Responding to the need for foreign language fluency in ever-globalizing business and cultural spheres, the federal government and foreign language institutions in an eleven-member task force... Show More

Responding to the need for foreign language fluency in ever-globalizing business and cultural spheres, the federal government and foreign language institutions in an eleven-member task force collaboratively published a set of nationally recognized, foundational standards for foreign language teaching. Rather than rely on teacher-centered classrooms where rote memorization is the rule, standards-based curricula are student-centered and emphasize meaningful communication in contexts that build cultural understanding. The new standards emphasize performance-based assessment, offer students opportunities to communicate in a variety of communicative modes and experience authentic cultural materials. In order to investigate the applicable strategic use of videochat technology in standards-based foreign language teaching, instructors from the Hindi STARTALK program at the University of Pennsylvania conducted a small case study to assess student responses to this modern technology-based interactive module. This paper focuses on a pedagogical intervention in which the Hindi instructors for the summer programs in 2010 and 2011 aimed to discover how communications technology, specifically Skype technology, could be used to effectively implement the National Standards.

Middleverse de Español (MdE) is an evolving platform for foreign language (FL) study, aligned to the goals of ACTFL’s National Standards and 2007 MLA report. The project simulates an immersive... Show More

Middleverse de Español (MdE) is an evolving platform for foreign language (FL) study, aligned to the goals of ACTFL’s National Standards and 2007 MLA report. The project simulates an immersive environment in a virtual 3-D space for the acquisition of translingual and transcultural competence in Spanish meant to support content-based and communicative classroom practices. This paper describes the design of MdE on Second Life as a dynamic environment of integrated technologies and its selection criteria, including the pedagogical principles guiding design and practices. Pedagogy is further explored conceptually in addressing language acquisition and cultural immersion within the broader communication’s system of language, images and symbols of the digitalized age. The initial pilot demonstrates that negotiations of meaning and negative feedback intrinsic to virtual interactions promote repair moves. Furthermore, students’ reconfiguring of conventionalized norms of participation results in increased exchanges in the classroom that stimulate student-centered discussions and meaningful collaborative work.

This paper presents the description of an email Tandem exchange project conducted between 94 intermediate-level students (47 pairs) from Columbia University/Barnard College in New York and... Show More

This paper presents the description of an email Tandem exchange project conducted between 94 intermediate-level students (47 pairs) from Columbia University/Barnard College in New York and Universidad Autonóma de Madrid in Spain during the Fall Semester 2010. There were several goals to this project: to help improve students’ writing skills; to encourage them to learn about culture through authentic (understood as ‘direct contact with a native speaker’) and real exposure to the target language; to foster progress in their use of the target languages through peer-to-peer corrections; and to take an active part in their own learning through self-assessment. Based on students’ opinions, this project had a very positive impact in the way they viewed the foreign/target culture on both sides of the Atlantic. It also helped them enhance their written proficiency and acquire a new lexical mastery that would have been impossible through the limited and less-real scope of the classroom.

The purpose of this case study was to examine one learner’s (Keira) personal trajectory in an online, transnational telecollaborative learning environment, focusing on how she negotiated (1) her own... Show More

The purpose of this case study was to examine one learner’s (Keira) personal trajectory in an online, transnational telecollaborative learning environment, focusing on how she negotiated (1) her own sense of identity, (2) her perspective on French and American cultures, and (3) the possibility of a transcultural dialogue. The data (observations, journals, interviews) showed that early on, Keira’s expectations of the class shifted drastically. Consequently, she began to engage her own conception of self and being American through introspection and, ultimately, a redefinition of her own subjectivity. Keira progressively developed her own transcultural stance and reached a point where her sense of the conditions of possibility of culture learning and the transcultural encounter, buttressed by a much deeper and nuanced knowledge of both culture(s), led to a completely new understanding and repositioning of her posture in this encounter, which she called “an opportunity for liberation.” This study supports the effectiveness of technology-mediated learning communities (MLCs) in fostering transcultural learning seen as a developmental process, a dynamic trajectory.

This article describes the affordances of social media and networks for online Elementary German courses that have been taught at the University of Pennsylvania since 2010. These online courses were... Show More

This article describes the affordances of social media and networks for online Elementary German courses that have been taught at the University of Pennsylvania since 2010. These online courses were created to provide students the opportunity to take Elementary German as part of the language requirement for Penn credit during the summer months when students are away from campus. Like their face-to-face counterparts, the online courses are grounded on the principles of communicative language teaching and learning but clearly reveal the potential of these principles to maximize participation, promote learner autonomy and influence student outcomes when applied to collaborative online learning spaces. This paper explains the pedagogy behind the online courses, outlines their relationship to the face-to-face language classroom, and describes how student interactions are key to the learning process. It considers the importance of electronic and digital literacy (Warschauer, 2006) to the growth of new methodologies, materials development, assessment, articulation, intercultural competence, and student progress. This paper also compares the instructor’s experiences of teaching in the online environment with those of the face-to-face classroom and discusses how these distinct and separate learning spaces are in many ways related and can inform each other. Finally, the author considers new possibilities for language learning through emerging technologies.