Developing an effective Chinese-American telecollaborative learning program: an action research study

Abstract

Despite the rapid development of telecollaboration in foreign language education, telecollaborative exchanges involving Chinese as the target language have not received sufficient attention. Adopting an action research approach, this study focuses on examining the student perceptions as well as the challenges of a carefully designed Chinese-American telecollaborative learning program involving Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) students at a small liberal arts college in the US and Chinese-speaking English majors at a large university in China. This study drew on a variety of data for analysis, including naturally occurring interaction data (i.e., Skype conversations, WeChat group discussion transcripts), students' weekly reflection journals, informal interviews with the students throughout the semester, end-of-program interviews, student responses to an end-of-semester questionnaire, and the teacher-researcher reflective journal. The results showed that this program was, in general, well received among the CFL students at the US college. The intermediate-level CFL students evaluated this program more positively than the elementary-level students. However, this program also faced many challenges, such as scheduling and technological issues with Skype conversations, target language proficiency gap, perceived irrelevance to Chinese proficiency development, heavy workload, lack of depth in WeChat group discussion, and the demanding role of the teacher-researcher.

Keywords:

• Telecollaboration
• online intercultural exchange
• Chinese as a foreign language (CFL)
• WeChat
• action research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Han Luo

Dr. Han Luo is currently an assistant professor of Chinese at Lafayette College. She received a PhD in Foreign Language Education with a specialization in the teaching of Chinese from the University of Texas at Austin in 2011, and a PhD in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from Beijing Foreign Studies University in 2007.

Min Gui

Dr. Min Gui is an associate professor of applied linguistics at Wuhan University, China. Her research interests include second language acquisition, teaching English as a second language, language assessment, L2 reading, and computer assisted language learning.