Promoting pre- and in-service teachers’ co-construction of knowledge through an intercultural telecollaboration project

Abstract

This paper reports an intercultural telecollaboration project between four pre- and in-service second/foreign language teachers that sought to analyze how knowledge was co-constructed among team members through online social negotiation. Data consisting of transcripts of two conversations using the conferencing platform Skype were analyzed using a taxonomy adapted from Gunawardena, Lowe and Anderson’s (1997) model. It was found that the highest amount of utterances (62%) fell into Phase I (Sharing/comparing of information) and that few occurrences fell into higher phases of negotiation of meaning (Phases IV and V). These findings raised awareness regarding task’s design, structure and content in order to foster higher levels of negotiation of meaning and to prevent potential lack of involvement.

Keywords

• telecollaboration
• meaning negotiation
• online social negotiation
• co-construction of knowledge
• interaction analysis
• multimodal asynchronous tools