Abstract:

Information and Communication technologies (ICT) allow language learners to reach out beyond the confines of traditional learning settings and this will arguably have a deep impact on the way in which teaching should be envisioned and understood. It is our position that teachers should and will have a key role in preparing future citizens for what can be called ‘e-functioning’. E-functioning entails many areas of competences, apart from digital and linguistic skills, not least of which are the ability to employ multiple literacies in order to work and communicate in multilingual and multimodal contexts. Even as students become increasingly more adept at the use of technology, schools fail to help them couple these digital capacities with the type of knowledge-construction that they will need in an interconnected world in order to ‘e-function’ effectively. This project is part of a wider project (KONECT, EDU2013-43932-P; Spanish Ministry of Economy and Finance), which aims to explore innovative, cross-competency based teaching that can address the current gaps between today’s educational practices and the needs of informed citizens in tomorrow’s interconnected, globalized world. In this paper, telecollaboration is understood as the process of communicating and working together with other people or groups from different locations through online or digital tools to co-produce a desired work output, and which carried out in a variety of settings both synchronously or asynchronously. In education, telecollaboration combines all of these components with a focus on learning, social interaction, dialogue, intercultural exchange and communication. This talk will look at the implementation of a telecollaborative project between two high school classes, one in Spain and the other in Sweden. The students were asked to work together to create an online platform for raising awarenes of the situation of the Syrian refugees, however, analysis of the interaction indicates that the design of some of these activities, in particular the way in which technology was used to mediate communication, created some unexpected complications. As most work looking at telecollaborative projects has focused on language learners outcome rather than the process, this study looks at the role of technology, student interaction, and the multimodality of their communication. Using a qualitative analysis of naturalistic data from classroom interaction, this presentation will briefly outline the pedagogical design and intended purposes of different tasks that make up a telecollaborative project and then look at the interaction that emerged from the actual implementation of the tasks. Based on this analysis, ways to better support students language comprehension and competences through telecollaboration will be discussed.

Keywords:

Telecollaboration, e-functioning.