The use of web-conferencing in a task-based beginners' Chinese class

The development of new technologies and the falling cost of high-speed Internet access have made it easier for institutes and language teachers to opt different ways to communicate with students at distance. The emergence of web-conferencing applications, which integrate text, chat, audio / video and graphic facilities, offers great opportunities for language learning to through the multimodal environment.
This case study aims to explore best practice in applying task-based language teaching (TBLT) via a web conferencing tool Blackboard Collaborate in a beginners' online Chinese course by evaluating the technical capacity of the software and the pedagogical values and limitations of the tasks designed.
Sixteen undergraduate on-campus students who enrolled in an introductory Chinese language course participated in this project. Five fortnightly one-hour online sessions were conducted, which included two jigsaw tasks, two decision-making tasks and one information-gap task. Learners' interaction in the online sessions has been recorded and transcribed for a deep investigation of learners' negotiation actions in peer-peer interaction. Their experiences of using Blackboard Collaborate and tasks were recorded in in-depth interviews and pre and post-session questionnaires.