Designing an Effective Keypal Exchange

Michael Fumanovsky, Ryukoku University

Many CALL instructors have been involved in class to class, country to country email exchanges over the past five years. Such keypal exchanges can be extremely rewarding for students, and indeed usually represent the only direct communication with foreigners that a typical university student in Japan is likely to have in a given year. Organizing this kind of project, however, is invariably time consuming and Keypal exchanges are probably among the most unpredictable and problematic activities in the CALL repertoire. It is precisely because so many things can and are likely to go "wrong" in any exchange, and that it makes sense for an instructor to make full and careful use of the experiences of those who have been conducting such exchanges for several years. Since many of those who have been active in keypals have their homepages, it makes sense to use this resource before planning any project. Prior to setting up my own project, I posed the following goals for myself and then began looking for ideas and advice from my contemporaries in Japan and elsewhere. The goals I set at the outset can be put into two categories(1) Organizational/Technical and (2) PedagogicalLinguistic. Organizational /

Organizational / Technical Goals:

• to match students with partners whose English level was approximately the same and who would have some interest in, and motivation to find out about, Japanese people and culture;
• to find co-teachers in the other countries with reasonably compatible goals and methods;
• to organize students into pairs or groups to foster collaborative learning and to provide mutual support in dealing with technical and other problems associated with computer use and keypal exchanges;
• to make a smooth start with the first email exchange and avoid the technical problems that often seem to plague computer and e-mail related activities;
• to develop an efficient system for communicating with my students, co-teacher and the keypal partners in order to minimize the inevitable problem of certain students not writing regularly (for whatever reason);
• to find a way to monitor student's work and to provide feedback and advice without becoming intrusive.

Pedagogical / Linguistic Goals:

• to use e-mail as a vehicle for motivating students to improve and increase the length and quality of their writing without making the class into a conventional "composition" class.
• to explore the concept of email as a new kind of "dialogue," rather than just another form of letter writing;
• to slowly introduce students to the world of the Internet and make use of teacher-created homepages;
• to set up activities with the co-teacher which would involve keypals in direct collaboration on a particular issue or problem and/or which involved some actual intercultural exchange.

Designing a Keypal Project

Suggested Guidelines :

 During the semester prior to beginning the exchange, I browsed the pages of at least twenty teachers. These were people whom I knew from the JALT conference, from reading JALTCALL and the CALL Conference Proceedings and from other sources had undertaken courses which centered around using email and/or the Internet. I compiled a list of their main ideas and contributions and used my personal experience with email communication to design my own course. Two years, hundreds of mistakes and many work hours later, I now feel I can make my own contribution by suggesting the following partial list of guidelines for those new to the field.

1. Keep the project as simple and low tech as possible, but at the very least make some kind of homepage, however simple, on which to post student photographs and other information. Seeing a picture of one's keypal is extremely motivating.
2. Keep in regular contact with the coteacher to iron out problems with particular students on either side.
3. Write to your own students between classes to encourage or reprimand them and to update them on events in the lives of their keypals, such as a national holiday or an exam period.
4. Write to the keypals to update them on events in your students lives: holidays, school festival, reports for other teachers etc.
5. Once students have exchanged basic personal information, set up some kind of information exchange or cultural information gap activity. Posting an article or picture on a homepage and asking questions is a simple but effective activity.
6. Send examples of "model email dialogues" (with students' permission) to help those whose exchanges remain short and superficial.
7. Consider organising snail mail exchanges of pictures or a student made video.

Comments:

Keypal exchanges are inherently messy and time consuming and following the guidelines above will not lead to a trouble free project. However, given, the highly motivating nature of such exchanges, it is well worth the effort, and a successful "keypals" exchange, can, at its best, help motivate students to improve their writing and reading skills and to become autonomous users of email and the Internet. And of course, in some cases, such exchanges can lead to lasting penpal- type friendships. While my own projects were far from being an unqualified successes, they did result in level of student interest and commitment that I have rarely attained in composition or reading classes. To a considerable extent, I owe my limited success with these classes to my generous colleagues in JALT CALL.

I would like to say a big Thank you to all of you have put your pioneering work into cyberspace for all of us to share. I would like to give special thanks to the following Japan-based teachers: Victoria Muehleisen, Bill Pellowe, Tom Robb, John Bauman, Erik Dahlin, Joseph Dias, Katherine Isbell, Patricia Thornton, and Robert Gaynor for the ideas contained in their homepages.

A longer version of this article can be found in the 1999 Calling Japan Conference Proceedings. 13 14