understanding the interaction of motivation ...

International Collaboration for EFL Instruction: Lessons Learned from Five Years of Experience Michael W. Marek Wayne State College, Wayne, Nebraska, USA

Abstract The author is an American college teacher who has a history of collaborating with Taiwanese EFL teachers to use Computer Mediated Communication to interact with Taiwanese EFL students, including in research studies funded by the National Science of Council of Taiwan grants. Types of interactions have included online videos, blogs, Facebook, and “live” Internet videoconferences, as well as three actual visits to Taiwan. There is abundant research showing the benefits when EFL students interact with native speakers, and showing that students consider native speakers to be highly authentic sources of information. Research also shows that students welcome use of social networking technology in the classroom and that interacting with native speakers via the Internet improves learner motivation, confidence, ability, and satisfaction. This paper reviews the steps that led the author and his collaborators to successful instructional designs using CMC. The paper presents both theoretical and practical frameworks of recommended “best practices” for multicultural CMC interaction, with particular focus on “live” Internet videoconferences. These frameworks have been shown to stimulate students to become active learners who are more motivated and have higher self-efficacy as a result of the native speaker interaction. The paper concludes with reflections on why the contemporary need for EFL skills has changed markedly from that of the 20th Century and how these changing requirements of students for EFL skills must change how EFL is taught.

International Collaboration for EFL Instruction: Lessons Learned from Five Years of Experience As the second decade of the 21st Century dawns, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) programs face important new challenges and opportunities. Once taught in Asia as a way of interacting with native speakers, English is now seen as the common language any time two people meet who are not native speakers of the same language (Su, 2006). This dramatically broadens the environment in which EFL skills may be employed and, therefore, changes the requirements placed on EFL programs and individual instructors. At the same time, the continuing evolution of technology and the Internet provides dramatic new opportunities for authentic source material and interaction with English speakers from other countries (Fresen, 2007). Many EFL instructors, however, have low technological proficiency and have not adapted to the new realities of the EFL arena. This paper describes the experiences of one American college teacher who has used Internet technology for five years to interact with EFL classes in Taiwan from his home and office in America. The participating students report that they consider the interactions to be highly authentic classroom resource materials, because they represent a native speaker describing his own culture and using excellent language skills. The author has worked with two different Taiwanese EFL faculty members and employed a variety of instructional tools, including live Internet videoconferences, online streaming video, blogs, and Facebook groups to facilitate the interactions with Taiwanese students. He teaches Mass Communication at a public liberal arts college in the American state of Nebraska. Therefore his academic interest in the interactions is from the Mass Communication perspective of using technology to communicate with audiences at a distance. His Taiwanese research partners are motivated by the desire to provide excellent EFL instruction. The intent of this paper is to describe the experiences of the American

participant in his ongoing collaboration for EFL instruction as a way of informing other efforts to develop inter-cultural collaborations to teach English. In this way, the author hopes to encourage further use of CMC for international collaboration to provide authentic, student-centered EFL instruction. Literature Review The Taiwanese educational system treats English as a classroom subject, similar to math or geography. Hammerly (1994) observed that when learners have minimal need to use English in their daily lives, English learning happens only in certain locations or places and students perceive English as something that may not ever play a major role in their lives outside the classroom. English Environment in Taiwan The lack of a surrounding community of English speakers means that, for Taiwanese students, there is little practical opportunity to use English for actual communication (Lan, 2005). In addition, many EFL teachers in Taiwan use lecture/memorization methodologies that rarely provide students with meaningful interaction with native speakers or authentic materials relating to English-speaking cultures (Su, 2008; You, 2003). The result is that students are often not internally, integratively, motivated to pursue their study of English, resulting in lower proficiency and, therefore, less desirable student outcomes. Motivation and Confidence in EFL Learning Motivation, confidence, and ability are interrelated and interact with each other (Butler & Lumpe, 2008; Phillips & Lindsay, 2006). All three of these learning variables are the result of the cumulative experiences of the student, both in and out of the classroom. They all strengthen or weaken as a result of positive or negative experiences in the use of English (Sakai & Kikuchi, 2009). It has long been accepted that intrinsically motivated learners are more successful

because their learning goal is to achieve satisfaction and enjoyment (Gardner, 2001; Wang, 2008). Learners who are extrinsically motivated generally make the minimum effort required to avoid punishment or to gain rewards. While the integrative/instrumental motivation framework has been widely cited, Dörnyei (2005) offered a more complex model of motivation in which the EFL learner imagines an idealized future English-speaking self, based in part on the desire to function in international society and in part on real-life encounters (or lack thereof) with other English speakers. The key to Dörnyei’s framework is that students will use their English skills not only with native speakers, but with a wide range of people who speak English as a first or second language. Online Technology for Language Instruction Developing online opportunities for language instruction poses important and difficult challenges (Wu & Bright, 2006). In America, videoconferencing technology has been available for close to 35 years and online learning is widely available (Tiene & Ingram, 2001; Saw, Majid, Abdul Ghani, et al, 2008). A wide range of choices for online interaction, up to and including videoconferencing, is now possible with standard home consumer equipment and minimal expense (Dantas & Kemm, 2008). Without careful planning, however, such videoconferences are nothing more than “stunts” that do not contribute in a meaningful way to the overall instructional design of the course (O’Dowd, 2005). Context & Learning Environment The American researcher grew in the upper Midwest of the United States with little opportunity to meet people from other countries. During his Ed.D. doctoral program, however, he had fellow students from Taiwan, Nepal, and Pakistan. He soon realized that his own learning was richer because of the international students and that sharing ideas with students from other cultures added an important dimension to his academic experience.

When one of his Taiwanese colleagues asked the American to serve as a qualitative analysis peer reviewer on her dissertation, he learned for the first time about the challenges of teaching English as a foreign language, the topic of the dissertation. He suggested casually one day that, when his Taiwanese colleague returned to Taiwan to resume teaching conversational English, he might talk to her class via the Internet, to give them the opportunity to interact with a native speaker. The idea soon expanded into a semester-long project that has been refined, revised, and expanded in subsequent semesters. When the American visited Taiwan in 2008 to meet in person the students he had been interacting with, he met the second Taiwanese teacher (a friend of the first), with whom he has also collaborated on English reading and literature courses. The two related collaborations have been rewarding, producing five or more journal articles and ten conference presentations (Marek, 2008; Marek & Wu, 2008; Wu & Marek, 2007; Wu & Marek, 2008; Wu & Marek, 2009; Wu & Marek, 2010). The collaborators have also been involved in studies funded by grants from the National Science Council of Taiwan. Types of Computer Mediated Communication interactions have included online videos, blogs, Facebook, and “live” Internet videoconferences. They have also resulted in visits to Taiwan by the American in each of three succeeding years. Four figures are presented in this paper to illustrate the collaboration. They show the techniques used over several semesters in this on-going collaboration, and also illustrate the theory-based instructional design behind the methodology.

Figures 1 and 2 show a computer classroom at one of the Taiwanese universities participating in this study. The researchers use the free Internet service SKYPE for videoconferencing. While everyone in the class can hear and see the American, individuals or small groups of students who are directly interacting use the camera and microphone at the front of the classroom.

Figure 1. Classroom during videoconference.

Figure 2. Classroom during videoconference – close-up. The local teacher uses scaffolding techniques (Lee, 2003), initially providing a high level of pronunciation and listening comprehension support, but slowly withdrawing support in subsequent videoconferences to encourage the students to become independent. Students know the subjects of the American’s presentations about American culture in advance. In early

semesters, the American presented “live” during the videoconferences and the students replied or asked questions in small groups. As the researchers’ methodology evolved, the presentations were later delivered in advance via online video and the students prepared presentations on a related subject, which they delivered during the videoconference. Topics of the American’s presentations for conversation classes included American holidays, food, clothing, weddings, and national parks and vacations. For example, when the American presented on American national parks, each small group of Taiwanese students would present back on one of the national parks in Taiwan. In this way, students became active learners because they had to select the national park, research it, and develop the presentation.

Figure 3. The American at home during a videoconference

Figure 3 shows the American at home during a videoconference. The American and the Taiwanese class were 13 or 14 hours apart, so daytime classes in Taiwan were in the middle of the night in the United States. So that the American did not have to drive long distances at night to participate in the videoconferences, interactive technology that could use typical home computer equipment, rather than elaborate centralized video studios, was important to the project. Figure 4 shows the literature blog site on the wretch.cc website, which is popular in Taiwan. For literature classes, the American prepared video presentations explaining and

Figure 4. The Literature blog on wretch.cc, showing the video for the short story Love by Jesse Stuart.

enriching English language short stories read for the class. The videos were uploaded to YouTube and then embedded into the wretch.cc blog. Students were required to reply to the American and to each other several times via the blog comment system. Stories were drawn from Jean A. McConchie’s 20th Century American Short Stories, vol. one and included Sandra Cisneros’ No Speak English, Jesse Stuart’s Love, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, and Lucy Honig’s English as a Second Language. Two wretch.cc blogs were used in the 2009-2010 academic year, one for conversation classes and one for literature classes. The blogs are currently inactive, but together have received over 11,000 views, indicating interest from well beyond the specific class in Taiwan for which the videos were prepared. The versions of the videos on YouTube have also attracted attention from beyond the specific classes. For example, the cultural video about American clothing has been viewed 9,700 times and the video about Sandra Cisneros’ short story No Speak English has been viewed over 9,000 times on YouTube. Discussion The author’s work over several semesters has been firmly rooted in the concept of the global classroom. The interaction between the American and the Taiwanese students was always about cultural things. He presented to them about American culture and they presented back about culture in Taiwan. In this way, the students learned about a different culture, one in which they already had an interest because of media exposure, but they also thought about how foreigners see their own culture as they prepared presentations for the American. Many students were nervous at the outset of their “live” interaction with the American, however the instructional design kept them engaged, and they have reported overwhelmingly that the interactions were always interesting and rewarding to them.

Theoretical foundations The foundation of the instructional design used by the collaborators is student-centered active learning, which itself grows out of Cognitive Psychology and Constructivism (Bruning, Schraw, & Ronning, 1999; Powell & Kalina, 2009). Constructivism holds that knowledge is retrieved according to the memory “slots” in which it is originally encoded, and the more crossconnections between these memory slots, the easier the information is to recall. Active learning has been shown to significantly increase these cross-connections and is therefore considered to be highly beneficial to learning. On the other hand, the traditional lecture/memorization model of instruction does not motivate students, does not cause them to learn deeply, and does not stimulate critical thinking. Active learning has been shown many times in many studies to stimulate students to become engaged learners who have higher self-confidence in using English as a result of native speaker interaction. This elevated self-confidence leads to higher motivation, and eventually to higher ability. But the insights of Zoltan Dörnyei (Dörnyei, 2005) have proven to be very important to the evolution of the instructional models used by the author and his Taiwanese colleagues. Dörnyei held that learners imagine themselves functioning in what he referred to as a “cosmopolitan international culture,” meaning a diverse international society of people from many different cultures. The common language of this international society is English, said Dörnyei, so when students imagine themselves interacting with people from many countries, having many native languages, it increases their motivation to learn English in order to be able to communicate effectively and be a valued member of this international society. In the first few semesters of the author’s collaboration, the stated goal was to interest and motivate students by exposing them to American culture. But in the intervening years, the

collaborators have realized that the overall goal of EFL instruction should no longer be simply to allow students to interaction with native speakers, but rather to prepare them to speak with people from many cultures who speak English as a first or second language. Therefore, it is the author’s inescapable conclusion, based on Cognitive Psychology, Constructivism, and Dörnyei’s model, that EFL educators must teach in ways that engage students in active learning and help them imagine themselves in future jobs interacting successfully with people from many countries and backgrounds. Recommendations for Practice The author’s collaboration with Taiwanese colleagues is the result of a special set of circumstances which, admittedly, would be hard for other EFL instructors in Taiwan to replicate. The author is convinced, however, that his personal role performing videoconferences and using other interactive media is not the most important element of the overall collaboration. Rather, the most important aspect is that students have been actively involved in their own learning and that they have had authentic classroom materials available about things in which they are interested. While an American collaborator is a convenient way to do this, every EFL teacher has the ability to engage students in active learning and locate authentic materials for them. This approach, however, requires a different kind of teaching. Here are recommendations from the author, based on five years of experience: 1. If you lecture, it must be no more than 10-15 minutes at a time. Otherwise, you will lose the attention of the students and they will slip into passivity. After brief, focused lectures, provide the students with activities that require them to apply the information presented.

2. Get students active, allowing them to make decisions about their own learning with appropriate direction from you. This can be scary to instructors used to a teachercentered classroom, but engaged, active learners learn more and remember longer. 3. Use authentic materials. Given the volumes of content available via the Internet and other sources, teachers can be creative in finding instructional materials that suit their classes and have the feel of authenticity. 4. Talk with your students about the purpose of their learning English. Help them imagine their own future role in international society, such as being successfully engaged in international business and travel. Although this is a different kind of teaching than is found in many Taiwanese classrooms today, it has been shown again and again to produce students who achieve more and who are motivated to continue to learn after the class, itself, ends. A college education has many practical, utilitarian goals, such as getting a good job and earning a good income. Preparing people to be lifelong learners, however, long after their formal education has ended, is probably the most important overarching goal of education in the second decade of the 21st Century. Therefore, the highest philosophical goal of EFL instructional programs should be to prepare and motivate students to continue learning English after every specific class ends, and after they graduate from their university program and enter the real world beyond.

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