UCLA

In recent years, the number of bilingual or emergent bilingual children in California has risen accompanied by greater enrollment in Dual Language Immersion (DLI) programs which offer instruction in two languages. DLI programs in the United States aim to help children develop bilingualism and multiculturalism. However, students enrolled in DLI programs do not always have positive attitudes towards language learning, potentially impeding the language-learning process (Lee & Jeong, 2013). Telecollaborative language-learning interventions have newly-emerged as a way of improving students’ attitudes towards language learning, showing increased willingness to use the target language and exploring the culture in non-academic settings. However, most of the telecollaboration language learning studies were conducted with college students, especially those who majored in language or would be trained as future teachers. Little work has investigated telecollaborative language learning for use with elementary school students in DLI programs, limiting our understanding of how telecollaborative language learning applies to children. Therefore, this small-scale, mixed-methods study examined the effects of telecollaborative language learning on DLI students’ language learning and culture exploration attitudes. In this study, the e-tandem model was applied explanatorily to help seven English-Chinese DLI students make connections with peers in China. However, few changes to language learning or in attitudes were observed in the study, and thus possible improvement of the e-tandem intervention is discussed so that DLI students may gain more from telecollaborative language learning interventions in the future.