Implementation and Evaluation of Language Education through Japanese Chinese Collaborative Distance Learning Lessons
LIN Chunchen

Due to remarkable improvements in performances of personal computers and rapid expansion of broadband Internet access, high-quality voice and video communication has been realized even at the personal level at home and abroad. The high-performance communication environment has made it possible that distance learning offers opportunities for foreign language students to take lessons from native speakers abroad. Language education in this environment, especially computer-supported cooperative learning (CSCL), has been actively conducted, with more inter-learner communication and collaborative learning made through computer networks.
We have made it possible to provide a learning environment closer to real classroom situations.
We have conducted China-Japan collaborative distance learning lessons making the most of the advantages of this multimedia language education environment. The students taking this course give their support to the peer students as the native speakers of the peers' target language. They also have discussions among themselves, person-to-person communication, dictations of dialogues, reviews of lessons, and so on. What makes this course distinctive is the collaborative learning environment where the students participating in the discussions share the same experience and give peer support to each other: We have conducted collaborative lessons for Taiwanese university students majoring in Japanese and Japanese ones majoring in Chinese at the same time periods under a common curriculum, and held four discussions during the course.
This paper will explain the hardware and software environment used for conducting this China-Japan collaborative distance learning course, and give our evaluation of it. We examined the effect of this course by assessing the participants' motivation based on the ARCS motivation model and by analyzing the questionnaires completed after the course. We measured the participants' development in proficiency based on the analysis of outcomes of dictation assignments of the recordings made in the course. We also had interviews with the students and gathered their comments.