Telecollaboration

Planning and Assessment

Sara Villa, The New School

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Abstract

Telecollaboration is by now a well-established feature of many language learning courses. For several semesters I have been employing such language exchange activities with most of my university classes in a variety of formats. Students with intermediate and advanced levels have experienced a for-profit platform and a not-for-profit one, normally linking with students at the Universidad de Concepción, in Chile. My students had specific guidelines and projects to carry out, such as blogs, videos, reflective statements, etc. Their exchanges were guided by certain prompts and suggestions aimed at enriching the interactions with their overseas partners.

Typical prompts were of the kind aimed at eliciting language production from the student and cultural growth on his or her part (e.g. culture and traditions, typical foods, public health, local dialectal and lexical features, immigration and international relations, predictions for the future, final reflections). In this session I would like to share with participants (A) the overall structure and planning of my projects, and (B) the final assessment of the projects’ linguistic and cultural goals. I will provide video clips of students’ self-assessment along with their own written commentary, as well as my own quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Presenters
Sara Villa

The New School

villas@newschool.edu