Abstract

Language educators' goals include promoting cultural understanding and improving the language skills of their students. Virtual Exchange (VE) is a powerful means to do this. Students in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms often have few opportunities to communicate with other users of English. VE gives them virtual mobility, enabling them to participate in a global community, use English in real world communicative events and become more culturally acclimatized. Though there are many benefits to VE, it is often not easily accessible to teachers. This paper introduces a large scale VE that includes over 1,500 students and 53 teachers from 21 institutions in six countries. The paper outlines benefits and drawbacks of this VE, some initial findings on student engagement and participation in the VE, in addition to information on how the project is planned to expand, making it accessible to a larger number of teachers and their students around the world. [For the complete volume, see ED571330.]

Citation

Hagley, E. (2016). Making Virtual Exchange/Telecollaboration Mainstream--Large Scale Exchanges. Presented at Conference on Telecollaboration in Higher Education 2016. Retrieved May 29, 2023 from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/192986/.

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Keywords

• asynchronous communication
• College Second Language Programs
• College Students
• Course Content
• Educational Benefits
• English (Second Language)
• Intercultural Communication
• International Educational Exchange
• learner engagement
• Second Language Instruction
• student participation
• Technology Uses in Education
• Telecommunications