In a 10-week Japan-Canada university online intercultural exchange, students communicated via video posts in Moodle forums. The two teachers chose video posts as the main form of communication because we wanted students to be able to see each other, hear each other’s voices, and show each other things—to have a rich, authentic experience. Video posts consist of a recorded video of a student speaking while looking directly into the lens of a camera, and include the text of the video as well as additional images. Being multimodal, these self-recorded videos capture voice, facial expressions, gestures and other body language, backgrounds, etc.

Multimodal information in video posts also enhances the authenticity of the interaction, leading to student trust, and helps to prevent miscommunication. In addition, the “rich contact” provided by video, in association with high involvement of the self, may result in an increase in Linguistic Self-Confidence (L2C, Sampasivam & Clement, 2014) and could lead to an increase in the Ideal L2 Self. T-tests showed that the means of L2C and the Ideal L2 Self (Dörnyei, 2005) both increased over the course of the project, as well as International Empathy and Interest in the English Language.

During the project, two students identified strongly with English-speaking peers and their motivation to learn English increased. Their images of themselves and what they were capable of changed and they set new goals of study abroad and were able to meet these goals soon after the project ended.

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Abstract Summary
In a 10-week Japan-Canada university online intercultural exchange, students communicated via self-recorded video posts in Moodle forums. Video posts allow students to see each other, hear each other’s voices, and show each other things—to have a rich, authentic experience. Video posts are multimodal, capturing voice, facial expressions, body language, backgrounds, etc.

Multimodal information in video posts enhances the authenticity of the interaction, leading to student trust, and helps to prevent miscommunication. In this exchange, the “rich contact” provided by video, in association with high involvement of the self, resulted in increases in the means of Linguistic Self-Confidence and the Ideal L2 Self.

During the project, two students identified with peers and their motivation to learn English increased. Their images of themselves and what they were capable of changed and they set new goals of study abroad and were able to meet these goals soon after the project ended.

Authors:
Jennifer Claro, Kitami Institute of Technology, Japan

About the Presenter(s)
Professor Jennifer Claro is a University Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer at Kitami Institute of Technology in Japan

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