Linguistic alignment and focus on form in task-based intra-institutional telecollaboration

This presentation will outline results of a semester-long mobile-based intra-institutional Telecollaboration study between learners of English and learners of Chinese. This proof-of-concept study required participants to use the mobile app WeChat in a series of cross-cultural activities, with participants serving as “cultural experts” on their home culture. Because of clear differences in target language ability of the two groups, tasks were sculpted that would complement the specific curriculum of each class (English composition for international students (face-to-face) and Gateway to China (online), respectively). All participants used a mixture of English and Chinese during the online interaction. Each week the Chinese L1 (English Composition) students received tasks related to their culminating project, which required students to develop a ‘survival guide’ for future Chinese students coming to study at the host institution. The English L1 students (Gateway to China) were required to serve as cultural consultants during these tasks and, because of the different curricular focus of their course, were also given specific grammatical structures to practice during the interaction. The degree of linguistic alignment will be discussed as will text-, video-, and audio-based Language Related Episodes. Lexical and syntactic alignment was determined by using the ALIGN software (Duran, Paxton and Fusaroli, 2019) as well as the Stanford POS taggers for English and Chinese. I will argue for the use of mobile technologies in Telecollaboration research (in terms of authenticity) as well as the advantage of employing geographically proximate learners rather than those separated by time zones. Duran, N., Paxton, A., & Fusaroli, R. (2019). ALIGN: Analyzing Linguistic Interactions with Generalizable techNiques—a Python Library. Psychological Methods.