Friday, March 28
1:00
Optional: Buffet Lunch preceding at 12:00 (please register in advance)
206 Ingraham Hall, Observatory Road

Title: Internet-Mediated Intercultural Learning: Accounts from France, Germany and the United States

Presenters: Julie A. Belz (Penn State) and Steven L. Thorne (Penn State)

What are the affordances and constraints of intercultural communication for foreign language development in institutionalized settings? How is culture enacted and negotiated in computer-mediated contexts? How are activity type, communicative modality, and the practice of identity construction related to acquisition? What types of linguistic and intercultural competencies do students experience in such communities?

These are a few of the questions that confront late-modern language educators.

This presentation provides a state-of-the-art overview of telecollaborative foreign language learning. Telecollaboration builds on the premise that intercultural communication is central to the agenda of foreign language education. In its essence, this approach involves parallel language classes in different countries using Internet-based technologies for communication and task-based collaboration. The underlying rationale is to provide each of the partner classes with access to and engagement with a community of students who are native speakers of the "foreign" language being studied. That the Internet can now be used to facilitate direct interaction with native speaker age-peers over much of world holds great potential for at-home foreign language students. A number of critical research and pedagogical issues arise, however. These include 1) developing a better understanding of the complex relationships that exist between institutional context, Internet communication tools, and types of communicative interaction, 2) assessing the linguistic, communicative, and cultural outcomes of intercultural relationship building, and 3) creating new and more productive forms of intercultural collaboration that best serve foreign language learning.

In an effort to describe both quantitative and qualitative features of telecollaborative foreign language study, we will present a number of research results and their implications for language learning and teaching which are drawn primarily from the Penn State Foreign Language Telecollaboration Project (2000-2002), a cross-linguistic, longitudinal investigation funded by the US Department of Education. These include:

· Development of pragmatic competence in German and French
· Mediation and the relationships between communication tools and interactional dynamics (French data)
· Teachers as intercultural learners in TC contexts (German-American partnership)
· Quantitative analyses of pre-test/post-test data (Spanish: tense and aspect, clitics, object pronouns; French: aspect)

In our conclusion we will address the broad issues of scalability, pedagogical innovations, the development of intercultural competence, and socio-institutional constraints on telecollaborative outcomes.