In this presentation we (Sauro, Spector Cohen & O'Dowd) examine a three-country teacher education partnership, designed to English teachers to innovative uses of technology, using the following four points introduced by O'Dowd's in his 2015 keynote at Eurocall: (1) the effectiveness of this partnership for contributing to the goals of (foreign) language education, (2) the degree to which this partnership sufficiently addressed the needs and challenges of twenty-first century educators, (3) what future research directions could be drawn from this experience, and (4) how telecollaborative initiatives outside of CALL could be used to inspire or enhance future similar exchanges.

1. Innovations in Teaching?
A Critical
Look at a
Three-
Country
Teacher
Education
Online
Partnership
Shannon Sauro Elana Spector Cohen Robert O’Dowd
Malmö University Tel Aviv University University of León
shannon.sauro@mah.se espector@post.tau.ac.il robert.odowd@unileon.es

2. Examining the Effectiveness of a
Three-Country Partnership
1. The effectiveness of this partnership for contributing to the
goals of (foreign) language education
2. The degree to which this partnership sufficiently
addressed the needs and challenges of twenty-first
century educators
3. What future research directions could be drawn from this
experience
4. How telecollaborative initiatives outside of CALL can be
used to inspire or enhance future similar exchanges.
O’Dowd (2015)

3. Purpose: Innovations in Teaching
Origins of the project: Adapting Telecollaboration to different university
learning formats and contexts
Inspired by the Sharing Perspectives Model of Exchange
http://www.sharingperspectivesfoundation.com
1. Online lectures from different teachers
2. Viewed and discussed by participating classrooms
3. Online interaction about the lectures by multicultural groups
4. Project work inspired by the exchange
Aims:
To move from a lecture-based ‘transfer of knowledge’ format to
an approach where content and student interaction are
integrated.
Provide students with access to experts in different areas of FL
education.
To provide future FL teachers with first-hand experience of
online intercultural collaboration.

4. Topics & Tasks
Three Modules on CALL Topics
1. Complete assigned readings
2. View expert-created video on
the topic
3. Respond to 2 out of 4 prompts on
the topic/readings/video

5. The Partners

6. University of León
Degree: MA in Secondary School Education
• Future EFLT teachers in secondary schools
in Spain
• Course: “Innovations in Education”
• Participation in project was obligatory for
all 12 students

7. Tel Aviv University
Course: Curriculum Design and Materials
Development
• Graduate students in International MA
TESOL program (EMI degree program)
• Participation was compulsory
• All 14 students in the program participated

8. Malmö University
Course: Language, Text & Culture
• Secondary school teacher-candidates
• 1st term (English as 1st subject)
• 3rd term (English as 2nd or 3rd subject)
• Due to class size, participation was
voluntary
• 22 students participated out of 91 actively
enrolled in the course.

9. 1: Contributing to the Goals of FL
Education
“I found that the writing skills of some
commenters were below average and not
quite on par with what might be expected
of someone with intentions to teach the
language professionally.”
(Feedback from Tel Aviv student)

10. FL Learning Goals (Malmö Only)
 Interaction in the Target Language
 Persistence
 Pushed Output (Swain, 1985)
 Accuracy
 Complexity

11. Activity Per Topic
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
León Tel Aviv Malmö
Flipped
TC
Fandom
Participation
was voluntary

12. Persistence of Malmö Students
Enrolled
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
91 enrolled > 22 participated > 10 participated in 2 sessions > 2 completed all 3

13. A Closer Look
Who participated?
Students who were studying English as 1st or 2nd subject
Students who identified as particularly weak writers
Diagnosed with dyslexia or learning disabilities
Self-identified as needing to improve their English
Students with a strong interest in technology
Who persisted?
Those who self-identified as needing to improve their
English
Students whose first subject was English

14. Pushed Output
“Negotiating meaning needs to incorporate
the notion of being pushed toward the
delivery of a message that is not only
conveyed, but that is conveyed precisely,
coherently, and appropriately.”
(Swain, 1985, 248-9)

15. Accuracy: Error Ratio
Error Ratio*
MIN
MAX
MEAN
SD
0.00
0.72
0.31
0.19
*Number of grammatical errors per 10 words.
(Van Beuningen, De Jong & Kuiken, 2012)
Errors were primarily of the
following types commonly
found in academic papers
from students at this level:
• Agreement
• Spelling
• Preposition choice
• Word form

16. Complexity: Word Frequency
1-500 500-3000 >3000 Academic
MIN
MAX
MEAN
SD
0.64
0.92
0.78
0.05
0.00
0.23
0.12
0.04
0.03
0.20
0.10
0.04
0.04
0.27
0.12
0.06
All 47 posts by the Malmö students were run individually through the
COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English; Davis, 2008) text
analyzer to identify the distribution of high and low frequency words
and academic words relative to those in the COCA.

17. Complexity: Variety & Readability
Lexical Richness
(Index of Guiraud)
Lexical Density Gunning-Fog Index
(Readability)
MIN
MAX
MEAN
SD
4.54
8.61
7.05
0.92
44.62
85.71
60.85
10.01
6.95
23.77
12.86
3.34
1. Lexical richness more comparable to that of short essays
(Van Beunigen et al., 2012) than text chat (Sauro, 2012).
2. Posts were lexically dense (60% content words).
3. Posts were written between12th and 13th grade reading level
(final year of schooling/first year of university in the US).

18. Personal FL Learning Goals
Mediante este proyecto, yo como alumna creo que es
interesante a la hora de mejorar el nivel de inglés
escrito, no sólo en cuanto al vocabulario y gramática, si
no también la capacidad de mantener conversaciones
sobre algún tema, tanto estando de acuerdo como en
contra.
As a student I think this project is interesting when it
comes to improving the standard of written English. Not
only does it help in terms of vocabulary and grammar ,
but also the ability to engage in discussions about
certain topics, whether or not you agree with your
partners.
(Feedback from León Student)

19. 2. Meeting the Needs of the 21st
Century Educator
“Today, because of rapid economic and
social change, schools have to prepare
students for jobs that have not yet been
created, technologies that have not yet
been invented and problems that we don’t
yet know will arise.”
(Andreas Schleicher, OECD Education Directorate, 2010;
cited in Suto, 2013, p. 3)

20. 21st Century Skills
Multiple conceptualizations in the literature
“The inter-disciplinary skills most commonly
regarded as essential for the 21st Century are
problem-solving, ICT operations and concepts,
communication, collaboration, and information
literacy” (Suto, 2013, p. 22).
Our focus 
innovations in technology / digital literacies for
teaching and learning
communication and collaboration
(inter)cultural awareness and learning

21. 21st Century Skills

22. Ways of Thinking
Creativity and innovation, critical thinking, problem
solving, decision making, and learning to learn (or
metacognition)
“This project made me realize that learning
can be not only limited by books, exercises
and teachers but it can be more diverse,
students may interact with other students
and it is also called learning process and not
entertainment.”
(Reflection from Tel Aviv student)
But…
“It was interesting to know the opinions of other
teachers, it helps anyway to share opinions and to pick
ideas from others experiences. But the discussions
were not so engaging maybe because everyone just
wrote his own answer to the questions and no one felt
like disagree with others. It is mostly when someone
disagree with the other that the discussion can be
interesting.”
(Feedback from Malmö Student)

23. “What I liked most about the project is that you have a feeling that
you do not do this task on your own but you do it all together
with other students from different countries. Even though you
leave your own opinion in your comment and you write it on
your own, you feel that you work as a group.”
(Feedback from Tel Aviv Student)
Ways of Working
Communication and teamwork
BUT…
“If I have to make any suggestion, it would be some kind of common
activity between the three universities involved, an activity that in
some way creates something, I mean, writing something in
common (not just commenting about somethin), or something
similar.”
(Feedback from León Student)

24. Tools for Working
General knowledge and information communication technology
(ICT) literacy
“It was a very interesting project because gave us the
possibility to try new tools and to explore new
possibilities that we can use in the future with our
students. I think that is very important to have a
knowledge about the possibilities that the new
technologies can give us.”
(Feedback from Malmö Student)
.
But…
“I would recommend to make the interaction
more direct. It would be great if students had
the chance to talk to each other directly,
maybe by using any service similar to skype.”
(Feedback from León Student)

25. Living in the World
Citizenship, life and career, and personal and social responsibility,
including cultural awareness and competence
“I continue to realize how important it [technology] is in language
teaching. ..in a job interview I had just yesterday for a position
teaching online … I was thrown into interacting with the online
platform, and asked how much experience, and with what
programs and platforms, I had with technology as a teaching tool.”
(Reflection from Tel Aviv student)
“ ...the discovery of the flipped classroom was a real milestone and
career changer for me.”
(Reflection from Tel Aviv student)

26. Living in the World
Citizenship, life and career, and personal and social responsibility,
including cultural awareness and competence
“
“I have noticed a lot of differences between the other future FL teachers
and me, and I consider that these differences have been crucial to provide
me a wider perspective about FL teaching. I have been able to see
problems that can appear in class from a different perspective taking into
account geographical and cultural factors, and I think it has provided me a
more global view of a class of FL.”
(Feedback from León student)
But…
“I have liked the idea in general. I mean seeing what
people from other parts of the world think about the
same stuff i am working with, listening to their ideas, or
saying he/she is right, that's a good point, I should have
thought about it...yet I have the feeling that it was too
short. I would have liked it to be both more intense, and
maybe to get to know each other in deep.”
(Feedback from León Student)

27. 3: Future Research Directions
“What ways should telecollaborative
researchers be framing future research studies
in the area?”
(O’Dowd, 2015)

28. How to Foster Teacher Identity
Telecollaboration facilitates a space where student-teachers
must negotiate their teacher and student identities, which
student-teachers can use to gain a better understanding of their
teaching Selves (Kumaravadivelu, 2012)
“Having to log-in multiple times to write a comment is something easily
forgotten and placed low on a priority list when seminar papers,
final projects and presentations must be done.”
(Feedback from Tel Aviv Student)
“…it is hard when a teacher says that it is good if you do this but you
don’t have to and you won’t be graded on it. As a student you
have so much to do and if it is not graded it will not be prioritized
and that was the case for me so only participated one time and I
think that is to little to really learn or get anything out of it.”
(Feedback from Malmö Student)

29. Taking OIE Beyond CALL
“Unfortunately, reports of OIE activity
outside of foreign language learning remain
scarce ... Educators often struggle to see
the value of the activity or are unable to
conceptualise how such student-centred
online collaboration could contribute to
their coursework.”
(O’Dowd, forthcoming)

30. Linguistic Landscape Analysis
Hult (2009)
Linguistic Landscape (LL) attempts to
understand the motives, uses, ideologies,
language varieties and contestations of multiple
forms of ‘languages’ as they are displayed in
public spaces…
Bridging sociolinguistics and CALL
Examination and discussion of the presence, function and
salience of language in different contexts.

31. 4: Telecollaborative Initiatives from
Outside CALL
“What can we learn from telecollaborative
initiatives which are being employed
outside of CALL?”
(O’Dowd, 2015)

32. Sharing Perspective Foundation
“The aim of the online discussions is to have the
participants reflect upon the content of the
lectures from a personal perspective… and by
focusing on personal experiences the
participants gain insights into the impact of the
topic on the lives of themselves and their
peers.”

33. Personal Perspectives from the
Internship
“I was an intern at a school in Sweden, and the teachers didn’t have any
control over the childrens computers in the classroom. The children check
facebook, play games, even some was looking at porno sites, and this
happened daily in the classroom.” (Malmö)
“I actually experienced this problem on my practice at upper secondary
school. They were having a telecollaboration in Sweden with USA and they
solved the problem by having the Swedish pupils in school at 7 PM.”
(Malmö)
“I do not think that making students go to school in the evening is a
good solution. Did parents agree? And what about students? They
usually do no like going to school after hours.” (León)
“I don’t know about parents but the students really liked to Skype with
the pupils from USA so they did not complain, they actually did it with
joy.” (Malmö)

34. Insight on the Self and Other
“It was interesting to see how other students view
the profession and their opinions on using modern
technology in teaching. It also gave me many
ideas and made me think on how I am going to
design my teaching later on.”
(Feedback from Malmö Student)

35. References
Davies, M. (2008). The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. Retrieved
from: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
Hult, F.M. (2009). Language ecology and linguistic landscape analysis. In E. Shohamy & D. Gorter (Eds),
Linguistic landscape: Expanding the scenery (pp. 88-104). London: Routledge.
Kumaravadivelu, B. (2012). Language teacher education for a global society. London: Routledge.
O’Dowd, R. (2015). Twenty years on and still reinventing the wheel? A critical review of Telecollaborative
exchange in foreign language education. Keynote address delivered at the Eurocall Conference, Padua,
Italy, August 26-29.
O’Dowd, R. (Forthcoming). Looking to the future of online intercultural exchange in university education. Under
review.
Sauro, S. (2012). L2 performance in text-chat and spoken discourse. System, 40 335-348.
Sharing Perspectives. (2015). Retrieved from: http://www.sharingperspectivesfoundation.com/
Suto, I. (2013). 21st Century Skills: Ancient, ubiquitous, enigmatic? Research Matters. A Cambridge Assessment
Publication,15, 2-8.
Swain, M. (1985). Communicative Competence: Some roles of Comprehensible Input and Comprehensible
Output in its Development. In S. Gass & C. Madden (Eds.), Input in second language acquisition (pp. 235–253),
Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Van Beuningan, C., de Jong, N.H., & Kuiken, F. (2012). Evidence on the effectiveness of comprehensive error
correction in Dutch multilingual classroom. Language Learning, 62, 1-41.
Slides Available At: http://www.slideshare.net/Shansauro