Introduction

This chapter will describe the design and outcomes of two online collaborative-learning communities, or ‘language Cafés’, developed by instructors from Chinese and Russian Language Flagship Programs in cooperation with the National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. These Cafés offered American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL)-Advanced (Appendix A) learners and native speakers of Chinese and Russian opportunities to correspond with each other about their respective cultures in the target language (TL) of the Flagship programs, to make observations and request clarifications about each other’s posts and to compare authentic media and print materials through guided discussions in the TL. The chief objective of the Café project since its inception in 2011 and throughout its development in subsequent years was to prepare US students of Chinese and Russian for direct enrollment at overseas Flagship institutions by increasing their ability to perceive, understand, tolerate and appreciate cultural differences through discovery processes facilitated in an online environment. The need for increasing students’ cultural competency was born out of decades of research on the role of cultural knowledge in second language (L2) learning (Lange & Paige, 2003).

This chapter begins by describing the use of online technology for language learning and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Cultura Project (Furstenberg & Levet, 2014; Furstenberg et al., 2001), an innovative model for enhancing deep understanding of TL cultures, which served as the inspiration for the Chinese and Russian online Cafés. The chapter then traces the development of the Chinese and Russian Cafés and describes the ways the development teams modified the Cultura model to align it with the proficiency goals of ACTFL Advanced-level language courses in the domestic Chinese and Russian

Flagship Programs. Finally, this chapter provides examples of cultural prompts and learners' responses, as well as preliminary evaluations of the effectiveness of the Cafés in promoting cultural understanding and communication in the TL.