Increasing regulation imposed on education systems at all levels engulfs teaching/learning time and impedes individual pursuits of interest to the learner. However, by restructuring the way educators approach the classroom, students can be provided an opportunity to explore further and become more successful. This success can be derived by…

A growing number of instructors use information and communications technology (ICT) inside and outside the classroom to teach all kinds of programs, including language courses. In this study, the instructor used a traditional way of teaching (lecturing, text-book, conversation, no technology in the classroom, no social network) during the first…

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of different types of language tasks performed in Second Life (SL) on the oral performance of beginners of Chinese as a Second Language (CSL), focusing on oral accuracy. The 30 CSL beginners who participated in this study were randomly divided into two groups (n = 15 per group), required to…

The purpose of this study was to explore how a Digital StoryTelling (DST) assignment affected and changed students' motivations for learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in comparison with a StoryTelling (ST) assignment. A course entitled "Information English" was held for Japanese university students at a faculty of information…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of Emotional Motivational Feedback Message (EMFEM) in an online learning environment. This exploratory research was conducted using mixed method single case study design. Participants were 15 undergraduate students enrolled in an instructional technology course in a large state…

The study attempts to determine whether or not Facebook is an environment suiting the Community of Inquiry Framework by investigating the cognitive, social, and teaching presence perceptions of students in Facebook groups and to examine the impact of group size on the CoI model. Additionally, whether or not these three types of presences predicted…

Social Networking Sites (SNS) such as Facebook (FB) are currently highly used by students because technology has the potential to become a valuable resource to support their educational communications and collaborations. This paper attempts to present a comprehensive picture of what has been investigated in terms of the use of Facebook as an…

Twitter is becoming increasingly popular as a medium for language learning. This study explores self-directed learning via social interactions that use Twitter as an interactive learning environment. The participants in this study were thirty university students of Chinese as a foreign language at levels 1 and 2 of the "Hanyu Shuiping…

This article reports the results of an experimental study on the effectiveness of mobile technology (WhatsApp) in improving the critique writing skills of English as a Foreign Language learners and increasing their motivation for learning. The participants (n = 52) are Average-English proficient learners enrolled in two writing courses given at…

This article is based on an analysis of a small sample of data from an international web collaboration project between four classes of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners guided by their English teachers in four different countries in Europe. As few studies have been published about intercultural communication in blended learning EFL…

This paper offers insight into learning Slovak in an e-learning environment. The need to reach distance-learners of Slovak led to the implementation of a web-based course on Slovak language and culture in 2008-2010. The pedagogical basis of the course, called Virtual Slovak, is the socioconstructivist approach to teaching and learning, in which…

This study examines the motivation of 20 Japanese students of English as a foreign language (EFL) who chatted electronically with 19 Taiwanese EFL students using online synchronous chat software. In particular, we were interested in four factors that affect task-based motivation: the willingness to communicate, task attractiveness, task…

This presentation is a case study of the Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) development of Mark, one of ten American students engaged in a desktop-videoconferencing telecollaborative exchange with a class of French students. Due in part to its inherent complexity, this context has not been widely researched. To observe ICC development, I…

This article reports a mixed-method research probing the effect of utilizing a blog-buddy system on English for academic purposes learners' writing performance. Sixty Iranian undergraduate engineering students at Iran University of Science and Technology Virtual Campus participated in this study. Our analysis of the students' writings indicated…

Web-based communication technologies that enable collaboration and sharing of information among users - such as podcasts, wikis, blogs, message boards, and others--are used commonly in contemporary organizations to increase and manage employee learning. In this investigation, we identify which of these collaborative communication technologies are…