Abstract
This research project brought together three unlikely, overlapping cohorts of pre-service and in-service teachers to respond to the missing link between theory and practice for prospective teaching English-as-a-foreign-language (TEFL) teachers and the urgent need of Taiwanese elementary school teachers for English-language instruction in their respective subjects as part of Taiwan’s goal of becoming a bilingual nation in 2030. This study examined the effects of participating in a telecollaborative community of practice on cultivating teacher efficacy and intercultural communication competence among prospective/in-service teachers and American school teachers who exchanged ideas online. In this project, nine prospective TEFL teachers from a college in Taiwan were paired with six teachers from a public elementary school and four teachers from the local American school in a telecollaboration project using English as the lingua franca for intercultural communication among 4 to 5 group members. Participants posted their self-representations on Padlet, responded to the educational and cultural scenarios, interacted with each other asynchronously via VoiceThread, and held a synchronous session via Zoom. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected using the Intercultural Sensitivity Survey (ISS), the Teacher Efficacy Scale (TEC), and the pre- and post-project open-ended surveys. Paired samples t-test results of the TEC and the ISS questionnaire show different results. The qualitative analyses of the surveys and interviews indicate that most participants welcomed the opportunity to collaborate online with culturally diverse partners and acknowledged developing a new understanding of each other’s teaching context.
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Liao, MH. (2023). Building a Telecollaborative Community of Practice Among Pre-service English Teachers, In-Service Teachers, and International-School Teachers. In: Huang, YM., Rocha, T. (eds) Innovative Technologies and Learning. ICITL 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14099. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40113-8_24
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