Teachers’ perspectives on telecollaboration in secondary school foreign language education

Abstract

In recent years, telecollaboration has proved to be a useful tool in the acquisition of foreign languages and intercultural communicative skills (Belz 2003b; Clavel-Arroitia, Pennock-Speck 2015a, 2015b; Hewitt, Brett 2007; O’Dowd 2007; Su et al., 2005). This paper focuses on how prepared secondary-school teachers believe they are in order to successfully implement telecollaboration in the classroom. To gather information on their views we carried out an online survey of 179 secondary school foreign language teachers and a series of focus group interviews in the context of a European project, TeCoLa. The advantage of the double- pronged approach to data collection, quantitative and qualitative, is that it provides us with a more complete picture of teachers’ needs.