Julie A. Belz

Teachers as Intercultural Learners: Negotiating German–American Telecollaboration along the Institutional Fault Line

This article examines how social, cultural, and institutional affordances and constraints in a telecollaborative foreign language learning partnership shape the agency of online teachers. In particular, it details how various aspects of schools and schooling impact the negotiation, execution, and management of a German–American virtual course from the perspectives of the teachers. These aspects include: the misalignment of academic calendars, local patterns of socialization into the teaching profession, institution–specific classroom scripts, systems of learning assessment, student workloads, and the physical layouts of local institutions and social forms of classroom collaboration. The article presents a self–reflective case study of our 10–month electronic negotiation, execution, and management of a German–American telecollaborative partnership within the constructivist paradigm of social realism. Using Agars (1994) notion of the linguistic rich point and examining patterns of communication, specific lexical items, and grammatical structures, the study uncovers how the culturally varying nature of schools and schooling is linguistically encoded in the texts of electronic correspondence.

Socio-cultural perspectives on pragmatic development in foreign language learning: Microgenetic case studies from telecollaboration and residence abroad

Abstract The aim of this essay is to explore and to illustrate the complementarity of intercultural pragmatics and socio-cultural approaches to developmental research in foreign language settings, including both the telecollaborative classroom and residence abroad. Drawing on socio-cultural theory and language socialization research, we review the complex nature of pragmatic competence and the role that participation in a range of interactive discourse settings may play in its development. The issue of address form use (tu  vs. vous  in French; and du  vs. Sie  in German) is taken as a particularly revealing example of the complexity involved in developing second language (L2) pragmatic ability. We examine precise ways in which participation in a variety of interactive intercultural discourses serves to enhance learners’ awareness and use of address form choice. We present case studies of learning in two settings: 1) electronically mediated interaction in the telecollaborative language classroom, where peer-to-peer conversation between classes at home and abroad serves to broaden the discourse options of instructed learning; and 2) language learning in residence abroad, where learners may—or may not—engage in a variety of interactive discourse practices. If multivalent participation is a crucial condition for the development of L2 pragmatic competence, the profession should continue to examine the contexts of learning environments in these terms.

THE ROLE OF COMPUTER MEDIATION IN THE INSTRUCTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF L2 PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE

This article provides a selective review of the role of computer mediation in the instruction and development of second language (L2) or interlanguage pragmatic competence within foreign and second language education. Both researchers and practitioners have noted consistently that several aspects of the teaching and tutored learning of L2 pragmatics have been reported as problematic and/or underexplored in the published knowledge base to date, including the availability and authenticity of instructional materials, the provision of opportunities for the performance and practice of L2 pragmatic competence in meaningful interactions, the relative lack of developmental data documenting the precise (and varied) pathways of L2 pragmatic competence over time, and the efficacy of particular pedagogical interventions in classroom-based L2 pragmatics instruction. The role of computer mediation in each of these underexplored areas is examined with a special emphasis on the teaching and learning of L2 pragmatics in Internet-mediated partnerships and on the use of (learner) corpora in L2 pragmatics instruction and research.

Intercultural Questioning, Discovery and Tension in Internet-mediated Language Learning Partnerships

This paper examines the use of questioning as an index of intercultural competence (IC) in an Internet-mediated, German–American language learning partnership. Such telecollaborative, intercultural exchanges are becoming increasingly more common as a means of providing students at one location with cost-effective access to distally located representatives of the languaculture under study (Agar, 1994); nevertheless, researchers have not paid close attention to the linguistic characterisation of the development of IC in such partnerships, despite the fact that text- based computer-mediated communication currently constitutes the primary means of telecollaborative interaction. In his well-known model of IC, Byram (1997) links the use of appropriate questioning techniques to the operation of skills of discovery, one means by which speakers in intercultural encounters may develop impressions and attitudes of one another. I examine the ways in which the number, type, chronological placement and content of the questions posed by participants each side of a trans-Atlantic exchange may influence the processes of impression formation in intercultural personal relationship building. Suggestions are made for ways in which research on computer-mediated relationship building in communication studies and foreign language education may enrich one another.

The myth of the deficient communicator

The basic argument of this paper is that multiple language use in learner output is not always and exclusively indicative of the deficient nature (V. Cook, 1999; Firth and Wagner, 1997; Kramsch, 1997, 1998) of the language learner with respect toan idealized monolingual second language (L2) linguistic norm. Multilingual written learner texts and learners’ explications of these texts are examined in detail. These data suggest that learners conceptualize themselves as multicompetent (V. Cook, 1991, 1992, 1999) speakers who regularly, playfully and creatively decouple conventionalized L2 form-meaning pairings in order to produce and use their own locally relevant L2 signs. Within mainstream Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research practices and correctness-oriented Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) methodologies, this departure from norm approximation may be interpreted to indicate the reduced (Harder, 1980) or deficient nature of the learner. Within a Vygotskian approach to the psychology of mind and language learning (e.g., Lantolf, 2000a; Lantolf and Appel, 1994; Vygotsky, 1978, 1986), however, the learner’s playful use of multiple linguistic codes may index resourceful, creative and pleasurable displays of multicompetence (V. Cook, 1991,1992).