Telecollaboration has been considered to have great potential for the development of L2 learners' intercultural communicative competence (ICC), so an examination of what benefits L2 learners receive through telecollaboration is necessary. Also, L2 learners' use of culturally specific expressions, such as proverbs, has not been adequately investigated. The present study investigated the effects of telecollaboration on L2 learners' perceptions of their ICC knowledge and skills in relation to one type of verbal communication (proverbs) in Japanese. Nineteen L2 novice learners of Japanese were involved in the study, and they telecollaborated with 23 native speakers of Japanese using Facebook. They learned Japanese proverbs through Facebook videos introduced by their Japanese peers, followed by in-class follow up sessions and a reflection log activity, and they then performed skits in Japanese. Their perceptions of their ICC knowledge and skills were compared using the pre-and the post-questionnaires, and their language production was analyzed. The study found that students gained a sense of accomplishment in learning the target element of verbal communication; however, they did not always execute the expressions in appropriate situations.

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Many studies on intercultural communication introduced how their collaborative projects were conducted. There are also several studies that discuss how intercultural collaborative activities can be integrated into a foreign language curriculum, as well as a big project (the INTENT project) that helps teachers integrate collaborative activities into their language curricula. Nonetheless, intercultural collaborative projects have not yet been mainstreamed for various reasons, such as insufficient pedagogical support from their institutions and a lack of interest in getting involved in projects among colleagues. We need to continuously examine and develop activities that can be relatively easily integrated into language curricula and that are appealing to more teachers to get involved in collaborative projects. Starting in the fall of 2013, we have been conducting a three-year experimental Facebook video project with learners of English in Japan and those of Japanese in the US. This paper will provide a brief overview of the Facebook collaboration projects and present the outcomes.

In this study, the authors researched how learners of Japanese as a foreign language introduce themselves and what they want to convey, as well as what kind of skills the speakers need to effectively communicate these points to the addressee. The self-introduction video data were collected from a project in which JFL learners interacted with EFL learners through Facebook. The survey data included learners' evaluations of their own self-introductions. Interviews were conducted with students in counterpart schools to evaluate the learners’ self-introductions. The authors analyzed the data and extrapolated the most useful skills for effective conveyance from the most successful self-introductions. The results showed discrepancies between learners’ self-evaluations and the opinions of the addressees. Non-verbal communication strategies were also shown to play an important role in successful conveyances. In this paper, we provide a brief overview of the project and report salient results obtained through the analysis of the data. We also share pedagogical implications of the results, and suggest alternative approaches to language pedagogy.

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