Blog Post #12: Telecollaboration

Ware and Kramsch, 2005. Toward an Intercultural Stance: Teaching German and English through Telecollaboration.



This week's article discussed online communication between language students from two different countries. It discussed a misunderstanding that occurred between two students. This misunderstanding highlights how important culture learning is when learning a language, and how much language is wrapped up in culture. The article argues that teacher involvement in helping students learn about culture through online communication is crucial.
I couldn't help but think that video chatting, instead of merely written chat, could have helped avoid the misunderstanding in the article. Paralinguistic competence is a very important part of communication,and helps in the negotiation of meaning. Video conferencing would allow students to practice these skills.

Meebo, the video conferencing tool we explored in class, would be a great way to practice these skills. Meebo is fairly easy to use, although it would be important for a teacher to model the technology and then provide opportunity for students to practice using it together. It might be interesting, and hopefully useful, to design an activity for students to communicate cross-culturally with another class by means of written chat, and then design an activity where these students communicate by video chat, and then have the class notice the differences between the two means of communication.