2. Changing perceptions of online intercultural exchange

To begin, I'd like to review what has generally been understood under the umbrella term ‘online intercultural exchange’. Traditionally, online intercultural exchange projects in foreign language education have involved the use of (text-based) online communication tools to bring together classes of language learners in different countries to learn the others’ language and culture. Also referred to as telecollaboration (Belz Reference Belz2003; O'Dowd & Ritter Reference O'Dowd and Ritter2006), Internet-mediated Intercultural Foreign Language Education (Belz & Thorne Reference Belz and Thorne2006) and in France as EIEGL (Échanges Interculturels Exolingues en Groupe en Lingue; Audras & Chanier Reference Audras and Chanier2008), online intercultural exchange has traditionally taken one of two forms or models during the first two decades of its existence – firstly, the e-tandem model and, secondly, what I usually refer to as the blended intercultural model. In the e-tandem model (O'Rourke Reference O'Rourke2007), two native speakers of different languages communicate together with the aim of learning the other's language. These exchanges are based on the principles of autonomy and reciprocity, and the responsibility for a successful exchange rests mainly with the learner. In these exchanges, learners are expected to provide feedback on their partners’ content and on their foreign language performance. In this sense, tandem partners in many ways take on the role of peer-tutors who correct their partners’ errors and propose alternative formulations in the target language. Communication can be in synchronous modes (e.g. via chat or online telephony) or asynchronous modes (e.g. via e-mail or wiki) and is intended to be 50% in the target language and 50% in the mother tongue, thereby providing each partner with an opportunity to practise their target language and, at the same time, to provide their partner with authentic input in their target language.

The following extract from a message written by an American student to her Spanish partner is a typical example of an e-tandem message:

The role of the tutor or class teacher in the e-tandem model is usually minimal as learners are encouraged to take on responsibility for finding their own themes for discussion and correcting their partners’ errors. However, there are published reports of e-tandem exchanges which have taken place within a class structure and where the teachers have played a role in structuring how the exchange would be run and actually integrated the exchanges into their classes (Kötter Reference Kötter2003; O'Rourke Reference O'Rourke2005).

A second model of online intercultural exchange goes to much greater lengths to integrate the online interaction completely into the students’ language programmes and could be described as Blended Intercultural Telecollaboration. This model involves international class-to-class partnerships in which projects and tasks are developed by the partner teachers in the collaborating institutions. Generally, the exchange is strongly integrated into the students’ contact classes where online interaction and publications are prepared, analysed and reflected upon with the guidance of the teacher. The emphasis of these exchanges is on both developing cultural awareness and other aspects of intercultural communicative competence as well as linguistic competence. For this reason, common activities include collaborative research projects comparing both cultures and the analysis of ‘parallel cultural texts’. For example, French and American students are often engaged in comparative studies of the film Three men and a baby with French original (Furstenberg et al. Reference Furstenberg, Levet, English and Maillet2001). Other activities include creating online texts or videos presenting one's home culture to the partner class (see O'Dowd Reference O'Dowd2005), or co-authoring bilingual essays with members of the partner class (see Belz Reference Belz2003).

In general, the tasks involved in Blended Intercultural Telecollaboration fall into one of three main categories which are described in considerable detail in O'Dowd & Ware (Reference O'Dowd and Ware2008). The first category, Information Exchange Tasks, involves learners providing their telecollaborative partners with information about their personal biographies or aspects of their home cultures. The second task type, Comparison and Analysis Tasks, are usually more demanding as they require learners to exchange information but also 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). Finally, Collaborative Tasks require learners not only to exchange and compare information but also to work together to produce a joint product or conclusion. This may come in the form of an essay or presentation or it may involve co-producing a linguistic translation or cultural adaptation of a text from the L1 or home culture to L2 or target culture.

Recent years have seen a third ‘generation’ or model of telecollaborative exchanges emerging, which reflects in many ways a more flexible and adaptable interpretation of how online intercultural interaction and exchange can take place in foreign language learning contexts. Described by Guth & Helm (in press) as Telecollaboration 2.0, this model focuses not only on the development of learners’ linguistic and intercultural competence but also on developing the electronic literacies necessary to learn and work in today's information society (see Guth & Helm in press; Lankshear & Knobel Reference Lankshear and Knobel2006). This emerging approach to online exchange allows for a much greater spectrum of possible partners, language set-ups and forms of interaction. For example, learners may collaborate not only with other classes of foreign language learners, but also with trainee-teachers, students of Anthropology, Communication Studies or Culture Studies (O'Dowd Reference O'Dowd2006) or indeed with native speakers who are not involved in education at all (Hanna & de Nooy Reference Hanna and de Nooy2009). Learners may also be engaged, not in bilateral exchanges, but it more complex multilateral group set-ups which involve, for example, language learners from three countries (TRIDEM exchanges; Hauck Reference Hauck2007) or groups of trainee-teachers from four different countries. In these new exchange set-ups, language use is not necessarily bilingual, but can involve the use of a lingua franca (e.g. German and Spanish students using English) or can be multilingual (e.g. language mixing of Romance languages). Finally, as these exchanges now exploit the Web 2.0 tools available to them, online interaction can be much more multimodal in nature than before, involving communication through combinations of text, voice, photos, videos and other formats. The overall image presented by many telecollaborative projects in recent times is that of a much more flexible set-up which is less tied to a text-based interaction and which no longer reifies the native-speaker model as the goal of foreign language learning. This emerging model also requires learners to assume greater responsibility for how their intercultural learning progresses online by giving them greater freedom in their choice of potential intercultural learning partners and communicative tools. Thorne (in press: 6) describes this form of telecollaborative learning as ‘intercultural communication in the wild’ and speculates that while this may be less-controllable from the teachers’ point of view, the opportunities which it offers for intercultural learning are very compelling.

Incarnations of all three telecollaborative models have been used extensively in foreign language education programmes over the past two decades and the analysis of the outcomes of online foreign language interaction and exchange has been presented in special editions of the journal Language Learning & Technology (e.g., 7.2, 2003) as well as in various other edited collections specifically dedicated to the area such as Belz & Thorne (Reference Belz and Thorne2006); O'Dowd (Reference O'Dowd2007); Dooly (Reference Dooly2008) and Guth & Helm (in press). Much of my own work in this area has highlighted the difficulties and limitations of attempting to develop learners’ target language proficiency and intercultural competence though online interaction (O'Dowd Reference O'Dowd2006; O'Dowd & Ritter Reference O'Dowd and Ritter2006); however, I would argue that this activity has made some very important contributions to foreign language education. I will now look briefly at what I consider these contributions to have been but also at what have been the principal criticisms of telecollaborative practices.

Firstly, I would argue that engaging learners in online intercultural exchange has played an important role in supporting the shift taking place in foreign language education from an understanding of foreign language learning as being the development of communicative competence to the development of intercultural communicative competence (Byram Reference Byram1997) with its emphasis on intercultural negotiation skills and an understanding of the role of differing cultural perspectives in intercultural communication. This shift is reflected in the importance attributed to intercultural skills and sociocultural knowledge in the Council of Europe's (2001) Common European Framework of Reference for Foreign Languages and its European Language Portfolio (Little & Simpson Reference Little and Simpson2003). There has been a significant body of research published on the themes of intercultural communication, intercultural miscommunication and the development of intercultural competence in online exchange (for some representative examples see Belz Reference Belz2003; Ware & Kramsch Reference Ware and Kramsch2005; Thorne in press), and I would agree with Thorne when he suggests that this body of research has helped to underline the important role of culture in learning a foreign language and to enhance our understanding of what intercultural skills and attitudes are required by speakers of foreign languages:

A second major contribution of telecollaboration has been the manner in which it has served to increase the level of authenticity in classroom practices and content. When telecollaborative exchanges are integrated into their classes, they allow teachers to use the ‘texts’ of the partner classes as a source of authentic use of the target language and to be thereby less dependent on textbooks as the source of language input. Educators who have developed the Cultura exchange set-up have reported in detail how they use the written texts from their partner classes as the basis for discussion in their classes (Furstenberg et al. Reference Furstenberg, Levet, English and Maillet2001), while Belz & Vyatkina (Reference Belz and Vyatkina2005) described how they created a corpus for grammar analysis based on the correspondence which their American students had received from their distant partners in Germany.

Thirdly, online exchange has also facilitated a greater connection between ‘classroom’ and ‘fieldwork’ in foreign language education as learners are now able to engage in ‘semi-authentic’ interaction with members of the target culture while still benefiting from the guidance and support of their tutors and classmates. While extensive periods of study abroad in the target culture continue to be seen as the ideal way to develop linguistic fluency in foreign language learners, online intercultural exchange is now increasingly being considered as an important tool for preparing students for study abroad as it allows them to experience intensive interaction with members of the target culture from the relative ‘safety’ of their own classroom. The European Commission's recent Green Paper on promoting the learning mobility of young people refers to online exchange as a tool for preparing physical mobility or as a second-best alternative for those students and young people who are unable to engage in traditional mobility programmes (European Commission 2009: 18). Various projects and initiatives are currently exploring how this form of virtual mobility can be integrated with physical mobility (see Culhane Reference Culhane2006 and the Mobi-blog project http://mobi-blog.eu/ for two examples of these initiatives). An example of this approach from my own work is the Spanish–American Cultura exchange. This virtual exchange project combines phases of online and physical student mobility for Spanish and American foreign language students. A class of students of English as a Foreign Language at the University of León, Spain, spend three months of their classes in intense virtual contact with a class of Spanish as a Foreign Language students at Barnard College, New York, using an online platform. During these three months, students in both classes make multimedia presentations and videos about their home town and university for their partner class and carry out various online tasks together which require the analysis of documents from both cultures and intensive discussion in text-based discussion forums. Following that, in the second stage of the project, students from Barnard travel to León and take part in student life in the Spanish city for two weeks. They participate in classes in the English department as language and cultural assistants and they carry out research for ethnographic projects and interview the families and classmates of their Spanish partners. When the American group return to Barnard, it is the turn of the Spanish class a group of five or six students to spend a two-week period studying at Barnard college. Here again the students take part in various classes in the Spanish department, they carry out research on-campus and maintain their classmates in León up to date with their experiences by maintaining a daily blog in English. In the third phase of the project, students update the project's virtual platform with the reports of their ethnographic projects carried out in the target culture, digital photos of their trips with commentaries as well as essays and other materials related to the exchange. This final phase of the project involves a reflection of the periods in the target culture and students continue their online interaction, discussing each others’ projects and experiences.

In this example, we can see where virtual and physical academic mobility can be integrated in a coherent educational experience. It is also notable that the content of the classes is based principally on the exchange itself. Spanish students watch videos and analyse texts written in English by their American partners, while the American students use the content created by their Spanish partners to improve their Spanish.

Despite these significant contributions to foreign language education, there has been a growing level of criticism of traditional approaches to telecollaboration in recent years in the literature and in the classroom, and I will present these criticisms here briefly. Firstly, many educators have highlighted the organisational complexity of these exchanges and the difficulties which many teachers find in trying to dedicate time to the organisation of an exchange while attending to their other duties and obligations. Warschauer & Ware (Reference Warschauer, Ware, Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear and Leu2008: 231), for example, suggest that the type of learning which telecollaboration involves can often be at odds with the institutional demands within which teachers are working:

This is a justified complaint, especially when online exchanges are seen as ‘extra’ activities which don't form part of the official study programmes or assessment criteria for courses. I'll be returning to this point in some more detail in the next section.

Secondly, although the emphasis in online exchange is often on the development of intercultural awareness, many teachers have found that engaging learners in short periods of virtual contact with members of other cultures can actually have more negative than positive consequences on students’ intercultural learning. I present here a case in point from one of my own Spanish–American exchanges. At the end of the exchange, one of my Spanish students submitted an essay based on five-months intensive interaction with her American partner. The essay began with the following:

This is perhaps a rather extreme example, but Kern (Reference Kern2000: 256) points out that instead of supporting intercultural understanding, ‘we find here [in online exchanges] that exposure and awareness of difference seem to reinforce, rather than bridge, feelings of difference’. The literature is full of examples of this (Kramsch & Thorne Reference Kramsch, Thorne, Block and Cameron2002; Belz Reference Belz2003; Ware Reference Ware2005; O'Dowd & Ritter Reference O'Dowd and Ritter2006), and it suggests that the breakdown of online intercultural exchanges has been due to a complex array of factors related to the sociocultural contexts in which the students are operating, the organisation and structure of the exchange, and the register and content of the interaction which takes place between the groups in the online environments. Elsewhere (O'Dowd & Ritter Reference O'Dowd and Ritter2006) I have argued that it is over-simplistic to blame one single factor to explain an exchange's lack of success as reasons usually include a combination of interconnected factors from different areas. Furthermore, the question is whether these examples of intercultural misunderstanding and communication breakdown should be seen as something negative for the learning process or rather as ‘jump-off’ points for exploring in class why members of different cultures interpret behaviour differently see and how different cultural perspectives can be reconciled. Belz (Reference Belz2002: 76) goes so far as to argue that ‘the clash of cultural faultlines in telecollaborative learning communities such as the one under study should not be smoothed over or avoided based on the sometimes negative results of a study such as this one; indeed, they should be encouraged’.

There are two further lines of criticism which are worthy of mention here although I cannot now go into them in great detail here due to limitations of space but which are nevertheless worthy of a brief mention as I believe they should be themes for further debate in the literature on this area. Firstly, there has been a growing criticism of the underlying belief in the research on online intercultural exchange that members of different cultures use different genres and cultural communication styles in their online intercultural interactions and that it is this ‘clash of genres’ which often leads to dysfunctional exchanges. Kramsch & Thorne (Reference Kramsch, Thorne, Block and Cameron2002: 99), for example, describe the breakdown in communication which occurred between classes of French and American students as ‘two local genres engaged in global confrontation’. However, Goodfellow & Lamy (Reference Goodfellow, Lamy, Goodfellow and Lamy2009: 6), for example, warn that ‘the assumption that a coherent “genre” or “style” is characteristic of national cohorts is rarely interrogated’. In other words, the authors question whether it is possible to speak about something which can be called ‘French communicative style’ and whether it is not a little over-simplistic to describe one monolithic cultural communicative style clashing or causing misunderstandings with another. I would suggest that the truth lies somewhere half-way between the one position that culture determines how people communicate and the other that suggests it is incorrect to say that members of a particular nationality exhibit a common communicative genre or style in online communication. Cultural differences in online communicative style have been clearly identified in Belz (Reference Belz2002) and elsewhere but, as I have already mentioned, this should be seen as just one of an interconnected number of reasons why online intercultural communication can break down.

Finally, there is also the question of the level of authenticity in class to class partnerships. While I highlighted earlier the pedagogical value of bringing ‘authentic’ texts written by native speakers into the classroom, the authors Hanna & de Nooy (Reference Hanna and de Nooy2009: 88) have pointed out that in class-to-class telecollaboration, ‘[i]nteraction is restricted to communication with other learners, a situation that is safe and reassuring for beginners and younger learners, but somewhat limiting for more advanced and adult learners, who need practice in venturing beyond the classroom’. The authors propose that it is more authentic and more advantageous to engage learners in interaction in authentic L2 discussion forums such as those related to L2 newspaper and magazine publications. For example, they report on studies of their own learners of French as a foreign language who participated in the discussion forums of French magazines such as Nouvel Observateur. New Web 2.0 models of online exchange may go some way to dealing with this lack of authenticity in telecollaboration, but I would argue that there will continue to be an important role for class-to-class partnerships and that the type of interaction and language generated in such projects can be just as enriching and pedagogically powerful as that which appears in public forums. The fact that learners in class-to-class exchanges have the opportunity to get to know their distant partners may in fact mean that the quality of the communication between the interlocutors may be more honest and more detailed that the superficial style of interaction which is common to public message boards.

3. The challenge of normalisation

This brings me to what I currently consider the main challenge for online intercultural exchange in foreign language education. After having studied this area in some detail for many years (O'Dowd Reference O'Dowd2006, Reference O'Dowd2007; O'Dowd & Ritter Reference O'Dowd and Ritter2006) I am concerned that telecollaboration continues to be seen as an ‘add-on’ activity which essentially depends on ‘pioneering’ teachers and highly motivated students and is not considered an integrated or ‘normalised’ part of study programmes and syllabi at university level. What do I mean by ‘normalised’ in this context? Stephen Bax (Reference Bax2003: 23) defines the normalisation of Computer Assisted Language Learning in the following way:

My belief is that if online intercultural exchanges are to continue to make a contribution to how foreign languages are being learned around Europe and elsewhere, they need to be seen as an integral part of classroom activity and language programmes which can be organised and carried out with relative ease. This will mean moving away from their representation as an ‘extra’ or supplementary activity and it will also require that there is a considerable reduction in the unfounded expectations that they will have exaggerated transformative effects on students’ linguistic skills and intercultural awareness.

In order to establish to what extent telecollaboration is becoming ‘normalised’ in university level foreign language education around Europe, I recently carried out a survey of university level language instructors who had used online exchanges in their classes and carried out a series of asynchronous interviews with these instructors via email over a two-month period. Participants answered an opening set of questions and then, when deemed appropriate, were asked to expand on their answers and provide examples of what they meant in further email correspondence. This protocol was based on the factors in the normalisation of online technologies in foreign language education by Chambers & Bax (Reference Chambers and Bax2006). The main questions put to the participants were the following:

1. 1. Does your institution provide easy access to up-to-date computer laboratories or provide online technologies (e.g. laptop + beamer, interactive whiteboards) in your standard classrooms?

2. 2. Does your institution provide sufficient technical support and back-up for using online activities in classes?

3. 3. Does your institution provide pedagogical and technical training for staff members in how to use online activities (such as online intercultural exchange) in classes?

4. 4. Are participation in online intercultural exchange projects and the development of online literacies explicitly mentioned in course syllabi in your institution?

5. 5. In general, do you feel that your teaching colleagues consider online intercultural interaction and exchange as important and relevant activities for your students? What are their reactions to you engaging your students in online exchange?

6. 6. Do you find that your students find online interaction and exchange as relevant and important for their learning?

7. 7. What aspects of your students’ online activity do you assess when they take part in online exchanges?

8. 8. Finally, what weight do online exchanges carry in the overall assessment of the course?

The interviews were carried out with 73 foreign language instructors working at university institutions around Europe who had carried out online intercultural exchanges. Analysis of the collected data is still ongoing but at the moment the following points appear to be generally representative of the state of online exchange in foreign language programmes around Europe and confirm my fears that online intercultural exchange is very much an ‘added extra’ to foreign language courses which is carried out by a motivated few.

Firstly, it appears that while instructors have good levels of access to online technologies in their classrooms and receive sufficient technical support for the use of technology, there is very little ‘pedagogical support’ available for colleagues who are interested in learning about telecollaboration and how such activities can be integrated into their classes. One respondent commented that ‘the training addresses technical issues rather than pedagogical issues’, while another explained that ‘[w]e have a tech support person but he is strictly with us for hardware problems or internal network problems’. I think this finding is quite significant because it suggests that universities risk being equipped with high-tech classrooms but lacking teachers who are sufficiently trained in the pedagogy of online foreign language learning.

Secondly, many respondents observed that while their colleagues saw online intercultural exchange as generally something positive, very few demonstrated any interest in getting involved themselves. This appears to be for a variety of reasons. Firstly, one informant suggested that this was due to the amount of work organising an exchange can involve: ‘the cost–benefit ratio is negative for them [my colleagues]. In other words, they realise these exchanges are relevant for the students but it takes too much effort to organise it and I think they wouldn't introduce it in their teaching’. Another informant explained that his colleagues were adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach: ‘I think it's seen by language teaching staff as peripheral or a novelty, pending evidence that it's effective’, while a third suggested that ‘there is still a wariness about the variability that occurs with interpersonal intercultural exchanges’. Due to this reticence among many foreign language educators, it appears that telecollaboration remains the reserve of highly motivated pioneer teachers who are particularly convinced of the benefits of this activity and who are probably engaged in research related to its outcomes.

Many of the respondents also explained that it was very difficult to integrate exchanges into their syllabi due to the lack of reliability of international partners. As they were unsure whether they would have a particular partner class the following year, they were unwilling to mention the exchange in their programmes and to award significant amounts of marks or credit for participation in the exchange. Some representative comments reflecting this problem can be seen here:

One more finding which is emerging from the data is that there is a serious lack of clarity about how telecollaborative exchanges should be evaluated and how credit can be awarded to students for participating in online exchange. In general, it would appear that a very small amount of students’ final grade is awarded for participating in online exchanges. One respondent commented that ‘in the recent two exchanges . . . we've only had a tiny fraction of their mark available to us. It was given basically on commitment and participation’, while another reported that ‘the students only get informal feedback, no grades’. In my opinion this can have very problematic consequences for the normalisation of this activity. If students do not receive sufficient recognition in the form of marks or course credit then it will be difficult to motivate them to participate and invest time and effort in carrying our projects with their distant peers. I think it is vital that if telecollaboration is to become an integrated and a ‘normalised’ part of foreign language education, then the value of this work needs to be reflected in course evaluation.