Telecollaboration and languages for specific purposes, Monografías, Ensayos de Cultura Inglesa

¡Descarga Telecollaboration and languages for specific purposes y más Monografías, Ensayos en PDF de Cultura Inglesa solo en Docsity! 286 © 2022 Salvador Montaner-Villalba et al. (CC BY) Telecollaboration and languages for specific purposes Salvador Montaner-Villalba1, Ana Gimeno-Sanz2, Sofia Di Sarno-García3, Ana Sevilla-Pavón4, Anna Nicolaou5, Rita Koris6, and Jean-François Vuylsteke7 Abstract. There is no doubt that telecollaboration currently plays an important role in  foreign  language  learning and, not  less  so,  in  the field of English  for Specific  Purposes (ESP). Guth (2020) highlighted how telecollaboration has rapidly evolved in the past years as an innovative approach, and how it has brought together a whole community  of  academics  and  researchers  interested  in  the  field.  In  this  paper,  a  brief  overview  of  the  various  presentations  that  took  place  in  the  EuroCALL  Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC)  Special  Interest  Group  (SIG) Symposium is offered. The paper introduces four projects based on telecollaboration contextualised within an ESP classroom in higher education. The first one focuses  on  a  collaborative  debate  project  using  English  as  a  lingua franca; the second elaborates on improving learners’ pragmatic skills through telecollaborative role- plays; the third describes an immersive Virtual Exchange (VE) aiming to foster the students’ civic and entrepreneurial competence, while enhancing their intercultural communicative competence. The fourth project aimed at improving students’ business  communication  and  management  skills  in  English  in  a  multicultural  environment. Keywords:  telecollaboration,  virtual  exchange,  languages  for  specific  purposes,  English for specific purposes, pragmatics, virtual reality, intercultural competence. 1. UNIR, Valencia, Spain; salvador.montaner@unir.net; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2742-5338 (Coordinator of the CMC SIG  Symposium) 2. Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain; agimeno@upvnet.upv.es; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3366-0729 3. Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain; sodisar@doctor.upv.es; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9952-4178 4. Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain; ana.m.sevilla@uv.es; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5253-0423 5. Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus; anna.nicolaou@cut.ac.cy; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8052-2201 6. Budapest Business School, Budapest, Hungary; koris.rita@uni-bge.hu; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1912-8744 7. Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, Belgium; jf.vuylsteke@ephec.be; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1762-0735 How to cite this article: Montaner-Villalba, S., Gimeno-Sanz, A., Di Sarno-García, S., Sevilla-Pavón, A., Nicolaou, A., Koris, R., & Vuylsteke, J.-F. (2022). Telecollaboration and languages for specific purposes. In B. Arnbjörnsdóttir, B. Bédi, L. Bradley,  K. Friðriksdóttir, H. Garðarsdóttir, S. Thouësny, & M. J. Whelpton (Eds), Intelligent CALL, granular systems, and learner data: short papers from EUROCALL 2022 (pp. 286-291). Research-publishing.net. https://doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2022.61.1472 287 Telecollaboration and languages for specific purposes 1. Introduction CMC can be described as any human communication which takes place with the aid of two or more electronic devices. The term CMC has traditionally referred to diverse kinds of communication, such as e-mails, e-forums, instant messaging, etc. This term has also been applied to other forms of text-based interaction, such as text messaging (Thurlow, Lengel, & Tomic, 2004). Significant  research  on CMC is mainly focused on the social effects of diverse computer-supported communication technologies. Telecollaboration or VE is indeed one of the most enriching and interesting forms of authentic communication in foreign language learning in general and in ESP settings, in particular. This is what triggered the EuroCALL CMC SIG to bring together six experts to explain current practices in  telecollaboration which can enhance language learners’ motivation. 2. Proposals of the symposium 2.1. The what, why, and how of telecollaboration projects in ESP in higher education In her presentation, Gimeno-Sanz explored two projects combining telecollaboration and ESP in higher education. Both projects were based on collaboration and product creation tasks as described by Harris (2002) and Helm and Guth (2010), which are the most demanding and, therefore, the least often used. The first project between students from two Spanish universities using English as a lingua franca was based on  a  collaborative  debate  project.  The  post-project  questionnaire  revealed  that  learners perceived they had primarily improved their speaking and listening skills, as well as acquiring new vocabulary  relating  to  their field of study.  In addition,  students pointed out they had improved a number of ‘life skills’ such as public speaking, critical thinking, articulating thoughts, learning to think on their feet, controlling emotions when speaking in public, and improving their presentation skills. These results were aligned with their expectations, as evidenced by a pre- project questionnaire. The  second  project, with  Spanish  ESP  students  and US  students  of  Spanish  as  a foreign language, had the clear goal of developing the students’ intercultural awareness.  It was conducted bilingually  through synchronous and asynchronous  tools  to  give  both  sets  of  learners  equal  opportunities  to  practise  their  foreign  language. The pre-project survey showed that, overall, the students were open- 290 Salvador Montaner-Villalba et al. implemented  in  the  field  of  English  business  communication  by  a  Hungarian  and a Belgian university for three consecutive academic years between 2019 and  2021.  Students  participating  in  the  VE  represented  a  large  variety  of  nationalities with diverse cultural and educational backgrounds. During the collaboration, participants worked online in virtual teams simulating real business communication practices in English (Swartz & Luck, 2018). Capitalising on the multicultural diversity of the teams, students engaged in discussions about the cross-cultural differences in their local business environments, job markets, recruitment processes, job applications, and interviews. At the end of the project, students participated in a real online job interview with professional recruiters. As  a  final  assignment,  students  presented  a  digital  portfolio  on  their  learning  experience,  professional  development,  acquired  employability  skills,  and  intercultural competence. The qualitative analyses of student team reports, digital  portfolios, and results of pre/post-project surveys of the three iterations revealed that students developed employability skills by facing new challenges in the culturally diverse business world. Not only did it allow students to improve their business  communication  and management  skills  in  English  in  a multicultural  environment, but it also challenged their intercultural communication competence and global collaboration skills. Hence, VE is an efficient means of and a catalyst  for developing students’ intercultural competence without physically leaving their classrooms. 3. Conclusion The  EuroCALL  CMC  SIG  symposium  participants  provided  ample  evidence  demonstrating that telecollaboration or VE practices  in  a  languages  for  specific  purposes context has more advantages than drawbacks. Through these projects, students can improve their linguistic skills and gain intercultural competence, two essential assets in today’s global world that would otherwise not be possible in a traditional classroom setting where students only interact with fellow students or with their teacher. It was also demonstrated that pragmatic skills, which are crucial  in communication, can also be developed through telecollaborative activities. The authors highlighted several requirements for these projects to be successful, that is,  strict coordination between the project tutors from both participating universities, clear instructions provided to the learners at the start of the project, implementation of questionnaires  to gather both expectations at  the outset and satisfaction upon  conclusion, a clear artefact to be produced collaboratively by the mixed cohorts of students, full integration into the course programme, clear evaluation guidelines, and accounting for student grading. 291 Telecollaboration and languages for specific purposes References Blum-Kulka, S., & Olshtain, E. 1984. Requests and apologies: a cross-cultural study of speech act  realization patterns (CCSARP)1. Applied Linguistics, 5(3), 196-213. https://doi.org/10.1093/ applin/5.3.196 Gimeno, A. (2018).  Learner  expectations  and  satisfaction  in  a  US-Spain  intercultural  telecollaboration. 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