Students’ Perceptions of Telecollaborative Communication Tools
3. Methodology 1 Research questions
1. Which tools do students prefer for communication within virtual exchanges?
2. What strengths and weaknesses do students perceive in the individual com- munication tools?
3.2 Instruments
To answer the research questions, a nine-week cross-cultural exchange between learners of German in the US and learners of English in Germany was established.
Several commonly used tools in virtual exchanges were selected for the exchange project and assigned to be used for different exchange tasks. After the 9 weeks of the virtual exchange a post-survey was distributed and students rated their en- joyment of using the different tools and commented on perceived strengths and weaknesses. For the purpose of this article, only the American students’ surveys were analyzed.
The post-survey included several sections, three of which were pertinent for this article. In section 1, students were asked to rate their enjoyment of the tools that were used in the exchange on a scale from 1–5 from did not enjoy it at all to
enjoyed it very much. The second section asked students to list the tools they had used to communicate with their exchange partner for the text-and voice-chats.
In the third section students were asked 6 open-ended questions about what they perceived to be strengths and weaknesses of the tools, what they liked best and least about each tool, which tool they liked best overall and which they would like to use in future virtual exchanges. Two multiple choice questions completed the survey. These two served to find out which tools students believed had contributed most and least to their learning of language and culture. The surveys were ana- lyzed quantitatively to report descriptive statistics. The answers to the open-ended questions were hand-coded by both researchers and categorized to identify what students perceived to be strengths and weaknesses of the tools.
3.3 Participants
The participants in the virtual exchange were students at a small private univer- sity in the USA and students at a public university in Germany. Three sections of third-semester German at a US university, in all 36 students, participated in the 9-week project. Complete data was only available for 29 (15 female, 14 male) of the US students whose responses were used for data analysis. The majority of these students, 24 of the 29, were between 18 and 20 years old. Two students were be- tween 21 and 23, and three were between 24 and 26. About half the students (48%) had spent time in a German-speaking country before the virtual exchange and 75% of the students had studied one or two other languages before or in addition to studying German. The students’ majors included biology, engineering, math, psychology, art history, computer science, political science, philosophy, English, film studies, and others. No student enrolled in a third-semester German class had majored in German or any other foreign language. The majority of students (22) listed English as their native language, while two listed Italian, and the other five listed Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Japanese, and Vietnamese as their respective native languages.
The participants at the German university were enrolled in a teacher training program and were taking a course on using digital media in school. A total of 35 German students participated, of which 29 were female and 6 were male. Their ages ranged from 20 to 50 years of age, one student was 50 years, six students were between 27 and 33, and 28 students were between 20 and 26 years old. Several of these students had been on vacation to the United States before but none of them had spent any long-term period in an English-speaking country. All German students were teacher candidates for primary or secondary school; three were
studying special-needs education and seven were studying to become English (EFL) teachers. All 35 participants listed German as their native language.
3.4 Description of project
The virtual exchange lasted 9 weeks and communication language was exclusively German. The project involved three 3rd semester German classes at a university in the US and one teacher-training class at a north eastern German university.
Students in both classes communicated with each other through email, text-chat, voice-chat, discussion forums, and video-conferences.
There were different objectives for both countries participating in the exchange.
For the US participants, the objectives were to a) provide students with an au- thentic opportunity to enhance their communicative competence in German by practicing the language with native speakers and b) to explore various tools for virtual exchanges to determine which ones are considered most suitable for language and cultural learning. For the German students who were enrolled in a teacher training program the overall aims were to c) present various possibilities of integrating new media tools in their future classrooms and d) to explore which tools are most suitable for communication within a virtual exchange.
The project concept was presented to the students at the beginning of the semester, at which time they were also informed of the requirements and goals, they were grouped for the discussion forum and matched with a tandem-partner for the chat activities.
3.5 Tools and tasks used in exchange
The virtual exchange employed email, text-chats, voice-chats, discussion forums, and videoconferences. Once students were matched with a partner from the other country, they used email to communicate with their tandem partner in order to set up their individual one-on-one text-and voice-chat meetings. Participants were required to conduct weekly text-and voice-chats in alternation on assigned topics with their tandem partner. The topics selected for the chats corresponded to the US curriculum and included, for example, discussions about present-day differences between former East and West Germany, current events, national identity, and cultural diversity. All tasks were open-ended topics about which students were expected to interact with each other in order to learn more about the target culture. Text-chats had a minimum time requirement of 30 minutes and voice-chats had to last for at least 15 minutes. Students were given a free choice of which program to use for the text-and voice-chat and were required to submit
a weekly forum posting summarizing and reflecting on the chats as well as com- menting on at least two of their group members’ entries.
The purpose of the weekly discussion forums was to have students reflect on what they had learned in their individual conversations with their tandem partner and exchange more information and ideas with other participating students. In the discussion forum students were split into groups of 4–6 German and American students each in order not to overwhelm students with too many of the weekly required posts and comments. For this task the public discussion forum ProBoards was used as it is free of charge, user-friendly, and allows a well-arranged layout.
Furthermore, it has several privacy settings, enabling only participants of the ex- change to access the forum. Students were not restricted to length requirements for their posts, however, they were graded on a completion/non-completion basis as part of their homework grade.
The last tool used in the exchange was a videoconference which took place in the second-to-last week instead of the weekly voice chat. For this task, the US and German students were each split into three groups and each group spoke for approximately forty minutes with a sub-group of the partner class. Both uni- versities’ Tandberg videoconferencing equipment was used. Again, language for communication was exclusively German and all the sessions were moderated by the instructors. There were no pre-assigned topics for the videoconferences; in- stead, students were asked to contribute one question that they wanted to ask the partner class. As was the case for the text-and voice-chats, students subsequently reflected on the videoconference in their small groups in the discussion forum.