The purpose of this study was to explore the perceived benefits of telecollaboration for Korean pre-service teachers of English. This study connected Korean pre-service teachers to American pre-service teachers. In a one-to-one relationship, each pair exchanged their weekly writings about the assigned topics over six weeks and shared their ideas. To explore the perceived benefits that the Korean pre-service teachers of English perceived and provide a rich description, this study focused on the five Korean pre-service teachers’ thoughts reflected in their reflective papers, their writings in the Google Sites, and the final reflection paper. Data were analyzed based on a qualitative approach using the content analysis. The results showed that the Korean pre-service teachers perceived that the online interactions with the target language speakers promoted their intercultural and linguistic competences as well as some affective domains such as confidence and motivation levels. Building upon the findings, this study provides significant pedagogical implications for instructional practices for the educators and researchers.

The quasi-experimental study was designed to compare effects of two telecollaborative learning models, asynchronous (ATL) and synchronous telecollaboration learning (STL), on Korean elementary school students’ motivation, anxiety, and intercultural communicative competence (ICC). To evaluate the 27 participants’ motivation and anxiety level, a pre-test and a post-test were administered and the motivation level and the anxiety level were compared between the ATL and the STL group. On the completion of the project, to examine their ICC development, the participants were interviewed by the researcher with questions constructed based on five objectives of Byram’s intercultural competence. The results are as follows: (1) The two groups did not show any significant differences in increase their motivation level. However, when examining in more detail, the participants in ATL increased their instrumental motivation while those in STL increased their integrative motivation. (2) There was no significant difference in anxiety level between the two groups. At last, (3) regarding ICC development, the participants both in the ATL and in the STL greatly improved their knowledge, attitude, and skills, but ATL participants, compared to STL participants, demonstrated relatively limited changes in their critical cultural awareness. Implications to enhance elementary school students’ motivation and ICC by telecollaboration are suggested.

This study investigated the impact of a telecollaborative project with Australian peers on development of Korean elementary school students’ intercultural communicative competence. 57 Korean elementary school students of grade five participated in the project with 11 topics for 8 months. The responses from the 46 participants in the three ICC surveys and the data from 11 voluntary interviewees were analyzed to discover the changing process of their ICC over time within the Bennett’s DMIS framework. The research revealed that the participants were ethnorelatively oriented at the onset of the project, and at the end of the project even though they temporarily displayed an enthnocentric orientation while participating in the project. Among the participants, some shifted toward ethnocentric orientation; however, they still kept the ethnorelative orientation more intensively than the ethnocentric orientation. Examining in great detail, prior to the start of the project, they were ready to accept cultural differences uncritically, and finally reached at the adaptation stage, which is the last second stage in DMIS. Lastly, the pedagogical implication and the limitations of the study were also discussed.

Recent advancement of information, communication, and technology has brought changes in EFL instruction. Of these changes, telecollaboration is introduced as one of the innovative EFL instructional methods and the telecollaborative instruction under the ‘Smart Education’ policy has been applied to K-12 EFL class in Korea. Based on the changes in K-12 EFL class, the study was designed to investigate how telecollaboration with Australian peers influences on Korean middle school students’ English learning, especially their motivation to learn English and their intercultural communicative competence development. Over a 9-month school academic period (from March to December), the subjects in the experimental group engaged in 40-45 minute-long telecollaborative classes, guided by a total of 15 tasks. Right after completing the 15 telecollaborative classes, at the early December, the data were collected using the survey questionnaire with 43 items adapted from Gardner’s AMTB and Chen and Starosta’s Intercultural Sensitivity Scale. The responses to the questionnaire from 75 subjects were analyzed using independent- samples t-test. The results showed that (1) telecollaboration with native peers of English helped Korean middle school students stimulate their motivation to learn English, but (2) telecollaboration with native peers of English did not make any contribution to development of Korean middle school students’ ICC. The limitations and suggestions for future research were concluded.