This article seeks to account for the experiences of tertiary students of German when a Facebook group and associated tasks is introduced as an assessed element of their language course. Ethnographic methods were applied, such as pre-, post questionnaires, interviews and fieldnotes. The data was collected by the instructor/researcher and subjected to thematic analysis. The students (n = 23) enjoyed Facebook but mostly used the site passively and only actively posted when required. This led to a flurry of posts at deadlines and less engagement between deadlines. Students wanted more feedback than the instructor was giving them, in an effort to make the interaction feel more authentic and spontaneous, as it is in non-educational, social Facebook.

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This research presents a virtual exchange project between two tertiary institutions in New Zealand and Finland with 26 participants who were intermediate German language students. During the project, the students used a closed Facebook group to post about given topics; the posts combined video, audio, and text that adhered to multimodal meaning-making theory. The theoretical framework was task-based language teaching underpinned by the notion of engagement, social media in language learning, and telecollaboration. Language learning was viewed through a socio-cultural lens. A mixed-methods approach was used to collect data including questionnaires, interviews, and FB-logs. The qualitative data was analysed by content analysis method. The results indicate that the students perceived FB as an applicable tool for community building and they enjoyed the variation it brought to the course. Collaboration, use of communication tools, authenticity, and teachers' support fostered student engagement.

<p>This study aims to contribute to the research into the design of language podcasts. It describes the design of the podcasts used and analyses the results of a questionnaire and discusses podcast design for future language learning.</p><p>During one 12-week semester, podcasts were used in a German language intermediate class to improve student listening skills. New Zealand is a long way from a Germanspeaking country; besides being a good way to bring authentic L2 material into the classroom, we envisaged podcasts on student iPods would also be a good way to take language learning out of the classroom and integrate it into daily life. Podcasts might become part of a series of web tools, which support the teaching goal: improved learning outcomes by making the students part of a web community.</p>