Task design and its induced learning effects in a cross-institutional blog-mediated telecollaboration

Abstract

This research investigated if and how the instructional design affected the learning outcome in a blog-mediated project, namely students' communicative writing in the social media. Thirty-four college-level English learners from two universities in Taiwan participated in the telecollaboration. The current research continues to highlight the social networking nature of Web 2.0 by locating idea units (IUs) in students' semi-formal weekly discussions, instead of focusing on syntactic complexity of conventional written modality. In this study, the language learners’ output performance (the quantity of IUs was operationalized as the dependent variable) was hypothesized to be affected by task type and duration time. The findings indicate that both were significant in eliciting the amount of IUs. As a result, the contributions of this study include (a) shedding some light on the academic and educational capacity of blog-mediated telecollaboration, (b) revealing multiple factors that might affect the telecollaborative mechanism with the use of weblogs for language learning purposes, and finally (c) evaluating interactive blogging activities’ educational value for complementing formal-writing training.

Keywords:

• task type
• duration time
• telecollaboration
• social networking
• communicative writing
• blog

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the 34 students who participated in the study. This work was partially supported by the National Science Council in Taiwan (NSC 101-2410-H-194-111, NSC 100-2511-S-006-001-MY2, and NSC 98-2511-S-006-003-MY2), and by the 2011 KPI Research Project at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wen-Chun Chen

Wen-Chun Chen received her PhD degree in curriculum and instruction from Texas A&M University, College Station, and an MA degree in TESOL from New York University, USA. She is currently an assistant professor as National Chung Cheng University, Chia-Yi County, Taiwan. Her major research interests include cross-cultural communication and teacher education for technology-supported language teaching/learning. In the past 10 years, she has worked with ESL/EFL/ESP learners of all age groups in both the USA and Taiwan.

Yu-Chih Doris Shih

Yu-Chih Doris Shih received her PhD degree in curriculum and instruction (with an emphasis of educational technology) from Texas A&M University, USA. She is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Fu-Jen Catholic University, New Taipei City, Taiwan. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of foreign languages and cultural learning with technologies, multimedia education, and distance learning.

Gi-Zen Liu

Gi-Zen Liu received his PhD degree in instructional systems technology from Indiana University Bloomington, USA. He is director of the Foreign Language Center and an associate professor of Foreign Languages & Literature Department at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Tainan City, Taiwan. He has received five research awards from the College of Liberal Arts at NCKU in 2007–2011 and another from the National Science Council of Taiwan in 2012. His research interests include instructional technology and design, CALL, CMC, and blended language learning.