E-mail Exchanges: Teaching Language, Culture, and Technology for the 21st Century

Abstract

How can e-mail be integrated into a college preparatory ESL curriculum? Classroom e-mail exchanges between the University College of the Cariboo in Kamloops, BC and the University of Wisconsin, the University of Northeastern fllinois, and Carleton University demonstrate that e-mail can be effective in teaching intercultural awareness, creating a more positive affective climate by providing greater privacy and intimacy, and in making the EAP curriculum more relevant to the needs and aspirations of young people looking ahead to the 21st century.

An ethnographic study of a key-pal project: Learning a foreign language through bilingual communication

“…In particular, the advantages of projects of this type have been underscored by a number of studies in that they raise cultural awareness and/or lower students' affective filters (e.g. Austin, 1998;Ruhe, 1998;Jogan et al, 2001;Kabata, Edasawa, & Kobayashi, 2003;Itakura, 2004). At the same time, positive effects of message exchange projects on learners' acquisition of second languages have also been reported by several studies (e.g.…”

“…Previous studies generally highlight the positive outcome of cross-cultural projects like the one discussed here, but many of them are interested in the effect on cultural understanding (Austin, 1998;Ruhe, 1998;Jogan, Heredia, & Aguilera, 2001;O'Dowd, 2003;Itakura, 2004, among others). There are few studies that examine the effect on second language (henceforth L2) learning in a project of this type (c.f.…”

Using an E‐Mail Exchange to Promote Cultural Learning

“…To ensure that no student experiences a failed exchange, the instructor can have students send him or her a copy of each message, thereby allowing the instructor to monitor the regularity of the correspondence throughout the semester. See Ruhe (1998) for additional suggestions for avoiding nonresponse.…”

Intercultural Communicative Competence and English for Academic Purposes: A Synthesis Review of the Scholarly Literature

“…In particular, as students were finding a sense of community and creating a collective identity as a class using online bulletin boards, they were also learning more about their peers from other cultural backgrounds and gaining an awareness of their cultural differences. Similar to electronic bulletin boards, Ruhe (1998) found that using email exchanges as an anxietylowering pedagogical tool led to increased intercultural awareness and an understanding of shared cultural traits within a global context.…”

“…Rather, intercultural communicative competence might be an outcome of the investigation (Clennel, 1999;Spiliotopoulos & Carey, 2005); an implication based on scholarly inquiry (Basturkmen, 2000;Cheng & Fox, 2008;Ellwood & Nakane, 2009;Singh & Doherty, 2004;Thatcher, 2004); or a part of an EAP course curriculum (Campbell, MacPherson, & Sawkins, 2014;Liu, 2007;Stoller, 1999). There were just four peer reviewed articles (Galante, 2014;Garcia-Perez et al, 2014;Jund, 2010;Ruhe, 1998) and one MA thesis (Martin, 2016) in which concepts related to intercultural communicative competence and EAP were the main focus of the scholarly inquiry. Table 1 summarizes the scholarly works included in the review of the literature.…”