No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This study investigates the effect of a cross-cultural bilingual communication project on students' second language learning. A collaborative key-pal project was conducted between Japanese university students learning English and Canadian university students learning Japanese. Ethnographic data were collected from the students' exchanged messages to examine whether the project provided students with opportunities for language learning. If so, what were the common types of language learning? How did students use the two languages in their bilingual communication?We also investigated what factors might facilitate or inhibit frequent and dynamic message exchanges. The data indicated that the students learned a great deal through the exchanges both at the vocabulary-and syntactic-level. However, counter to our expectation, explicit error corrections were very rare. It was also found that understanding of the language level, strength of communication skills, and shared interest affected their communication and the success of this kind of project.

This paper discusses issues surrounding the development and implementation of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) at the curriculum-and programlevels. The Japanese program at the University of Alberta has introduced CALL courseware in language courses including those with multiple sections. An evaluation was conducted at the initial implementation stage to measure the success of the project. The results of the evaluation indicated that students and instructors were positive towards the curriculum reform through the implementation of CALL technologies. However, several issues also arose during the integration process. We found that the seamless integration of technologies was diffi cult to achieve, especially in dealing with a language like Japanese which requires additional software to display and input the idiographic characters. Our experience also underscores the importance of student support in the implementation stage. Special consideration should be taken to achieve a good "fi t" between pedagogy and technology. Moreover, each instructorʼs understanding and sharing of his or her view of the CALL integrated instruction was found to be vital for a program-level CALL implementation. The University of Alberta case serves as an example and benchmark for others planning to conduct a similar project.