Successful telecollaboration exchanges in primary and secondary education: what are the challenges?

Abstract

The TeCoLa project promotes telecollaboration to foster meaningful foreign language learning particularly in secondary schools throughout Europe. In 2018, a number of pilot experiences are being conducted. This paper focusses on one of these pilot experiences, where learners from a Dutch secondary school and a Spanish primary school telecollaborated in Spanish and English by carrying out four tasks (creation of vlogs) asynchronously and sharing them in their group’s Padlet wall. Different sources of data were gathered (recordings, surveys, and interviews) in order to be able to disentangle the factors that might play a role in successful telecollaboration exchanges and language learning experiences. Overall learners seemed to enjoy the experience, but the Spanish participants found the exchanges much more meaningful than the Dutch ones. This might well be related to the autonomy given to the students, who might have needed further guidance to benefit fully from the exchange.