Telecollaboration in Language Teacher Education: Cultivating a Community of Inquiry and Intercultural Communication Competence

Min-Hsun Liao

《Taiwan International ESP Journal》 15卷2期 (2024/12) Pp. 1-28

https://doi.org/10.6706/TIESPJ.202412_15(2).0001

摘要

This study investigated the effects of telecollaboration on fostering a community of inquiry and cultivating intercultural communication competence among 20 prospective foreign language teachers. To meet the rapidly changing demands for globally competent foreign language teachers, this project integrated telecollaboration into existing teacher education programs, and investigated whether and how it helped prospective foreign language teachers step out of their linguistic and cultural comfort zones to engage in an online community of inquiry and develop intercultural communication competence. This telecollaborative project paired 12 prospective English teachers in Taiwan with eight prospective French and Spanish teachers in Canada and Spain, using English as the lingua franca for intercultural communication. At the beginning of the project, the participants posted their short biographies on Padlet before splitting into VoiceThread discussion groups. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from the VoiceThread discussion forums, the Intercultural Communication Competence Questionnaire (ICCQ), and the open-ended survey. While the prospective foreign language teachers interacted with their international partners via asynchronous communication, their social, cognitive, and teaching presences in the discussion forums were coded and analyzed to capture the unfolding of meaning negotiation processes. The results indicate that social presence was more prominent in negotiating mutual understanding than were the other two presences. The effects of relatively low teaching presence on cognitive presence remain inconclusive. The results of the ICCQ paired-samples t tests indicated that participants' intercultural communication competence was enhanced after the semester-long telecollaboration. Most participants considered telecollaboration to be beneficial for enhancing their intercultural communication skills and increasing their subject knowledge. Future research is necessary to explore the impact of teacher presence and to consolidate the interdependent effects of various presences within a community of inquiry.

關鍵字

Telecollaboration ； Intercultural communication competence ； Community of inquiry ； Voice Thread ； Language teacher education

參考文獻

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