The JALT CALL Journal
Vol. 2, No. 1, April 2006

Telecollaboration for intercultural learning: An overview of projects involving Japan

Nathaniel Carney
Kwansei Gakuin University
　

Abstract:

Telecollaboration is a form of foreign language education which links language students both cross-linguistically as well as interculturally through computer-mediated communication (CMC) (Belz, 2003).  There has been significant research on telecollaborative projects (e.g. Abrams, 2003; Bauer et al, 2005; Belz, 2001, 2002, 2003; Belz and Kinginger, 2002; Kern, 1996; Kinginger, 1998; Kinginger, Gourves-Hayward, Simpson, 1999; Kramsch and Thorne, 2002; Müller-Hartman, 2000; O’Dowd, 2003;  Thorne, 2003; Ware and Kramsch, 2005).  Recently, reviews of online language education (Kern, Ware, and Warschauer, 2004) and Internet-mediated intercultural foreign language education (ICFLE) (Thorne, 2005), as well as an edited volume specifically on ICFLE (Belz and Thorne, 2005) have looked at these and other telecollaborative studies.  However, to date, specific contexts for telecollaboration have only been reviewed in detail for Spanish-American telecollaboration (O’Dowd, 2005) and German-American telecollaboration (Belz, 2001, 2002; Belz and Müller-Hartmann, 2003).  This paper gives a overview of intercultural learning telecollaborative projects that have involved Japanese students, and based on these and other studies, offers a perspective on best practices (Thorne, 2003) for building telecollaborative partnerships for intercultural learning between Japan and other countries.