Activity theory perspective on student-reported contradictions in international telecollaboration.

ABSTRACT

This process-oriented study focuses on contradictions that emerged in a WebCT bulletin board collaboration among English learners from Japan, Mexico and Russia, and explains them from the perspective of activity theory (Leont'ev, 1978, 1981; Engestrom, 1987, 1999). The study identified a) two intra-cultural contradictions--to post or not to post, to sound formal or informal; b) three inter-cultural contradictions--unequal contribution, genre clash/plagiarism, clash of topic choice; and c) three technology-related contradictions--message overload as hindering community formation, bulletin board as too "slow" when compared to chat, and names and gender confusion. These contradictions were catalyzed by the clash of curricula versus interactive learning paradigms (Lemke, 1998): the outcomes of different cultures-of-use of computer technologies (Thorne, 2003), instructors' mediation, and resources available to learners within their broader sociocultural contexts. The study concludes with a discussion of whether the learning paradigms can be bridged and cultures-of-use of computer technologies aligned.

INTRODUCTION

Earlier studies on international telecollaboration (1) were primarily descriptive, focusing on the design and implementation aspects, or framed within a product-oriented paradigm (Chapelle, 2001; Warschauer & Kern, 2000). Over the last decade, however, there has been a shift toward process-oriented research and a focus on the contexts of computer use and evolving interaction. The most recent studies on telecollaboration (Belz, 2001, 2002, 2003; Belz & Muller-Hartmann, 2003; Belz & Thorne, 2006; Chase, Macfadyen, Reeder & Roche, 2002; Kramsch & Thorne, 2002; O'Dowd, 2003, 2005; Schneider & von der Emde, 2006; Thorne, 2003, 2006; Ware, 2005) explore the kinds of cultural contact afforded by a technological medium. Special attention in recent studies is paid to tensions and misunderstandings that might hinder intercultural learning (Belz, 2001, 2002, 2003; Kramsch & Thorne, 2002; O'Dowd, 2003, 2005; Thorne, 2003; Ware, 2005). These studies relate online tensions to the socio-cultural dimension of telecollaboration and the ways students make sense how their partners make communicative choices.

Building on previous research on online intercultural misunderstandings, I explore contradictions, a term used by activity theorists in reference to problems, ruptures, breakdowns and clashes (Kuutti, 1996), that emerged in the 12-week long interaction on the WebCT (2) multithreaded bulletin board (3) among English learners from Japan, Mexico and Russia. More specifically, the study (4) builds on previous research by Thorne (2003), an activity theorist, and his concept "cultures-of-use" of an artifact, defined as "the historically sedimented characteristics that accrue to a CMC tool from its everyday use" (p. 40).

Whereas previous studies mainly focused on students from the USA and Western Europe, participants of this study were students from Japan, Mexico and Russia who have received less attention in the research on international telecollaboration (Carney, 2005; Murray, 2000). Participants in this study were significantly culturally distanced from one another in geopolitical and economic terms. (5) Related to this feature is Belz's (2002) argument that national differences in computer access and technological know- how raise new "important ethical and methodological questions for telecollaborative foreign language study" (p. 73).

In previous studies the focus was on language exchange task-based assignments, such as discussion of texts among students from the USA learning European languages and their European counterparts learning English (Belz, 2003; Belz & Thorne, 2006; Kramsch & Thorne, 2002; O'Dowd, 2005; Ware, 2005). In comparison, this study involved English language learners who engaged in asynchronous interaction in English on their topics of interest. The choice of such a format for the project stemmed from my personal experience using WebCT in graduate classes I took earlier, which appeared to be effective in two ways: 1) the interaction was contingent, 2) students were granted more agency and a sense of ownership of the bulletin board (Potts, 2001). I was hoping that a similar effect would be achieved through the use of WebCT in the project under investigation.

Furthermore, previous studies were ethnographic and operated with the two levels of analysis--a complex interplay of macro-level (social contexts) and micro-level (agency) phenomena (Belz, 2002, 2003). I use the activity theory framework (Basharina, 2005; Cole & Engestrom, 1994; Engestrom 1987, 1999; Lantolf, 2000; Lantolf & Genung, 2002; Leont'ev, 1974, 1978, 1981; Mantovani, 1996; Nardi, 1996; Thorpe, 2002; Vygotsky, 1978, 1934/86) with its key notions of mediation, contradictions, community, culture and cognition, which provides an additional avenue to explore intercultural tensions.

In what follows I review the previous research on tensions in telecollaboration. I then describe the telecollaborative project under investigation and methodology used in this study. In the findings section I focus on major contradictions that emerged in the process of telecollaboration (to be consistent with the activity theory vocabulary, tensions will be referred to as contradictions in the rest of the paper). I conclude this paper with a discussion of the practical implications.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Interrelationship between Contexts and Contradictions

The exploration of intercultural misunderstandings in recent research often leads scholars to investigate the complex interrelationship between structure (i.e., context and setting) and agency (i.e., situated activity and self), given that in online interaction we deal with at least two contextual layers: off-line, sitting in front of the computer screens in the context of culture; and online, through textual representations of selves (Lam, 2000) in the context of situation (Kramsch, 1993). It has been argued that the chances of misunderstanding in online environments increase due to the nature of an online medium which relies on typing and Internet speed, as well as a lack of paralinguistic and non-verbal cues (Ferrara, Bruner & Whittemore, 1991; Mantovani, 1996; Murray, 1991; Yates & Orlikowski, 1993). In addition, it was recently found that the sources of misunderstanding in online telecollaboration are rooted in the broader socio-cultural contexts, which inform the linguistic choices of students online. The newly identified variables behind online contradictions include differences in students' frames of reference with regards to local discursive norms of language use (Kramsch & Thorne, 2002), language valuation (Belz, 2002; Ware, 2005), the ways students co-construe the context of online communication (Ware, 2005) and their communication partners (Meagher & Castanos, 1996; O'Dowd, 2003, 2005).

Kramsch and Thorne (2002), for example, interrogate the presumption that computer-mediated communication naturally helps learners to understand their partners' local conditions of language use and to build a global common ground for intercultural understanding. In their study of French-American telecollaboration, quite often students run across intercultural misunderstanding based on the limited knowledge of the "different social and cultural conventions under which each party is operating" (p. 90) and "very little awareness that such an understanding is even necessary" (p. 98). Most of the French interlocutors, for example, used factual, impersonal, dispassionate genres of writing. They extensively used argument building logical connectors such as "for example," "however," "moreover," as well as made nuanced corrections to what they felt were American misjudgments about the situation in France. By contrast, the American students, who initiated this exchange in order to understand "how they live their everyday lives" viewed this instance of Internet-mediated communication as a ritual of mutual trust building and used an informal, highly personal genre. The authors explain the misunderstanding as "a clash of cultural frames caused by the different resonances of the two languages for each group of speakers and their different understanding of appropriate genres" (p. 94-95). In Kramsch and Thorne's interpretation, "each group mapped the communicative genres they were familiar with onto their foreign language communicative practices in cyberspace." Consequently, the educational implication drawn from their study is to prepare students to deal with global communicative practices that require mastering "far more than local communicative competence" (p. 99).

A number of recent studies found that the contradictions may also take place because of the misalignment of academic calendars, institutionalized classroom scripts, methods of learning accreditation, academic socialization and technological access (Belz, 2002; Belz & Muller-Hartmann, 2003; O'Dowd, 2005; Thorne, 2003). These studies emphasize the importance of physical contexts consisting of mediating tools and other people in shaping an online interaction.