Understanding L2 Teachers’ Attitudes via Their Uses of Multimodal Resources in Telecollaboration
Understanding Attitude in Intercultural Virtual Communication - Ana Oskoz
Meei-Ling Liaw [+ ]
National Taichung University
Sabrina Priego [+ ]
Université Laval, Quebec, Canada
Description
Many studies have demonstrated that telecollaboration has the potential for developing intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 1997), an essential requirement for both learners and teachers in the globalized world. One of the emerging directions in telecollaborative learning is multimodal communication (O’Dowd, 2016). Thus, to adequately interpret the effects of telecollaboration for language teacher education, it demands a sound understanding of how multimodal resources are used and how this may affect teachers’ attitudes or abilities to ‘decenter’ (Byram, 1989) from pre-existing notions of language learning and teaching as well as from their own culture and language. In this chapter, we report on a telecollaborative project that provided L2 teachers in different countries with opportunities to engage in professional dialogues via multimodal means. We specifically focused on the participating teachers’ attitudes and on their changes during the telecollaboration.