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Building Bridges through Reflexive Teaching

Building Bridges through Reflexive Teaching. Elana Spector -Cohen & Rosalie Sitman Division of Foreign Languages Tel Aviv University, israel Telecollaboration in University Foreign Language Education University of León, Spain February 12, 2014 .

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Building Bridges through Reflexive Teaching

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  1. Building Bridges through Reflexive Teaching ElanaSpector-Cohen & Rosalie SitmanDivision of Foreign Languages Tel Aviv University, israel Telecollaboration in University Foreign Language Education University of León, Spain February 12, 2014 espector@post.tau.ac.ilrsitman@post.tau.ac.il

  2. Outline • The context and telecollaboration • The exchanges • Intercultural exchange of ELLs (Spain-Israel-England-Germany; Spain-Israel-pre-service teachers in USA) • Telecollaborative materials development exchange (pre-service teachers in Canada-Israel) • Challenges and recommendations • Planning, design and logistics • Management of cross-cultural communication

  3. The Presenters: Politics and Policies • Department and program heads • At intersection of top-down and bottom-up policy makers • At intersection of processes of internationalization and internationalism (Byram, 2012) • Can be the agents of change through reliable and steady telecollaborative partnerships (O’Dowd, 2013) • Implementing innovative policies regarding language teaching • Promoting genuine internationalism and partnerships • Promoting awareness and fostering prestige (O’Dowd, 2013)

  4. Benefits of Telecollaboration(Kern, Ware and Warschauer, 2004) • Linguistic interaction and development • Intercultural awareness and learning • Enrichment of cultural and intercultural competence • Opportunities to promote intercultural communicative competence self-awareness and interpreting/relating (Byram, 1997) • ‘Rich points’ (Agar, 2006) signaling intercultural difference as opportunities for learning • Development of new multiliteracies and their relations to identity • Opportunities to negotiate new roles and identities (Kern, Ware & Warschauer, 2004) • Creates new opportunities of agency (Murray, 1977; Kramsch, A’Ness & Lam, 2000)

  5. Challenges and Pitfalls • Missed potential (e.g., Belz, 2002; Kramsch and Thorne, 2002; O’Dowd, 2007; O’Dowd and Ritter 2006; Potts, 2005) • Online communication does not necessarily lead to language learning and cross-cultural understanding (e.g. Fischer, 1998; Kern, 2000; Kinginger, Gourves-Hayward & Simpson, 1999; Kern, Ware &Warschauer, 2004, Belz, 2002) • Telecollaborative exchanges can often reinforce, rather than bridge, feelings of difference (Kern, 2000) • CMC can actually promote missed communication (Ware, 2003) • e.g., delayed response time and lack of consequences for dropping topics, discourse that encourages brevity

  6. Exchange 1: Online Intercultural Exchange • Populations • Fall 2012-2013: ELLs from Spain (Universidad de León), Israel(TAU), England (Coventry University ) and Germany (Koblenz University of Applied Sciences) • Fall 2013-2014: ELLs from Spain (Universidad de León), Israel (TAU), ; pre-service (graduate level) teachers from the USA (University of Central Florida) • ELLs approximately B1/B2 level • General goals: • to give students experience in working and learning together online with people from different cultural and language backgrounds • to improve English language skills and develop some basic academic skills such as working in teams to make online products (in this case, a blog), conducting research interviews and making presentations in classes based on the research. • Task 1: Personal introduction on forum (ME) • Task 2: Group blog (WE): • Task 3: Ethnographic interview + written/oral presentation

  7. Exchange 2: Toronto – Tel Aviv Collaborative Exchange • Populations: • Fall 2012-2014: 5 pre-service teachers (graduate students) York University, Toronto; 10 pre-service (international graduate students), Tel Aviv University • General Goals: to give collaborating teachers experience in applying theory to practice through collaborative task development. • Task: • Work in pairs (Tel Aviv) and collaborate with one colleague online (Toronto) to create a task/lesson for a specific ELL population of your choice. • The task should span one (or more) lesson(s) and integrate at least one technology

  8. Challenges and Recommendations • Planning, design and logistics • Management of cross-cultural communication

  9. Planning, Design and Logistics:Negotiating Accessible Language Tasks and instructions accessible in terms of language and content (Kirschner, Wexler and Spector-Cohen, 1996)

  10. Planning, Design and Logistics:Clear and Explicit Instructions and Procedures • e. How to post your blog: • On the Moodle site you’ll find a section with blog forums for Task 2 for different groups – group 1, 2, 3, etc. Your teacher will tell you which group you and your partners should join. Post the URL (Internet address) of your blog on a forum post. Make sure you include the following information: • Your blog title: • Your blog URL: • The full names of each of the partners in the group: • Once you have posted your blog, students from the other countries will react to them. Make sure you read their reactions and answer them when necessary. • f. How to react to another blog: • Read the blogs by students from the other two countries who have posted in your blog forum group. Then go back to the task 2 forum on the Moodle site, and REPLY to their original post (do NOT reply on the blog itself). Each student should react to at least one blog from each of the other two countries. • Below are suggestions regarding how to react:

  11. Planning, Design and Logistics • Incorporatedinto course content • Take intra-group issues into account • Sensitize (instructors and students) regarding partner cultures before and during the exchange (Nuttaand Spector-Cohen, 2002) • Negotiate clear assessment criteria • Hampel (2006) – lack of assessment was a de-motivating factor • O’Dowd (2013 , p. 52) – “…when students are awarded grades or credit for activities such as telecollaboration, they automatically gain greater importance for both students and teachers alike.”

  12. Planning, Design and Logistics • Need for familiarizing and training students / teachers on tools  electronic literacy (Hampel, 2006) • Documentation (e.g. booklet on how to use Blogger) and step-by-step presentation (broken into doable chunks) • Choice of tools / platforms • Should preferably be versatile and ‘rich’ in possibilities, user friendly, level of familiarity similar across partners, and integrated into ‘regular’ course work (not an add on)

  13. Planning, Design and Logistics:Incorporating Reflection • Opportunities for revision • Student reflection tasks on language, culture and the teaching/learning of both (Sitman et al., 2005) • both affective and content issues • Teacher reflection diaries • to promote development of telecollaborative competences (O’Dowd, 2013) • to enable teachers to identify and address their own preconceptions that they might not have previously aware of • for research, practice and improved management of collaboration

  14. Planning, Design and Logistics • Interim progress reports • Need progress reports within the class (O’Dowd & Waire, 2008); • To trace learning processes and deflect and analyze problems, leading to increased awareness (online collaborative competence)

  15. Interim Progress Report: Toronto-Tel Aviv ExchangeStudents X and Y (Tel Aviv) 1. Group Members: X, Y and Z 2. Description of the lesson/task: Students will be creating blog entries on the topic of the winter Olympics 2014.  3. Completed: Rough draft of the lesson plan 4. Issues/Concerns: Getting in touch with Z has been a little difficult. Her responses to our emails have been quite delayed making it hard to decide on a specific task or even to make any deadlines. 5. Action Plan: We are going to send the rough draft of the lesson to Z this evening. We are going to work on the materials that accompany the lesson plan. (See handout, Excerpt 1)

  16. Telecollaboration: Definitions • “…the application of global electronic networks to foreign language education" so that "internationally dispersed learners [can] use technical communication tools such as email, synchronous chat, threaded discussion, or videoconferencing in order to support social interaction, discussion, debate, and interculturalexchange” (Kinginger, 2002; cited in Belz and Hartmann, 2003, p. 72) • “… the use of online communication tools to connect language learners in different countriesfor the development of collaborative project work and interculturalexchange (Belz, 2002)” (O’Dowd, 2005, p. 40) • “virtual interculturalinteraction and exchange projects between classes of foreign language learners in geographically distant locations” (O'Dowd, 2007 as cited in O’Dowd, 2013, p. 47)

  17. Management of Cross-cultural Communication • Merging of language and culture learning tends to be neglected in EAP (Byram, 1997; Kramsch, 1994) • Many forms of culture • e.g. religion, socioeconomic/social class, region of country (Cohen, 2009) • Israeli context: • multicultural/multilingual/region in conflict • for many, first contact with ‘the other(s) within’: ethnic, racial, religious, socioeconomic, region (center vs. periphery) • potential misunderstandings and conflict on a number of levels • dilemmas regarding grouping: (See handout, Excerpt 2)

  18. Management of Cross-cultural Communication Working Pedagogical Model (Lawrence, 2013) • For building learning communities and online support in Intercultural Language Learning • Need to Build Identity Investment: critical feature of a motivating classroom environment is the ‘we’ feeling of a group (Dörnyei, 2007) • Built on intermember acceptance and shared commitment to task/purpose of the group… Candlin (1987, p. 17): the need “for tasks to take a critical stance”

  19. Management of Cross-cultural Communication • Sensitive nature of context: to facilitate this classroom ‘blend’ emphasize a focus on ‘the other without’ (country): • To provide “safe” opportunities for intracultural ‘rich points’ • To promote reflection on one’s own identity – the ‘me’ (Lawrence, 2010) • To encourage the ‘we’ (Dörnyei , 2007), promoting intra-group reflection in a less threatening way • A springboard for promoting intercultural awareness the other within ME the other without (WE)

  20. Managing Cross-cultural Communication • What happens in cases of intercultural breakdown? • To what degree and when does instructor intervene when misunderstandings and cultural clashes occur? • When is it necessary to involve the partner teacher(s)? What happens in cases of 3+ teacher partners, when one partner is less ‘present’ in the exchange? (See handout, Excerpt 3)

  21. Thank you for listening

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