Telecollaborative debates in ESP: Learner perceptions and pedagogical implications

Abstract

This article reports on an empirical study analyzing the development and use of effective multimodal communication strategies to deliver a telecollaborative debate as the core activity for upper-intermediate learners of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) from two far afield Spanish universities, one located in Gran Canaria and the other in Valencia. The pedagogical project not only focused on preparing and conducting an online debate through telecollaboration, but also on developing communicative skills based on discussion, argumentation, justification, critical thinking and explanation using academic and scientific language. Through a pre-task and a post-task survey, the results highlight, on the one hand, that telecollaboration is an experiential approach for ESP learners that necessarily has to involve pragmatics within a well-organized debate scenario and, on the other, that this two-way collaborative task demonstrates that telecollaborative debates are an innovative and engaging means of exploring not just content but communication and performance strategies while simultaneously helping to increase multimodal communicative fluency in the foreign language. The findings also underline the fact that elements such as motivation and self-confidence are variables that influence the learners’ performance in both conducting the necessary research to adequately debate the given topic and seeking efficient multimodal communication strategies.