and multimodal characteristics of
  these learning activities.

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Thank You!

• robert.odowd_at_unileon.es
• This presentation will be available at
• http//www3.unileon.es/personal/wwdfmrod/