Written by: David Ockert
Abstract: This paper reports the survey results of a group of students at an elementary school in Japan, who engaged in a computer mediated communication exchange with native speaker of English elementary school students in Australia. The schools collaborated to provide the students an opportunity to introduce each other and conduct various activities using Skype. The self-report measure was administered to an experimental and control group before and after the Skype exchange. The results show that the experimental group had statistically significant increases in their desire to engage in foreign language activities (p < .01); international posture (p < .01), motivation (p < .01), and desire to visit foreign countries (p < .05). In addition, the Glass’ Δ effect size measures for the experimental group are: Foreign language activities = .83; International Posture =1.06; Motivation = .80; and Desire to visit foreign countries = .54. These results are very encouraging. The efficacy of including multimodal computer mediated communication exchanges in foreign language learning contexts is discussed.
Keywords: Affect; CALL; computer mediated communication; international posture; motivation; multimodal; willingness to communicate