It has been widely agreed that when teaching a language, teachers need to provide students with opportunities to engage within the entire spectrum of possibilities for language development and affordances for intercultural learning. Telecollaboration has been one approach widely adopted for such opportunities and affordances for nearly 30 years (e.g., Liaw & Le Master, 2010; Liaw & English, 2017; O’Dowd, 2013). However, one should not assume that language teachers are interculturally competent by default. Thus, more recently, telecollaboration has also been implemented to facilitate language teachers’ intercultural learning (e.g., Liaw & Priego, 2021; Liaw & Wu, 2020; Wu, et al, 2020).

As communication technologies advance, newer and more sophisticated ICT tools, including virtual reality (VR), are being used for telecollaboration. Although researchers have applied different models and approaches of multimodal analysis to understand the specific features of VR on students’ language learning (Dubovi, 2022; Friend & Mills, 2021) and intercultural communication (Rustam et al., 2020), very little has been done to look into language teacher telecollaboration via VR technologies. This presentation reports a study in which student teachers of an additional language (LX) (Dewaele, 2017) from different geographical locations and cultural backgrounds participated in a project to cultivate their critical views on LX teaching and intercultural communication skills. The participants interacted and discussed LX teaching/learning issues in VR environments during the telecollaboration. Screen recordings of the participants’ interactions in VR environments were analyzed by applying Multimodal (inter)action Analysis (MIA) (Norris, 2004) as the analytical framework to systematically unpack the thematical saliencies and significant moments of the participating LX teachers' intercultural interaction. The findings revealed that they not only took on different approaches to host meetings but also shifted attention/awareness during the intercultural communication processes. As communication became complex, they were challenged to overcome differences to reach the collaborative LX teacher intercultural learning goal. Based on the findings, this presenter offers suggestions and caveats for future designing and researching intercultural telecollaboration in VR environments.

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Abstract Summary
As communication technologies advance, newer and more sophisticated ICT tools, including virtual reality (VR), are being used for telecollaboration. Although researchers have applied different models and approaches to understand the specific features of VR on students’ language learning and intercultural communication, little has been done to examine language teacher telecollaboration via VR technologies. This presentation reports a study in which student teachers of an additional language (LX) from different geographical locations and cultural backgrounds participated in a project to cultivate their critical views on LX teaching and intercultural communication skills. The participants interacted and discussed LX teaching/learning issues in VR environments during the telecollaboration. Screen recordings of the participants’ interactions in VR environments were analyzed to unpack the thematical saliencies and significant moments of the participating LX teachers' intercultural interaction. Based on the findings, this presenter offers suggestions and caveats for future designing and researching intercultural telecollaboration in VR environments.

Authors:
Meei-Ling Liaw, National Taichung University of Education, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Meei-Ling LIaw is a University Professor/Principal Lecturer at National Taichung University of Education in Taiwan

See this presentation on the full schedule – Saturday Schedule

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