Short Research Papers

Virtual Exchange and ESP: Natural
Bedfellows

Sandra Healy
Kyoto Institute of Technology
Olivia Kennedy
Nagahama Institute of Bioscience and Technology
Yasushi Tsubota
Kyoto Institute of Technology
This poster introduces three different virtual environments that address issues of English
for Specific Purposes (ESP) in different ways at Kyoto Institute of Technology. The firstis a virtual exchange between Belgian and Japanese students. The second is an academicpresentation course in which Japanese students work online to improve their performanceswith teachers based in the Philippines, and the third is an intercultural communicationcourse connecting students in Burundi with students in Japan.

Recent developments in technology have led to increased opportunities forcreating new virtual environments for teaching and learning. This article describes
three different virtual exchanges developed by a team of researcher-practitioners
at a national university in Kyoto to give students opportunities to develop theskills that they need to achieve their research and career goals. The students
are science, architecture and design undergraduates, and the majority go on toundertake master’s degrees, which they then use to enter academia or to workin research departments in both domestic and international companies. Virtual
exchange has the capacity to bring English alive for these students as it is directly
35Healy, Kennedy, & Tsubota

relevant to their studies and their futures. Through it, they can use English andsee that it has practical and immediate use.
The university was chosen as a Top Global University, one of 37 Japanese
universities selected to improve the internationalization of Japanese society byincreasing the number of courses taught in English and increasing the percentage
of international students and faculty members (MEXT, 2018). Ideally, many of
the university’s students would study abroad as part of this internationalization,
but this is not always possible due to financial and/or time constraints. Virtual
exchange allows a much wider population of students to experience international
communication than is presently possible through traditional study abroadprograms.
O’Dowd and Lewis (2016) describe online mediated virtualinternationalization as a way to enable students to become global citizens. They
define the qualities of being a global citizen as having “a heightened capacity
for interconnectedness and empathy that supersedes parochial nation state
identifications” (p. ix), and also having the ability to participate and contributeresponsibly to decision-making in professional and social contexts that areintercultural in nature. In addition, they state that having historical and cultural
knowledge of diverse world languages and cultures and how these concepts relate
to the present day are vital for global citizens. By providing opportunities forvirtual exchange for our students, we as educators can work towards achieving
the diverse language and intercultural communication goals of our students, thegoals of the university and the needs of society at large.

Literature Review

From the early 1990s, foreign language teachers have been using the Internet toconnect their students to partners around the world in order for them to improvetheir language skills. Most projects have fallen within two models, namely theE-tandem model (O’Rourke, 2007) and telecollaboration (Warschauer, 1996).
In the E-tandem model native speakers of two different languages connect andtry to learn each other’s languages. In these exchanges, the role of the teacher
is limited and the students take responsibility for their own interactions. This36

Virtual Exchange and ESP, OCJSI 2, pages 35-41

type of model was the earliest form to appear in foreign language teaching, butsoon after that, telecollaboration, a term coined by Mark Warschauer in 1996,
emerged. Telecollaboration widened the focus from language learning to include
the development of intercultural communicative competence, and in recent years
there has been increased movement to integrate this kind of virtual exchange
into formal education especially at the university level (O’Dowd, 2013). A wellknown example of this is Cultura, a project which was developed by Furstenberg,Levet, English, and Maillet at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in2001.
Virtual exchange has also been embraced by the business world, with a wide
variety of projects developed. Some of these projects have been brought into theuniversity sphere, with significant crossover between business uses and language
learning uses. One example of such an exchange is X-Culture, a project atUniversity of North Carolina at Greensboro (Taras et al., 2013). These types ofvirtual exchanges are known as subject-specific exchanges.
Other university subjects have also begun to use virtual exchange as part oftheir educational programmes in what is termed the shared syllabus approach.
One particular example of this is Collaborative Online International Learning(COIL), developed at the State University of New York (SUNY) (Rubin, 2016).
In shared syllabus approaches such as COIL, classes that have similar content
connect together and work on shared problems or have discussions based on
the same material. A task-based approach is often used and the focus is on thedifferent cultural interpretations that are brought to the material.
As we can see, virtual exchange would seem to be ideally suited to English forSpecific Purposes (ESP) as it can be tailored to any educational context. Jendrych(2013) explores the complexity of ESP teaching in the present day, connecting
it with the development of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)
as both emphasize learners’ needs and have a focus on communication as wellas content. While many believe that ESP and CLIL are separate approaches(Fortanet-Gómez and Bellés-Fortuño, 2008), Liew and Khor (2014) define
CLIL as an integrated version of ESP and believe that it addresses some of theweaknesses of ESP citing the need for more collaboration between language
37

Healy, Kennedy, & Tsubota

specialists and subject specialists. This is the definition that is used in this paper.
The first virtual exchange is a jointly developed online module between
universities in Japan and Belgium in which students use the same materials toexplore similarities and differences in the students’ experiences of the teaching of
their subject area in their respective countries. English is used as the lingua francain this exchange, with both the teachers and the students working virtuallytogether, both synchronously and asynchronously. This exchange is based on
the shared syllabus model of virtual exchange, and as such, there is a dual focus
on the development of linguistic skills, specifically targeting language for thestudents’ major, and cultural learning. The cultural interpretation of materials
is a vital component, as well as the interaction between people from different
cultural backgrounds.
The second virtual exchange presently underway is a course that was created
to develop the academic presentation skills of 40 first-year undergraduates. In
this course, students prepare and practice presentations which they give online
to teachers based in the Philippines. The teachers work synchronously with thestudents to improve their presentations, and as a consequence of this interaction,
students’ linguistic and intercultural communication skills are also developed.
This is a single-language virtual exchange (SLVE), and students are excited tofind that English can truly operate as a lingua franca. Since the students areinteracting with teachers from another culture rather than other students, theexchange does not fit previous models. Its focus on the development of a specificskill, however, means that it may be viewed as a new “hybrid model” type.
The third is a virtual exchange which focuses on the building of interculturalcommunication skills for students based in Japan and in Burundi. In this course,
graduate-level students from the two institutions work together to completetasks related to the development of intercultural understanding and sensitivity.
They explore issues related to intercultural communication together, sharing
and experiencing the realities of intercultural communication both practicallyand theoretically. This type of exchange follows the Cultura project model, andthe emphasis is on the development of cultural awareness and knowledge ofdiverse perspectives and identities, alongside the development of empathy and38

Virtual Exchange and ESP, OCJSI 2, pages 35-41

teamwork. As with the other exchanges, it is classroom based, and teachers on
both sides of the exchange are actively involved in the learners’ interactions.

Project Assessment

Various data, both qualitative and quantitative, concerning these three virtualexchanges was collected. Data included questionnaires concerning anxiety,enjoyment and the perceived benefits of virtual exchange; students’ written
reflections which were coded and analysed; comments and feedback provided
by the Filipino teachers; and recordings of all the sessions which were analysedfrom a variety of perspectives. The results show largely positive outcomes (forexample, Healy, 2017). Student responses revealed that a large majority (some87%) perceived an improvement in their English language skills and an increasein their motivation to study English (76%). Comments also clearly showed thatstudents believed virtual exchange to be a positive addition to learning. It was
all participants' first experience of this kind of learning environment and many
commented that they would like to use this method again. The questionnaires
also revealed changes in the areas of language learning that the students wereanxious about. There was a shift from fear of the unknown to a focus on specificweaknesses that emerged during their online interactions, such as the desire fora better ability to paraphrase. The written reflections show that many appreciatethat they have become language users rather than language learners. Additionally,
many students showed an increased awareness of international posture, a concept
described by Yashima (2009) as participation in an international communitythat results in the creation of an English-using version of themselves. Evidence ofambivalence was also found, however, with some students voicing complicatedfeelings towards speaking English, expressing simultaneously a willingness andunwillingness to communicate (MacIntyre et al., 2011).

Conclusion

Virtual exchange is a valuable addition to the field of ESP, and by extension CLIL.
It provides opportunities for students to engage internationally with people inother countries whilst developing numerous skills related to their specific subjectareas, as well as more holistic skills.
39Healy, Kennedy, & Tsubota

References

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Author bios

Sandra Healy is an associate professor at Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan. Her
research areas include the intersection between identity, language and gender, andthe use of computers in language learning, especially virtual exchange and extensive
reading. <healy@kit.ac.jp>
Olivia Kennedy is currently a lecturer at Nagahama Institute of Bioscience andTechnology. Her research interests lie in the interplay between, agency, autonomy andtechnology integration for the effective delivery of EFL instruction. <o_kennedy@
nagahama-i-bio.ac.jp>
Yasushi Tsubota is an associate professor at Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan.
His research interests include CALL, STEAM education, cooperative/collaborative
learning, and telecollaboration in foreign language education. He has recently focusedon foreign language anxiety in language classrooms. <tsubota-yasushi@kit.ac.jp>
Received: October 20, 2019
Accepted: September 9, 202041