Student chat on Ning - observations on intercultural communication

As mentioned in my previous post, one difference that struck me in our international chat over a

week ago was the communication styles of European and Malaysian students. Before the chat, I expected all students to be well familiar with this style of communication and thus swim like fish in water in the chat environment. Maybe they are, but inside their own cultural comfort zones, where everybody shares more or less the same communication strategies.

It was easily noticeable that the European students, even though most of them were users of EFL, seemed to behave in quite similar ways. Apart from the limited vocabulary of some, they mostly appeared a rather homogenous group during the chat. But as soon as the Malaysian students managed to get online there was a clear change in the conversation. While European students started typing their 'hi's' the moment they logged in, the Malaysian ones waited for quite some time, possibly trying to follow what was going on among the others first. It is possible though that this wait was due to their technical connection problems, too. We Europeans could see that they were online and started greeting them and encouraging them to join:

We soon realized the considerably more polite and formal tone in their replies. Many of them kept repeatedly asking whether they could join in the discussion, while European students simply dashed in to introduce themselves in the middle of other people chatting. Actually this shouldn't be a surprise for me, as I have seen the difference in the general attitudes and behaviour of Asian and European students during our face2face student exchanges. Even the simple fact of them calling me, the teacher, 'madam' was quite exotic, since here in Finland most students simply use my first name.

Being 'madam' for a while was quite sweet, though. Just as being called 'auntie Sinikka' by Malaysian students during our student exchange a couple of years ago!

Another difference between Europeans and Malaysians was that the latter seemed to prefer private one-to-one chats to the chaos of the main chat room. Our students found it strange that the Malaysians kept asking for 'privacy'.

Further, in the previous example the Malaysian boy asks: 'Can I know bout you more'. This baffled our students, too, as though he was asking for permission to ask questions. They expected others to be more straight-forward and ask more specifically what they wanted to know, just as they themselves were doing. In this sense the Malaysian students came across as far more reserved, which made the European students feel ill at ease at times. A good learning experience about intercultural communication, though. Students soon realized that using English doesn't make us all the same, but cultural norms still play a huge role in communication. These incidents are also very fruitful to help students reflect on the importance of empathy and remembering that difference isn't strange in a negative way, but actually our diversity is a constant source of wonder and fascination. The real challenge is, of course, how we can work together and understand each other despite our diverse backgrounds and communication cultures.

I need to point out here that these were just simple observations during one particular chat session between a limited number of students in a limited number of European and Asian schools. I am not trying to formulate any theories about intercultural communication, and much of what I wrote probably is rather oversimplified and stereotypical. Nevertheless, this is how it often works in practice - small and insignifant case studies and observations over the years lead to revelations that consequently guide the ongoing process of improving intercultural school projects. What's more, reflecting on the experiences in this blog helps me focus my thoughts and has become a way of keeping an active project log at the same time.

Testing student chat on Ning

Last week we organised an intercontinental chat session on our WHAZZUP? project Ning. This was initiated by our members in Cyprus, who had a special theme day in their school and wanted to give hands-on demonstrations of their international projects.

PREPARATIONS

Adding the chat feature on Ning was a piece of cake really, and we teachers test-drove it beforehand to see how it worked. The more complicated task was to synchronize all the different time zones of the participating schools. In the end, we came up with the following time frame for start of a one-hour chat session.

Cyprus/Finland 11.00 am

Ireland 9.00 am

Italy/Spain/France 10.00 am

New Delhi 2.30 pm

Malaysia 5.00 pm

Korea/Philippines 6.00 pm

The time zone issue actually turned into a whole lesson with the geography teacher in Ireland:

On the foot of preparation for Thursday, I took out a large wall map of the world and circled each of the countries participating. Using the notice on whazzup, we identified what countries were in what time zone, and looked at the difference between Ireland and Korea. I think it began to dawn that as we were in class at 10 am today, other students had their days work done and were probably at home relaxing. It certainly gave pause for thought.

The details of the chat were discussed in our Ning Teachers' group, where teachers also indicated whose students would most probably manage to be online at that given time. The idea of planning a joint discussion topic came up as well, and it was decided that students should be prepared to talk about some special national holidays, as it was the time for the beginning of Lent in Europe with different traditions and also the Chinese New Year celebrations in Asia were not far behind.

THE CHAT ITSELF

On the day, the Cypriot students stayed online from 8 am till around 1 pm to see who they could catch for a chat. Eventually, students from Cyprus, Finland, Ireland and Malaysia got together in the chat room, which was very positive, as, despite the time differences, we managed to involve people from both continents in a real-time activity.

As for the topics discussed, quite expectedly it mostly revolved around young people's leisure activities - shared music, film and reading experiences.

Some more serious topics came up, too though, such as differences in school systems, politics or environmental problems, which pleased us teachers. School uniforms were compared, for example.

It has got to be remembered, however, that apart from the Irish, the rest of the students are learners of EFL, and for some this was the very first time to use English in an authentic situation with people who don't share the same native language. From that point of view, of course, we can't necessarily expect very profound discussions about complicated issues. Even saying 'hi' and talking about the weather is an achievement and a positive language learning experience for some. Students' uncertainty about their English skills recurringly came up in their discussions.

While students were active in the main chat room, teachers opened up private chat rooms to share ideas about the progress. This proved a useful feature.

Some students started private one-to-one chats, too. However, something we began to miss on Ning was a feature that would allow small groups of students to open their own separate chat room. The most students online at any one time was 31, and it soon became apparent that even that was too many. The discussion simply got too fast-paced, not only for us teachers with far less online multitasking experience, but also for the students, as this example shows:

Some technical hitches were encountered, too, which seems unavoidable whenever trying to work syncronously over space and time. At one point it looked threateningly that we wouldn't manage to get anybody from Asia to join us Europeans. Although the students were ready and keen in their ICT room in Sabah, Malaysia in the evening the chat just wouldn't work for them. The teacher shared their frustration on wall posts:

Luckily, their ICT staff managed to work wonders and they entered the chat room bringing with them a fascinating , and even partly exotic, feel to the discussion. I will write a separate blog post on the the clear difference in the communication culture between them and European students later.

REFLECTION

All in all, I would say this first chat experiment was well worth it. Our students in Finland were surprisingly excited about it all day. Some even revealed that they had never chatted online in a foreign language before!

Other participants have given quite positive feedback, too.

Just to say that the chat on Thursday went really well. As I said to Sinikka, I overheard a student say it was better than Bebo and that is a very big compliment. It created a great buzz with the students wanting to stay on-line for longer than originally intended.

I think that during the chatting the students have exchange many interesting information. They have spoken about their school, about the uniform in school, about the different time zone. Someone asked where is Cyprus, our students try to know about the political problem in Ireland and they try to tell the others about our political problem but this was without success. They have spoken with success about the weather.

And certainly it created momentum for the project in Malaysia, where suddenly more and more students wanted to join the Ning and become part of the network. In actual fact, all through the chat one of my main jobs was approving new members from there. I was quite touched by some of their reactions, which was a good reminder that not all teenagers all over the world are as blase about participating in online social networks as we might expect.

As a final remark, another feature missing on Ning is having access to past chat logs. Once the chat is over, and even during it whenever a limited number of visible lines on the screen is exceeded, the comments are simply wiped off into the void of virtual space. That is why I was busy taking screenshots all through the chat to have at least some record of what was going on. It might be useful to be able to go back to the whole chat session, especially as I enjoy doing small case studies on young people's communication patterns in international projects.

FUTURE PLANS

We are definitely going to try the chat again during this spring term, but in new and improved ways. Firstly, we will seriously have to limit the number of participants per chat to make it more manageable and productive. This will involve a lot of joint coordination and planning between teachers in advance. We will also need to find out about options for grouping students during the chat, as one colleague pointed out:

if we do it again (which I hope we will) it might be an idea to form groups with a student from each country in a group. With so many exchanges as on last Thursday, the speed makes it difficult to keep up, even for our tech savvy students!

Secondly, I feel that, despite the obvious advantage of everyday chit chat for lower level learners of English, as mentioned before, more attention will have to be paid to defining a purpose for the chat to enhance the overall learning experience.

Other forms of syncronous exchanges have also been suggested by colleagues:

with the Polish and Russian students we've had two skype sessions.. we could do that with yours.. so the students, instead of just chatting on the net, could talk.

As inviting as adding voice to the chat sounds, unfortunately we don't access to Skype at school, so that is out. There must be other tools available for this, but for now they will have to wait till a later time.