O n f e r e n c e

Response (n=77) 
Germany
France
Netherlands
England
Spain

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-194- 
2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be 
Some cultural trends were observed in the answers: Facebook is used relatively more in 
Spain, while Skype is more frequently used in England. Edmodo is used only by the 
French students. A majority of the students thinks that digital applications should be 
used more at school (65%) and thinks that the use of digital tools can improve language 
learning (66.3%). There is a high correlation between these two items (
r 
= 0.72). 
A total of 73 pupils filled in the 
user experience questionnaire. 
64% of the pupils used 
BigBlueButton as digital communication tool during the telecollaboration sessions, 17% 
used OpenSim, while 9% used Skype. From all pupils, 60% communicated in a tandem 
setting (carrying out tasks in two languages: the foreign language and the native 
language) while 40% communicated in a lingua franca (foreign language for both 
groups). 
In Table 1 the mean scores and their standard deviations are shown for the different 
items. Technical aspects such as the ease to start and use the tool scored satisfactorily 
overall, but there was a lot of variance. There were 18 comments about the technical 
aspects showing that when there were problems, these were due to a bad Internet 
connection (or no connection at all) and poor sound quality (or no sound at all). The 
sound quality scored the lowest in the whole questionnaire (M=2.90, SD=1.08). In spite 
of technical problems, students still enjoyed the opportunity to communicate with foreign 
peers as it can be seen by the high means (and the relative low standard deviations) on 
items such as whether the students like to (1) communicate in the tool environment 
(M=4.06, SD=0.75), (2) meet students from other countries in the tool environment 
(M=4.35, SD=0.63) and (3) learn in the tool environment (M=4.04, SD=0.87). It does 
not seem to matter which tool environment is used, since almost all scores are above 4. 
Aspects like comfort, motivation, satisfaction and especially enjoyment (M=4.29, 
SD=0.64) score very high. It is interesting to notice that students did not feel especially 
nervous when speaking in the target language, as the mean of the scores is neutral 
(M=3.15, SD=1.06). When the different digital tools are compared it becomes clear that 
especially in OpenSim students feel more at ease and less nervous when speaking in the 
target language (M=2.77) compared to Skype (M=3.00) and BigBlueButton (M=3.38). 
The survey reveals that overall the telecollaboration project was positively valued. The 
online tasks were seen as enjoyable, interesting and useful for language learning. As to 
the last item “I 
would like to use online tasks with students from other countries more 
often”, this was rated high with M=4.07 and SD=0.84.