A pedagogical framework of cross-cultural online collaborative projects in English as Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms

Abstract

Many researchers have focused on online collaborative learning, cross-cultural communication, project-based learning, digital literacy, and digital storytelling but there is no pedagogical framework that incorporates these elements for English as Foreign Language (EFL) teaching. This study based on the qualitative design established a pedagogical framework from three different types of cross-cultural collaborative projects with the collected data including students’ artifacts and project structures. We have found that the pedagogical framework proposed here serves as a guide to facilitate different types of cross-cultural projects in their classrooms. The multiple cases of cross-cultural online collaborative projects in an EFL class were taught according to the theories of project-based learning and content language integrated learning alike, proved to follow this pedagogical framework. Implementation is also described to give more details on how the projects were conducted. In the end, opportunities and challenges are provided for future implementation of online collaborative EFL projects.

English as an International Language Project-Based Learning: A Focus on Young Chinese Learners’ Beliefs

“…All interviewees reported a high level of agreement with the six aspects of PBLL, while they claimed to have carried out each aspect during the interview. For example, they highlighted the effective roles of using authentic material, which is consistent with findings in other studies (Mergendoller, 2018;Chen et al, 2021).…”

“…For collaboration, the findings indicated that most learners wanted to cooperate with others in their learning, echoing the claim of EIL that it concerned with both content and interaction (Mckay, 2018). This also concurs with previous studies (Petersen and Nassaji, 2016;Revelle et al, 2020;Chen et al, 2021), which highlighted the significance of collaboration in project-based language learning.…”

A study of Chinese young learners' beliefs in eil project-based language learning in rural schools

“…For collaboration, the findings indicated that most learners like to cooperate with others in their learning, echoing the claim of EIL that it concerned with both content and interaction (Mckay, 2018). This also concurs with previous studies (Petersen and Nassaji, 2016;Revelle et al, 2020;Chen et al, 2021), which highlighted the significance of collaboration in project-based language learning.…”

“…However, all interviewees reported a high level of agreement on the six aspects of PBLL, they illustrated how they carried out each aspect during the interview. For example, they highlighted the effective roles of using authentic material, which is consistent with findings in other studies (Chen et al, 2021).…”