Developing a collaborative community: Guidelines for establishing a computer mediated language learning project with a developing country
Dr Debra Hoven
School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies
University of Queensland

Abstract
Proficiency in a second language and intercultural awareness are seen as important personal and professional assets as we take an increasingly global perspective. In Australia, Indonesian is one of the priority languages, while in Indonesia, English is the most widely taught foreign language in schools and is compulsory for most secondary students. This paper describes the pilot study and subsequent development of a project, QUIPNet (QUeensland Indonesia Proyek internet: http://jcs.ed.qut.edu.au/QUIPNet/ ), designed to enhance the language proficiency and cultural awareness of students using computer-mediated exchanges. Ten schools in Indonesia and ten schools in Queensland, Australia have been linked in this large-scale tandem e-learning project, after a preliminary year-long feasibility study, with the support of the Queensland Ministry of Education and the Australian Research Council. While the concept of a digital divide is no longer the contentious issue it was 5 years ago (Rao, 2000), throughout the world, governments, business and educational institutions are taking strenuous steps to join the global virtual communities. Nevertheless, reliable and affordable access to the use of computers and the Internet are still very real constraints on the use of computer mediated communication in developing countries such as Indonesia. The numerous compromises which have had to be made to the design of the interactions taking place will be discussed in the context of this background. Some guidelines for the inclusion of developing countries in the design and implementation of computer-mediated language learning communities are derived from this discussion.

BACKGROUND TO THE PROJECT
Intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 1997) – the ability to communicate and interact across cultural boundaries – is increasingly acknowledged as an appropriate goal for the expanded language programs in schools and a vital requirement for internationalisation which involves “developing the knowledge, competence and ways of thinking and seeing necessary to live in an international, intercultural and interdependent world” (Parmenter, 2000:309. However, “preparing students to communicate in multiple cultural contexts, both at home and abroad, means sensitizing them to discourse practices in other societies and to the ways those discourse practices both reflect and create cultural norms” (Kern, 2000:2).

Recently, computer-mediated communication with peers who do not share the same cultural assumptions has been used in language classrooms to add new discourse practices to the language learning experience (Gläsmann & Calvert, 2001). Others (Mueller-Hartmann, 2000a; Felix, 2001; Reichelt, 2001) have hypothesised that this practice also contributes to language development by allowing learners to try out their developing second language with native speaker interlocutors. Indeed, purposeful, contextualised negotiation of meaning, particularly with more proficient interlocutors, is increasingly seen as a key factor in second language acquisition, the process through which learners potentially gain access to improved comprehensible input and negative feedback and are encouraged to focus on form (Long & Robinson, 1998). Interaction can also result in modified output which stretches learners’ linguistic resources and may force them “into a more syntactic processing mode than might occur in comprehension” (Swain, 1995:373).

There is, to date, only limited research which has analysed the discourse used in the CMC environment for human-human interaction or investigated its potential to foster second language learning. In fact, using technology to achieve communication “both amongst learners in a classroom context and between them and native speakers at a distance, forms a new learning environment which is yet to be exploited to its full potential” (Conacher & Royall, 2000: 311). New communications technologies are radically changing access to knowledge and how learning and many other aspects of daily life are carried out (Ortega, 1997). Interactive writing via computer, for example, differs in purpose and audience from traditional foreign language teacher-assigned compositions (Reichelt, 2001). Furthermore, because the medium is new, rules of use are still evolving. Thus, to date, “there is no way of predicting whether this new language-using situation will make use of old conversational norms or invent fresh stylistic techniques to facilitate interaction, or what particular combination of new and old will prove to be most effective” (Crystal, 2001:14). This project is designed, therefore, to develop a new framework to assist teachers and researchers with the conceptualization, implementation and evaluation of pedagogical practices which (i) take advantage of CMC to achieve interactive language use through engagement in virtual tasks with native speakers and (ii) use meaning negotiation in these intercultural experiences to encourage learners to focus on form and content in order to enhance their own language development and cultural awareness.

Secondary schools in Australia now have considerable technological infrastructure and state and federal governments are encouraging computer literacy as a key learning area (Hoven & Crawford, 2001). However, if teachers are to help learners develop improved computer literacy and use tools such as the internet and email effectively, they need to develop appropriate pedagogical practices to ensure, for example, that the tasks fit within the general learning environment (Conacher & Royall, 2000) and also help develop rich contact with and understanding of the target culture (e.g. Lee, 1997; Furstenberg, et al., 2001). Students too will need to develop appropriate strategies for learning via this new medium. For teachers and students used to more teacher-centred approaches this may require a modification of roles and the development of greater learner autonomy (Hoven, 1999; 2005/6; Schwienhorst, 1998). Given this potential need for change, therefore, it is also important to investigate teacher and learner responses to the new learning opportunities provided through electronic communication and their perceptions of how these experiences lead to effective language and culture learning.

In the Indonesian context, the introduction of innovative teaching approaches, particularly those involving changes to the traditional roles of teachers and learners or to the source of content, is particularly problematic. Teachers are constrained in their selection of material to be taught, by a national curriculum and national examinations. Because of this top-down model of educational delivery and assessment, negotiation has been necessary at various levels from the Ministry of Education, to the regional education directors, to the local school principals, language coordinators and actual teachers involved in the project. Curriculum documents have been exchanged and ideas generated among teachers for possible topics and themes to be explored collaboratively. Issues of time coordination and standardised assessment remain problematic. In addition, timely access for students and teachers to computers in classrooms is often difficult or impossible in Indonesian schools, with the exception of a handful of International Schools. Except in cases where particular schools have been the recipients of targeted IT funding, the costs of installing multiple telephone lines to schools and regular payment of the internet-associated phone bills are prohibitive. It has therefore been necessary to liaise closely with regional education directors to identify those schools which have the necessary facilities and on-going budgetary capacity.

In the late 90s, the term “digital divide” was used as a label for the inequitable distribution of computing resources and access to ICTs (Information and Communications Technologies) in education systems in different parts of the world. Investigations of distribution of computer ownership and internet access by ethnic background in the United States (Novak and Hoffman, 1998), content and access in south Asia (Rao, 2000) and internet connectivity in south and east Asia (Bailey, 2000) found that social and pedagogic factors may be more explanatory of the inequities than the provision and availability of actual physical resources. As Warschauer (2002) and others (Bailey, 2000; Rao, 2000; Warschauer et al., 2004) are finding, it is not so much the availability of physical facilities which determines the equity of access and use of technology in education. Bailey, for example, found that in Chinese-speaking countries, users’ level of education and literacy in one or more of the major languages of the internet (English or Chinese) were significant factors. In their study of low and high SES (Socio Economic Status) high schools in California, Warschauer and colleagues (2004) have found that often it is the social support and understanding of the uses of ICTs on the parts of both teachers and parents which have the greatest influence on equitable and effective usage of these technologies. In the context of our project, we have found similar conditions on equitable access and usage in both Queensland and Indonesian schools. These will be discussed in detail below.

An essential activity for both the Queensland and Indonesian teachers involved has been professional development in the appropriate uses of the available technologies for language learning and teaching. This has necessitated a number of workshops in both countries as well as periodic updates, reminders, and, when possible, re-visits. Both teachers and students have also needed some re-education in the use of technologies, particularly chat and discussion forums, for educational purposes. Many students and some of the teachers in both countries were familiar at the commencement of the project with using e-mail and chat for communication with friends, for purely social and utilitarian purposes. It has been a difficult and delicate task to acculturate participants to the educational purposes of CMC interactions in the project and the netiquette appropriate to these purposes. In some cases, this has not yet been fully achieved.

MOTIVATIONS/RATIONALE FOR THE PROJECT
Because of Indonesia’s close geographic proximity to Australia, the Indonesian language has always played a significant role in Australian education systems. From 1994 till 2002, as part of the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools (NALSAS) strategy, Indonesian officially became one of the four priority Asian languages in Queensland and teacher and student numbers at all levels of the education system increased rapidly. However, with changing governments in both countries and corresponding changes in economic focus and political ties, the numbers of students studying Indonesian in Australia have fallen by approximately 70% over the last 6 years, with some university programs closing completely (Lo Bianco, 2002; Hill, 2004). In spite of this fall, the bomb attacks in Bali in 2002 and the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in 2004 have meant that there is a heightened need for people in both countries with fluency in both Indonesian and English and a thorough understanding of the values and perceptions of the other culture.

To help stimulate and maintain interest in and understanding of the language and culture Australia’s nearest neighbour, this large-scale tandem e-learning project was conceived. Such a large scale project has never been carried out in Australia, and very few studies have been attempted in secondary or high schools, and certainly not with schools in a developing country as Indonesia is. Globally, many studies have been carried out at an individual level with teachers of a second language studying their own classes. While this kind of action research and single case study has proven valuable for us to begin to investigate the processes involved and outcomes that we can expect from such interactions, because of their very nature, these studies are not generalisable. In addition, to date, most of these studies have been at the tertiary level of education: in universities and colleges of advanced or post-school education. This project is an attempt to provide both a broader series of case studies and some insights into the possibilities and value of conducting electronic international exchanges with secondary or high schools.

In view of the tension between our two countries in the wake of several acts of terror, it seems appropriate to pursue the cultivation among the up-coming generation, of some insights and understanding of each other as people and human beings as well as members of societies, cultures and nations. As numerous educational researchers have advocated (Ramsden, 1992; Laurillard, 1993; Kafai & Resnick, 1996; Sengupta, 2001), we aim to develop dialogic interaction among our participants, within the paradigm of social, or rather sociocultural constructivism (Scott et al. 1992; Hoven, 1997). In this way, we hope to develop among participants not only intercultural cognitive and social negotiation skills, but also a sense of being part of a global virtual community that transcends political trends and national policies.

In fact, one of the focus teachers in our project has long been a member of an on-line discussion forum, AsiaEdNet founded with funding from the NALSAS strategy. After the recent terrorist acts in Indonesia, this teacher and others have expressed the wish that these horrific acts of a few not be allowed to damage the generally sense of community that is building among the project participants. 

METHODOLOGY
As originally conceived, the project was to utilise, as its primary data source, e-tandem exchanges (Gläsmann & Calvert, 2001) between ten Indonesian schools and ten schools in Queensland identified in a pilot study carried out in 2000/2001. Because of various complications as outlined above, these numbers are now being reached in a rolling addition process, with schools being added if and when their teachers provide the appropriate documentation and student details. Tandem projects function on the principles of reciprocity, bilingualism and learner autonomy or responsibility (Schwienhorst, 1998). “Both partners, being experts in their language and culture and depending on each other for mutual support, contribute and benefit equally in terms of their time, energy and interest” (Mueller-Hartmann, 2000a: 596).

In keeping with these principles, participants are encouraged to make equal use of their two languages, thus ensuring they all encounter authentic texts prepared by native speakers of their target language as well as having an audience and purpose for their own L2 texts. A Web-based classroom with its poly-communication (many-to-many) (Sengupta, 2001) considerably expands access to interactants. This, in turn, increases the potential for meaning-focused input (positive evidence) as well as implicit or explicit feedback (negative evidence) and opportunities for modified learner output. This broadening of horizons is particularly important for school-aged language learners in regional and rural schools for whom the teacher may otherwise be their only expert interlocutor. In developing countries, such as Indonesia, where the educational level of teachers is lower in regional areas, the possibility for learners and teachers to have access to the authentic language of speakers of the target language is both exciting and intimidating. To mitigate some of the intimidation, the time for reflection that is afforded by the lapse between typing (including editing what is written) and hitting the “Enter” key to post, seems to allow L2 learners to improve on the accuracy and structure of their output. This in-built reflection time, in fact, seems to allow superior output to that producable in face-to-face (f2f) situations (Sullivan & Pratt, 1996; Payne & Whitney, 2002). In fact, although Sengupta’s participants seemed to feel that the web-based activity was more passive (2001), others have found that the use of on-line chat discussion prior to a writing activity actually helped learners more than f2f discussion in organizing their ideas and producing more and more complex language (Lan, 2004).

Since e-mail is generally the most readily available (and cheapest) form of CMC, this was the application we initially planned to use in this project. However, as e-mail was not available for several of the Indonesian schools which were otherwise ideal participants, the decision was made to move the interaction to web-based forum discussion boards. In Indonesia there are numerous warnet or internet cafes which young people usually use for their internet communication and exploration. We have therefore installed a server-based discussion-forum application to enable students in Indonesia and Australia to access the same CMC environment and complete their tasks from wherever they can log in, whether this be at home, in class, in the school library, or at an internet café. From the point of view of students, this decision provides the possibility of logging in from anywhere, using a consistent interface. From our perspective (teachers and researchers) this means that there is no need to rely on students copying all messages to us for archiving, as all interactions are automatically displayed and archived. This has been achieved by setting the preferences to disallow learners to remove posts after posting: only administrators can perform this function. In the course of the study we hope that additional Internet technologies (e.g. collaboratively-created student web pages and synchronous videochat or delayed synchronous chat) will be used, where teachers and students have access to them and feel they will contribute effectively to the task at hand. 

The QUIPNet project aims to investigate learners’ language performance as they engage in CMC tasks. The text-based nature of current CMC provides a written record of the language used which is then available for detailed revision and hence further learning by learners (González-Bueno, 1998; Sotillo, 2000; Sengupta, 2001) as well as analysis of discourse patterns by researchers. The project is also investigating teacher/learner perceptions of the effectiveness of different tasks in achieving the goals of the language program and in “value-adding” (Bax, 2000) to what is achievable in regular classroom interaction. Each task, therefore, is evaluated in terms of:
(i) 	the actual quantity and quality of language used (fluency, accuracy, complexity (Skehan, 1998; 2003) and the L1/L2 balance);
(ii) 	the negotiation of meaning and form undertaken by students as they interact electronically in both their L1 and L2 (collaborative discourse, use of clarification requests, confirmation checks, recasts, self- and other-correction, etc.);
(iii)	how teachers and students perceive and analyse the cultural and linguistic content in the messages received and sent;
(iv)	the learners’ perception of the real-world usefulness of these tasks;
(v) 	teachers’ perception of the “value-addedness” of using CMC to complete the task.

CONSTRAINTS, COMPLICATIONS & EXPERIENCES: ADMINISTRATIVE, TECHNICAL, SOCIO-PERSONAL
Dealing with such a large project across a country as diverse as Indonesia and with the political and economic waves that have rolled through in the last several years, we have naturally experienced several setbacks in implementation. Some of these have been surmountable, for others we have managed to find compromises, while yet others we have had to set aside. As mentioned above, the major setback encountered has been the flow-on effects of various terror attacks in Indonesia in recent years. These incidents have led to a sharp drop in confidence and understanding between the two countries at both political and community levels. Travel bans and warnings have now been in place for Australians wishing to travel to Indonesia for several years, with only a few months’ repeal during this time. While the concept of using electronic communications to bridge this gap and overcome the strictures of these bans is appealing and technically possible, the problem of finding appropriate people and keeping in touch with them through the rather protracted establishment process has meant long delays before forums can actually start up. In this time, teachers have often moved schools, Internet providers changed, or contact has just lapsed for unknown and indeterminate reasons. Other complications, classifiable into administrative, technical and socio-personal will be discussed below.

Administrative
Administratively, several layers of permissions and ethical clearance have had to be negotiated. On the Indonesian side, this has meant contacting and liaising with the Directors General responsible for the appropriate areas of education (Extracurricular and Out-of-school hours as well as Vocational and Language) to gain their confidence and enthusiasm and, with their assistance, make the appropriate contacts at the various descending levels in the hierarchy from regional directors to principals and teachers, with some school governing boards also involved with the private schools. Because of the nature of Indonesian society, it has been critically important to make contact with the right people in each of these areas in order that other aspects flow more smoothly. In spite of strenuous efforts on the part of the national government in recent years, corruption remains an obstacle, without the assistance of the right people. In the case of this project, we were fortunate to gain the support of the Director of Community, Youth and Extracurricular Education as well as the Director of Vocational Education – both of whom have strong interests in the promotion of ITC education as well as English language and international understanding. 

On the Queensland side, ethical clearance had to be sought from the university initially, followed by the government and then Education Queensland. After this protracted process, permission to participate in the project had to be sought from the principals of each school that had indicated interest in participating, then the teachers and finally the students and their parents. Many of the teachers who were very interested in participating were not notified by their principals of our approach to them, and therefore lost interest in the project when extended periods of time had passed without contact from the project coordinators. Unfortunately, because of the requirements of Education Queensland, we could not approach the teachers directly until permission had been granted by their principals. It is only now through personal and professional contacts at other venues that some of the original schools and some new ones are ready to participate and have gone through the process of gaining student and parental consent.

Once all the permission have been granted, the final major administrative headache has been the difference in academic teaching year between Queensland and Indonesia, as well as the minor variations between private and state schools in each location. In Queensland, as with the rest of Australia, the teaching year begins at the end of January with a new intake of students and ends in early to mid-December of the same year, with a 6-8 week holiday over the Christmas-New Year period, which is also our Summer. In Indonesia, on the other hand, the new teaching year begins in September, and then depending on whether the school is state, Muslim, or Christian, may have their long holidays over Christmas, over July-August, or over the Muslim fasting month of Ramadhan, the timing of which varies each year. For the years 2003-5 (the period of this project), therefore, the only time when we can be assured of all schools being able to actively participate in the forums simultaneously and with consistent groups of students is between February and June.

Technical (and pedagogic)
The second area of constraint we have experienced involves the technology and associated pedagogy. Since its inception, the web has been used predominantly as a so-called “pull technology”: that is, users search or explore for what they want to use or find out. This mode of use creates an environment suitable for the development of constructivist and exploratory learning models (Hoven, 2005/6). However, numerous commercial and educational providers are now using the web for “push technology” – creating profiles of users and their needs and sending them pre-packaged information postings – either by email, through automated pop-ups at certain websites or at certain times, or through timed webcasts. Each of these approaches has it merits and advantages. Some users, for example, prefer push technology because it makes the job of finding what they want on the web much more manageable. Others prefer to be able to take advantage of the openness of the web for exploration as it was originally conceived. With the former push technology approach, users run the risk of not getting a biased view of the topic being researched, for example. Users of pull technology, on the other hand risk gaining access to exploitative or other inappropriate material. This latter is particularly a problem when schools and children are the users.

These two approaches to technology, therefore, can be associated with different pedagogical models. In Indonesia, the long tradition of a central, national curriculum with standardized national examinations, has lead the major telecommunications provider to advocate and invest in the development of pre-packaged education modules which are pushed into the geographically diverse regions. These modules also have the advantage of possibly becoming commodities that are marketable to neighbouring countries. This approach to educational provision – essentially using modern technology to perpetuate traditional pedagogy – has hampered the efforts of the education directorates who are looking toward broader community building and communication. It has also lead to philosophical conflict between some forward-looking teachers’ recognition that language is meant to be used to communicate and that communicative and constructivist approaches to language teaching can foster this, and an education system which imposes national exams based on traditional teaching and learning approaches.

A problem that has arisen in some Queensland schools is the use of school-enforced “Nanny software” or firewalls which have blocked the receipt of photos between schools. This has highlighted the need for teachers to liaise with technical support people within schools to allow entry of such material from designated “trusted” sites. For the project coordinators, it has also raised the possibility of needing to teach teachers and students how to allow access to the new sites created by the interacting classes. Wherever possible we invite the school technical support people or IT teachers to the teacher and student workshops in the schools. At the very least we make sure that we meet these people and exchange email addresses so that when problems of this nature arise, we have a ready means of coming to a solution or work-around.

For Indonesian schools, reliable and affordable access to the internet is often an issue. With assistance from the Director of Vocational Education, an increasing number of Vocational High Schools have now been provided with, not just computers and internet access, but also technical staff to support this and a budget to allow continuing and developing use. Teachers at these schools are also designing some creative means for supplementing the school budget by, for example, combining the talents of the business students with those of the IT students. In this way, they have managed to establish school-based internet cafes which are open to both the public and students at the school. Since this access is fee-for-service, they are gradually becoming self-sufficient, with some able to use their new funds to expand their facilities and opening hours – even to the extent of providing part-time salaries to students staffing the cafes outside of school hours.

In schools in both countries, access for language teachers and classes to the computing facilities in schools can sometimes be a problem. There are, understandably, many calls made on these scarce resources and often language classes are very low on the list of curriculum areas which have priority claims. The very names given to the spaces where computing and internet facilities are housed (library, computing room, business skills rooms) usually pre-disposes the use of the facilities to certain (non-L2) purposes. We are currently working with teachers to gradually re-orient the minds of some school administrators to see the necessity of incorporating skills in the use of these facilities for language learning.

Socio-personal
Two major socio-personal constraints to the project have been experienced so far. The first of these involves mismatches of technical expertise, while the second derives from the change from personal to educational uses of electronic communications.

During both the feasibility study and these early stages of the project proper, the coordinators have sometimes been left wondering which is the developing country – Indonesia or Australia. Many students in some schools are much more knowledgeable than their teachers and much of their IT/CMC-related learning seems to have taken place and continues to be undertaken outside of schools. The teacher-technology nexus has often emerged as an issue in our workshops, for example, with teachers suffering embarrassment when they realise that not only do they not understand the uses and possibilities of the technology as well as they thought they did, but also their students are much more knowledgeable and expert than they are. Although in principle all participating teachers have agreed to and are enthusiastic about participating, at certain points their lack of technological expertise has become an impediment. Some teachers, for example, having agreed to participate in order to appear forward-looking or to not lose face with their students or other teachers. It is only when they are actually called upon to begin posting and responding, or to liaise with their partner teacher that their technophobia emerges. This phenomenon seems to have its roots in the traditional top-down power relationship between teachers and students and some resistance to change from a teacher-controlled environment to a more equal or collaborative environment in which, at certain points, teachers are learning from students. In addition, it is often these same teachers who are embarrassed about their lack of proficiency in the target language, resisting the expectation to post 50% in their second language, but rather restricting their use of the L2 to greetings and closings, and a few other formulaic expressions. We hope to acquire clearer and more concrete data on these as the project progresses and we are able to interview individual teachers.

The second socio-personal issues relates to the use of electronic communications for educational purposes. In the feasibility study, most of the participants in the project had indicated that they were familiar with the use of email for communication purposes and with the web for seeking information. However, it has proven difficult to shift the emphasis of communication in the project from the Pen Pal concept to more educational purposes. After their initial sign-on to the forums, for example, many students by-passed the bulletin board and went immediately to personal e-mail. As we had deliberately not yet activated this feature, there was a flurry of messages returned by the server which then appeared in the mailboxes of the coordinators. At the time of the pilot study, the coordinators had a similar experience, when the teacher and students at an Indonesian school initiated their side of contact in the project, not by sending messages student-to-student with the participating school as instructed in the workshop, but rather by sending 278 personal messages to the coordinators. Since one of our research questions in the project relates to the discourse used, these messages will be useful for analysis. Furthermore, as several other researchers have indicated, the establishment of good personal and social relationships is important to the on-going success of communication and negotiation in subsequent pedagogic tasks (Appel & Gilabert, 2002).

CURRENT STATE
Of the 14 Indonesian schools originally identified in the feasibility study, only 3 remain in the final project, with another 5 new ones added through the assistance of local focus teachers. Of the 12 Queensland schools originally identified, only 2 are currently active, though 3 others have submitted lists of students who have their parents’ permission to participate in the coming year, depending on class numbers and enrolments in Indonesian classes. Teachers in another 4 schools have still to negotiate permission with their principals and parent bodies. Several Queensland schools have had to drop out of the project as they can no longer offer Indonesian languages classes at the senior high school level, due to adverse community perception and lack of federal government support. Several Indonesian schools have also disappeared from the project. These schools were specialist Muslim schools or Muslim boarding schools. Since their websites are no longer accessible and email is returned, it is unclear at this stage whether they no longer have Internet access, their sites are being blocked coming into Australia, or other factors are intervening.

At one of the Indonesian schools, it has proven too difficult to engage the English teachers, and therefore the group that participates is an outside-of-school-hours “Cyberschool” – a small class of highly motivated students with their computing teacher whose written English is at an Elementary to Intermediate level (he can communicate fairly effectively, though accuracy leaves a lot to be desired). As their teacher is not a language teacher, this Cyberschool class is being “steered” by the activities of the Queensland partner school while the Indonesian students themselves are working relatively independently of teacher supervision or support – except in the technical area.

GUIDELINES: ADMINISTRATIVE, PEDAGOGIC, TECHNICAL, STARTING UP, PERSONAL
As a result of our experiences to date, we have arrived at the following collection of guidelines for the inclusion of developing countries in e-Tandem language learning projects. These include some of the compromises which have had to be made to the design of the interactions taking place.
1. Locate focus teachers or principals who will support the project with enthusiasm and enthuse others. Such people typically run or are major players in local teacher networks, which may or may not be technologically-based. Ask these people the best process to follow for the steps below.
2. Find out what ethical guidelines apply (if any) at all levels in both countries, how to apply, and how long the approval process can take. Are there specific people who can guide and advise you in facilitating this process?
3. Find out the system of authority, notification and permissions applicable in each country, region and school. It is of little use, for example, to talk directly to principals and teachers first if decisions involving the school or school curriculum are controlled or influenced by a national or local education authority, or a school board. Conversely, because of local power relationships, sometimes the necessary information does not flow downwards either.
4. Having followed guidelines 1-3 above, it is necessary to gain the cooperation of both principals and teachers. Visit schools you have identified as possible participants and talk to: 1. the principal; 2. the language teachers (including L1 teachers and teachers of other foreign languages); 3. students in language classes; 4. students in informal situations around the school; 5. any technical support people or IT teachers. When speaking to computing support staff or IT teachers, find out whether they speak the L2, and with what level of confidence. Finally, take photographs of people and facilities around the school grounds. This is important to gauge how students, teachers, and principals react. Much can be learnt from whether they prefer posed photographs determined by the principal or teachers, or whether they are happy for you to look around and take some candid shots. To what extent they wish the inclusion of students using the facilities in these photographic records also says much about how well the facilities are actually integrated into daily teaching and learning.
5. Many-to-many electronic communications technologies such as bulletin boards, or discussion lists or forums are more effective. In developing countries, class sizes are often larger than elsewhere. In Indonesia, for example, 40 students in a single language class is common, with either this number of computers or half the class number in a single computer laboratory. Rarely are computers found in regular classrooms. In Queensland, class sizes are rarely larger than 25, and therefore it would be impossible for students to each have an individual email partner. The many-to-many mode of communication also alleviates problems experienced when some students are absent from class due to sickness, excursions, or other school activities. It is also helpful during different school breaks and holidays between the two countries as some students will usually be able to log in from home or an Internet café. In our experience it is better for the progress of the project to only allow personal one-to-one (e.g. email) communication after the project is running smoothly and students are posting regularly.
6. Tie participation in the forums to assessment. This could be calculated either on a specified number of posts per week or term or on specific criteria for postings, including content (initiating a new thread, following up on a previous posting by themselves or others with additional information) and discourse aspects (topic changes, ellipsis) as well as syntactic accuracy and complexity, and length of postings.
7. Make sure that sound personal relationships are established between the teachers and students in each tandem pair before pedagogically-oriented tasks are introduced. This can include tasks which will develop into language learning tasks such as taking and sending photos of each other, the school environment, teachers, family, and pets. These can later form the basis of a more in-depth collaborative study of similarities and differences between the two schools and education systems, resulting in a collaboratively-constructed information-based website.
8. Ensure that on-line tasks correspond to the themes and/or teaching points currently being taught in face-to-face classes – or that there is at least some correspondence.
9. Where at all possible, seek some source of external funding to provide additional incentives or rewards for participating teachers/students from the developing country to visit the partner school – even if only for a short time.

CONCLUSION & FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS
To date, several studies have been successfully implemented in Europe and North America of the qualities, characteristics and effectiveness for language learning of tandem e-mail exchanges, and delayed synchronous and asynchronous CMC interactions between groups of learners in developed countries However, because of the technical and organizational difficulties outlined in this paper, there is a paucity of studies involving developing countries in such projects. This paper seeks to fill this gap by detailing the processes undertaken in the establishment of such a project and providing guidelines for achieving this. It also investigates the pedagogical practices which develop as teachers and students work with these new tools and seek to integrate their use into language programs.

Over the next twelve months, we will be collecting, collating and analyzing the archived posting lists of students and teachers participating in our project. Teachers and some students will be interviewed to gauge their perceptions of the value of their participation, particularly where this value may be incidental or not part of the project aims. The websites collaboratively constructed by students will also be collated and linked to the tandem school sites, to enable viewing by all members of the two school communities involved as well as broader access by communities in other schools. When one cycle of pedagogic tasks has been completed, we will also be publishing an additional set of guidelines for the creation of such tasks that are appropriate to this level of students. It is hoped that these guidelines and descriptions of practice will help others to undertake similar projects between secondary or high schools – including some in developing countries.

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Biodata
Debra Hoven teaches technology-enhanced applied linguistics to postgraduate students in TESOL and Applied Linguistics. She has previously taught Indonesian, German, Japanese and ESL/EFL at a range of educational levels ranging from kindergarten to university and in several countries. Her research interests include learner-centred pedagogy and instructional design, multimedia technology, computer mediated communications, intercultural communication, and learning styles and strategies.