Robert O'Dowd

• Managing Director at University of Leon

Virtual exchange (VE) is an educational practice that involves the engagement of groups of learners in extended periods of online intercultural interaction and collaboration with international peers as an integrated part of their educational programs and under the guidance of educators and/or facilitators. Despite more than 20 years of research and...

This article provides an overview of the most significant emerging trends and tendencies in telecollaborative practice. In order to achieve this, I review the recent literature in the area and I identify recurring themes from the Telecollaboration in Higher Education conference which took place in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland from 21 to 23 April...

The importance of teachers' capacity to integrate and exploit computer mediated communication (CMC) in the foreign language classroom has been recognised by many of the leading publications in foreign language teacher education, including the European Profile for Language Teacher Education (2004) and the European portfolio for student teachers of f...

Telecollaboration, or ‘online intercultural exchange’ (OIE), refers to the application of online communication tools to bring together classes of language learners in geographically distant locations with the aim to develop their foreign language skills and intercultural competence through collaborative tasks and project work. Many studies have dem...

Online intercultural exchange (henceforth OICE) refers to the application since the early 1990s of online communication tools to bring together classes of language learners in geographically distant locations with the aim to develop their foreign language skills and intercultural competence through collaborative tasks and project work.

In this paper I argue that online intercultural interaction and exchange remains a relatively peripheral ‘add-on’ activity in most foreign language classrooms. In its current state, it is yet to be considered an integral part of curricular activity and it does not yet form a significant part of high stakes assessment procedures. Against this backgr...

This volume provides an introduction to online intercultural exchange, the activity of engaging language learners in collaborative project work with partners from other cultures through the use of online communication technology. The chapters look at how online collaboration can be successfully integrated into the foreign language classroom and how...

We performed a two-phase, year-long research project that explored the impact of peer feedback on language development. We investigated specifically how and when post-secondary learners of English and Spanish provide corrective feedback on their partners' use of the target language in weekly asynchronous discussions by assigning them to one of two...

Like a good deal of change in education, the integration of digital technologies into language teaching and learning has a tendency to be a slow moving, often uncertain, process, whose advance is punctuated by a series of political, administrative and ...

This paper reports the findings of three qualitative studies which were carried out in university level EFL classes in Germany. The three groups used various combinations of communication technologies such as email, web-based message boards, and video conferencing in order to engage in online exchanges with different partner classes in Ireland and...

It is by now well established that telecollaborative exchanges frequently end in 'failed communication' and do not automatically bring about successful nego- tiation of meaning between the learners. Instead, the intended pedagogic and linguistic aims of online interaction are repeatedly missed, and projects may end in low levels of participation, i...

This paper reports on research carried out on an intercultural telecollaborative exchange between language learners in Germany and Ireland and focuses particularly on what was required of the teachers in the development of the project. The review of the literature looks at the role of telecollaboration within the field of network-based language l...

Intercultural learning is often assumed to be an automatic benefit of e-mail exchanges between groups of learners in different countries, but little research exists on whether on-line intercultural collaboration does actually develop learners' understanding of the other culture's perspective and world view. This paper reviews what recent literature...

Intercultural learning is often assumed to be an automatic benefit of e-mail exchanges between groups of learners in different countries, but little research exists on whether on-line intercultural collaboration does actually develop learners' understanding of the other culture's perspective and world view. This paper reviews what recent literature...

This article describes an exchange project carried out by foreign language classes in the University of León, Spain and the University of Northern Michigan, USA. The two groups integrated videoconferencing technology into a task based exchange in order to make students more aware of how they viewed their own and the target cultures. In the cours...

This paper reports on a telecollaborative exchange between university language learners in Spain and the USA and analyses the effects of the different institutional and sociocultural contexts on its development. While the socioinstitutional dimen- sion of GermanAmerican exchanges has already benefited from extensive study in the literature, this pa...

This thesis reports the findings of three qualitative studies which were carried out in EFL classes at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany between 2001 and 2003. All three groups used various combinations of communication technologies such as e-mail, web-based message boards and videoconferencing in order to engage in on-line exchanges with d...