The role virtual exchange could play in helping prepare students for real-life study abroad

More and more Japanese students are studying abroad and the Japanese government has set a target of 180,000 students to study abroad each year by 2020 and is providing financial assistance to students to help achieve this goal. However, is financial assistance enough? Surveys conducted with students from a national education-focused university in northern Japan, before and after their study abroad experience, show that they feel underprepared before they leave to go overseas and regret not fulfilling the opportunities they had while abroad. The key areas identified where they needed assistance were with their English language ability, confidence building, and intercultural awareness. This paper suggests that doing a Virtual Exchange (VE) before they travel could help students in all of these areas. It could provide much needed language support, motivation to explore other cultures and share their own, and deliver the confidence to enable them to become more outgoing and make the most of the opportunities presented by studying overseas. Additionally, there is a case to be argued, that VE could help reduce the impact of culture shock. Overall, it is very likely that the use of VE prior to departure could improve students’ study abroad experience. The author also understands that more research is needed on this and proposes a further study comparing students who have studied abroad without conducting VE in advance to those who have, to try and assess its impact on the study abroad experience.

Collaborative tasks in telecollaboration: their challenges and potentials

This chapter reports the challenges that both the students and the teachers experienced in a telecollaborative project between a Japanese university and an American university. In this semester-long project, the students in groups of three to five from both universities worked collectively mainly asynchronously and in occasional synchronous sessions. The project was originally designed in 2017 with the expectation of incorporating ‘collaborative tasks’ (O’Dowd & Ware, 2009), then redesigned in 2018. To examine how the students in both years perceived their collaborations and effectiveness, the results from online surveys from both years were compared. Furthermore, two groups from 2018, which experienced difficulties, were examined to reveal the causes of the problems. These results indicate that rather complicated tasks raised more logistical challenges than linguistic challenges. It became clear that the students experienced various challenges, which include scheduling synchronous sessions, unaligned visions on the final products, and lacking consideration for non-native speakers in synchronous sessions. These challenges in ‘collaborative tasks’ suggest that the success of a project is heavily dependent on the simplicity of the project design, sharing the same understanding at the beginning of the project, as well as the linguistic consideration to their group members.

Foreword

This publication on virtual exchange is incredibly timely, coming as it does during the pandemic, when universities are increasingly turning to virtual exchange as a viable tool for intercultural learning, particularly when travel and physical exchange are challenging to nearly impossible. The chapters in this publication provide useful and vetted insights into how to implement virtual exchange in practical and concrete ways, from using wikis in online learning to developing mentor/learner relationships in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to a web-based virtual exchange project. This kind of practical information, grounded in research, is needed now more than ever as universities turn to virtual exchange and online learning as a way forward even in the post-pandemic world. Moreover, given that so much of the intercultural literature is published in the Global North, these chapters provide much-needed insights from uniquely Asia-Pacific perspectives.

The affordances of wikis for virtual exchange

This chapter will describe the ways wikis can benefit students, teachers, and administrators as well as provide examples of ways they can be used in the language and culture classroom for Virtual Exchange (VE). It will specifically examine how the tool was used for a collaborative research paper and explore how students can think critically to decide how to draft, edit, and revise the paper into a unified voice. Throughout the process, writers are thinking metacognitively about their writing and that of their counterparts. Furthermore, using written or verbal comments and visual markup within the wiki itself, recursive feedback loops between teachers and students are created in real-time but also recorded for later reflection. Finally, the tool also allows for a multitude of data points to be collected and analyzed for fair and valid assessment that is data driven. Teachers and administrators can see exactly who wrote what, when, and how long it took them. Therefore, the quantity and quality of the contributions can be assessed. Wikis are a powerful tool that can be harnessed in the language classroom for intercultural VE in a myriad of ways with an assortment of benefits.

Tackling international controversies in virtual exchange

Since 2000, I have been coordinating a web-based Virtual Exchange (VE) project, Project Ibunka. Ibunka means different cultures in Japanese. It aims to provide opportunities for authentic interaction among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) learners all over the world. By the end of our last project, Project Ibunka 2018, more than 6,600 students from 22 different countries had participated in this project. The Asia-Pacific countries, such as Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, the US, Argentina, and others, have always played an active role in Project Ibunka. Though not so often, participants had taken up international controversies, such as territorial disputes, wartime responsibility, compensation for war victims and survivors, and others. Fortunately, the messages posted did not result in fruitless debate among participants. These issues can sometimes be seen to be too sensitive to be taken up in VE. However, the study and discussion of such issues are inevitable if we are to promote mutual understanding especially in the Asia-Pacific region. In my article, I would like to show how VE language teachers and students can take an acceptable, open-minded stance in VE, free from any stereotypes and prejudices. Teachers should set a goal of multicultural understanding and encourage students to gain insights using conflict resolution approaches. They also should push students to reconsider their own values from the standpoint of basic human needs.

Introduction and overview

The year 2020 will more than likely go down in history as a year many terrible things happened. Yet in the field of education it will also go down as a year in which educators had to overcome enormous hurdles, which they did emphatically. Though never going to take the place of educators, technology came to the fore in the field in 2020 and assisted educators to carry on the incredible work they do. Schools were closed due to the pandemic so education had to go online. It was due to this that Virtual Exchange (VE) started to come of age too. When study abroad programs were so badly affected by the pandemic, other options had to be entertained. When language classes had to go online, teachers started to look outside of their normal boxes. It was then they discovered VE was an option too. As more people who had not seen it before saw that technology could be beneficial to education, the options available showed themselves and the ones that were truly useful flourished. VE was a chief one among them. It is timely then, that this volume appears now.

Ethnographic approaches to developing intercultural competence through intercultural interactions in the higher education context in China

With the recent developing trend of redefining ‘culture’ across disciplines in intercultural and foreign language education (Corbett, 2003; Shaules, 2007; Spencer-Oatey & Franklin, 2010), it is widely agreed that culture requires a broader definition to improve the teaching and learning of it. Wilkinson (2012) suggests “a redefinition of culture in anthropological rather than aesthetic terms” (p. 302) to ensure that intercultural and language learning leads to Intercultural Competence (IC). Others (Buttjes, 1991; Risager, 2006) also note the importance of anthropological conceptualization when culture is taught in foreign and/or second language classrooms, because motivation to learn the language is increased. Byram (1991) similarly emphasized the need to include active ‘cultural experience’ in the foreign language classroom, and provided examples including cooking and geography lessons, in which students learn about the food and geography of the country whose language they are studying. A crucial element in research within the anthropology field is ethnography. Thus, to achieve a fuller understanding of culture “as the full gauntlet of social experience that students of foreign languages both learn and participate in” (Wilkinson, 2012, p. 302), including Holliday's (2004) concept of ‘small culture’, students should take on the role of ethnographer too; ethnography practices, in a variety of forms, have become central to intercultural approaches to culture and language teaching and learning (Corbett, 2003).

Improving interactions between teachers and students in virtual exchanges – a case of mentor/learner relationships in MOOCs

Shanghai International Studies University has hosted an intercultural Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) course for several years. Course facilitators, mentors, and learners from all over the world are invited to enroll in the class. However, conversations between mentors and learners revealed that most were superficial. Thus, a pilot study was undertaken to improve mentor and learner interactions undertaken. The main focus of the research was to analyze the content of nine sustained conversations in the MOOC. The threads were selected for analysis from the first, third, and final week of the intercultural course. Initial analysis indicated responses made within the same day, and even within the early hours of initial postings, were conducive to sustained conversations. Within the discussion section, several suggestions were given to improve online interactions between mentors and learners. Training and orientation of mentors were suggested. Mentors could be encouraged to use the MOOC’s notification system to reply to the learner’s comments. With appropriate training, mentors might be able to respond to the learner’s comments effectively. In the end, future suggestions for research were given to assess further and improve MOOCs.

ICC cultivation in a multiform course mode

With the present situation of economic globalization, simple inter-flows of information within and between countries have become standard to meet the development needs of college and university students, who now require and demand intercultural communication to improve their understanding of the globalized world. In recent years, online platforms have dramatically changed the traditional face-to-face communication methods and provide a learning environment without time and place restrictions. With the construction of international online platforms, real intercultural communication conditions have been provided for students to improve their Intercultural Communication Competence (ICC) and English skills where they were not available before. This study outlines an online teaching method and design of a new multiform course mode that consists of two online platforms. Eleven random classes of 330 university students were observed in this study. All of them were enrolled in a four-month course of intercultural communication in the spring semester of 2017 at a science and technology university in China. Students were divided into two groups, Group A had five classes of students who participated in the new course mode and Group B was the other group which had six classes under the traditional classroom teaching mode. This study aims to find if the special course mode would help develop ICC among college students who stay in a domestic context, through an analysis of the variation of the two groups’ ICC before and after the course. This research adopts a mixed methods approach that includes questionnaires, online platform observations, and students’ reflective journals to test students’ cultural intelligence before and after they have had the intercultural communication course. The findings provide a basis and reference for future ICC cultivation, especially regarding the construction of online ICC cultivating platforms.

What do we exchange in virtual exchange? Reflections on virtual exchange as intercultural dialogue

On its website, APVEA reminds us that “virtual exchanges are technology-enabled, sustained, people-to-people education programs”. This chapter addresses the question of what we exchange when we engage in virtual exchange by exploring the meaning and value of virtual exchange as intercultural dialogue, and by considering the impact of the technological medium on the process. A small group of expert practitioners (N=6) were consulted for their views on virtual exchange. Their responses sketch a picture in which virtual exchange stretches beyond transaction into interaction among and transformation of the participants. The expert practitioners value virtual exchange for enhancing employability and foremost for its dialogic qualities. Next, the chapter explores the meaning of dialogue more deeply from a Bohmian perspective and considers applications in organizational development (Isaacs, 1999), restorative justice (Pranis, 2005), and intercultural competence development (Deardorff, 2020). When the intercultural dimension is made salient, this creates additional chances for realizing the dialogue principles of participation, coherence, awareness, and unfolding. The chapter then illustrates how intercultural dialogue is reshaped in a virtual environment as it is mediated by the technological context in which it is conducted. Specific attention is paid to the circle, the talking piece, and the facilitator. The chapter concludes by stating that, although intercultural dialogue will always be mediated by technology in virtual exchange settings, it makes good sense to speak of ‘virtual dialogue’ in situations that take the core principles, practices, and structural components of dialogue as outlined in this chapter as a starting point for designing online intercultural dialogue activities.