Pete Smith

Over the past three years, it has been and is my great pleasure to work with Konstantin Shestakov (Omsk, Russia), Jan Marston (Des Moines, Iowa), and Joe Liro (Austin, Texas) on the innovative curricula and teaching endeavors that Konstantin Vsevolodovich describes. As a language and culture teacher based in Texas, it is first and foremost a thrill for me every week to join colleagues and students who are located literally around the world in Omsk, twelve time zones away! At my home institution I am dedicated to online teaching and learning, but the Omsk experiences underscore for me that there really is no challenge to “distance” any longer, when we as a teaching team can log in and interact, live and with no appreciable delay, with student groups, working through the language and culture activities described above. And there is no doubt that the weekly Adobe Connect or WebEx sessions raise the students’ level of linguistic competence. Even fifteen hours of intensive, small-group, authentic and communicative activities with native speaker teachers in a semester bring obvious advances in listening and speaking skills. We will describe in later posts how we document that growth. But I am especially interested, too, in how our telecollaboration students develop cultural competence and intercultural communication skills. In our curricular planning, we have utilized the theoretical cultural framework of Hofstede to guide our students to “big questions” of culture, exploring such topics as individualism vs. collectivism in the U.S. and Russian cultural settings, time orientation in a culture, and the ways in which a culture deals with the fact that the future can never be known—should we try to control the future or just let it happen—which Hofstede terms “uncertainty avoidance.” For American students, this key societal descriptor is often seen in “Russian fatalism” when reading Russian literature or studying Russian. These deeper topics for student research, reflection, and integration into their speaking, listening, reading, and writing assure us that the subject matter has depth and interest, in addition to preparing our learners for travel abroad and improved intercultural communication. We will describe several of these activities in posts to come as well. And our telecollaboration intitiatives have demonstrated how the available technology can develop our students’ experiences in virtual teams. Through a virtual translation seminar joint organized by Omsk Law Institute and the University of Texas Arlington, students in Texas have joined language learners in Omsk for translation study and joint work, practice which prepares them well for careers in localization in the 21st Century, where the model of a lone translator is more and more being replaced by virtual teams of linguistic and technical specialists who translate Internet and digital media via intercultural collaboration.