O n f e r e n c e

Methodological problems and challenges
The first difficulty the researchers encountered when designing the project was to match the 
instructional objectives of the two courses and to meet the needs of the students of 
different academic majors. We decided to lean on their needs of using English to 
communicate and strengthening their intercultual sensitivity as the rationale for the 
collaboration. Second, the researchers had to decide on the means of communication and 
the tasks that both sides would find them meaningful to engage in. Since the Canadian 
participants have the needs to create multicultural reading materials and the Taiwanese 
students have been creating digial stories, co-writing of digital stories became the logical 
choice for the collaborative task. Since the participants come from multiple linguistic 
backgrounds, the researchers then decided to take advantage of it and have them create 
French, English, and Chinese trilingual stories. The third obstacle was match the academic 
calendars between the two universities. To overcome this problem, the students in Taiwan 
had to start the project before the semester began.
As for conducting the study, the obvious difficulty is getting access to students’ 
correspondences. Since the study aims at looking into the participants reactions and 
experiences in the telecollaborative writing processes, being able to see the interactions 
(both synchronous and asynchronous) is imperative.

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Nevertheless, the participants might not be alwasy willing to share their entire 
corresponding processes, we might not have the entire correspondence data for analysis. 
Thus, interviews and surveys are also needed for in-depth understanding of the processes 
that the participants had gone through.
References 
Bahktin, M.M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. U.S. A: The University of Texas P 
Cummins, J. (1979). Linguistic interdependence and the educational development of 
bilingual children. Revue of Educational research, 49, 80-95.
Cummins, J. (2000). Language, power, and pedagogy : Bilingual children in the crossfire. 
Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. 

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2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be