Sessions

Online Exchange between Taiwan and Japanese University Students

A 12-week online exchange was conducted between university students from Taiwan and Japan (N=75) with the purpose of raising cross-cultural awareness and communication skills. The exchange consisted of 8 Flipgrid activities, where students responded to one another through video recordings, and students also participated in 2 sessions of real-time small group conversation during class time. The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of such online exchange in promoting cross-cultural awareness and student learning motivation. A survey was conducted at the end of the exchange. The feedback from the students indicated that 89.5% of them agreed that the communication skills they acquired through the online exchange were useful for their future. 84.5% of them felt that the exchange had increased their motivation to learn English. Two-thirds of the students expressed interests to take part in similar kinds of online exchange. In the written comments, some students felt a certain level of anxiety for having difficulty to communicate spontaneously in real-time small group conversation as compared to the recorded conversations using Flipgrid. In general, the online interaction was a positive experience for the majority of students.