Telecollaboration for intercultural learning: An overview of projects involving Japan

Telecollaboration is a form of foreign language education which links language students both cross-linguistically as well as interculturally through computer-mediated communication (CMC) (Belz, 2003). There has been significant research on telecollaborative projects (e.g. Abrams, 2003; Bauer, Benedette, Furstenberg, Levet, & Waryn, 2005; Belz, 2001, 2002, 2003; Belz & Kinginger, 2002; Kern, 1996; Kinginger, 1998; Kinginger, Gourves-Hayward, Simpson, 1999; Kramsch & Thorne, 2002; Muller-Hartman, 2000; O’Dowd, 2003; Thorne, 2003; Ware & Kramsch, 2005). Recently, reviews of online language education (Kern, Ware, & Warschauer, 2004) and Internet-mediated intercultural foreign language education (ICFLE) (Thorne, 2005), as well as an edited volume specifically on ICFLE (Belz & Thorne, 2005) have looked at these and other telecollaborative studies. However, to date, specific contexts for telecollaboration have only been reviewed in detail for Spanish-American telecollaboration (O’Dowd, 2005) and German-American telecollaboration (Belz, 2001, 2002; Belz & M_ller-Hartmann, 2003). This paper gives an overview of intercultural learning telecollaborative projects that have involved Japanese students, and based on these and other studies, offers a perspective on best practices (Thorne, 2003) for building telecollaborative partnerships for intercultural learning between Japan and other countries.