In this part, I would offer a balanced selection of examples from a pool of data, including the last two open-ended questions for students’ feedbacks on the overall project and their reflections demonstrated in the final class-presentation. The selected students’ responses are summarized in Table 14.
Table 14
Students’ feedbacks Strengths of the project
(1) “I'm satisfied about the project. It clearly improved my vocabulary and I had a chance to make a real conversation. I think that there must be balance between e-mail sent and e-mails received.” (Mackiewicz Lukasz):
(2) “I could find out what the life in Taiwan was like – it was interesting.” (Tarwka Ala)
(3) “I think it was a great idea! I hope I will have a project like this in my next class.
I like it very much. Andy didn’t write a lot so I haven’t learnt much about Taiwanese culture, but now I know that far away, in Taiwan, in a city called Kaohsiung, live very interesting people. They have helped us to understand that we don’t learn English for marks at school but to communicate with people from all over the world and to broaden our mind.” (Forystek Ewa)
(4) “Thanks to this project now I know where Taiwan is [is Taiwan,] I know something about culture of people who live there.” (Olbrot Jadwiga)
(5) “I was so lucky to have this special chance to make friends.” (Tomo Huang) (7) “Though writing a mail usually took more than an hour, I felt a sense of achievement when I finished writing it.” (Cora Yeh)
(8) “I feel my English was getting better through the experience.” (Jane Tsai)
(9) “It is the first time that I know I could really use English to communicate with people from other parts of the world.” (Jessica Chen)
Weakness of the project
(1) “I’ve got some suggestions for the future. I hope not to mark each letter and we should given more time to write an e-mail. Besides, only volunteers ought to do the project, students shouldn’t be ordered to take part in it, because it will be senseless homework, which can’t improve English and becomes a boring, unnecessary homework. A mentor of the project ought to give one mark for the term. Students should think up the topics and talk with the teacher about them so that students wouldn’t talk about things they don’t like. And perhaps the most important thing – all participants ought to be systematic.” (Hawryleczko Maciej)
(2) “I hope the project could last for a longer period of time.” (Jasiczek Maria) (3) “Since I had to spend a lot of time to compose a mail in order to write as much
as my partner did, sometimes I felt pressured.” (Blanch Tseng)
(4) “The schedule was too tense for me, and I had little time to reply the letter.”
(Cathy Lin)
(5) “I had been expecting to join the project from the very beginning. And I felt extremely excited when I got my partner’s first mail. However, I was getting disappointed with my partner’s delayed response. Gradually, I was losing enthusiasm.” (Jack Hsu)
(6) “It’s better to involve only the volunteers in the project next time.” (Andy Pan) (7) “Frankly speaking, I did not gain much from the activity, because he wrote little
and we made only few exchanges. I felt disappointed when I saw those interesting e-mails shown by other classmates. However, the experience was great, for I have never had such experiences. I hope I still can join the project next time.” (Ken Yu)
Students’ end-of-semester feedbacks revealed that in general the students from both Poland and Taiwan felt that the experience was very interesting and rewarding.
However, some of them mentioned some discomfort, frustrations with the writing and their partner, and they even suggested ways for improvements. With respect to the strengths of the project, the exchanges, according to some students, offered a linguistically, socially, and culturally meaningful context for them to use the second language. Such results are consistent with the findings of the previous studies, which claimed that the cross-cultural e-mail exchanges were beneficial for learners’
linguistic and cultural learning and the development of the friendship as well.
On the other hand, students’ negative feelings toward the projects arose from their partners’ delayed or lack of responses, and having little time to keep up with the pressing e-mail schedule. A common suggestion was to conduct this project on a voluntary basis instead of a compulsory task, for several of them seemed to have suffered a lot from the e-mail writing. Indeed, some students’ enthusiasm wore off as the project proceeded, but this was considered a general decline in expectations as it was a natural process with many pedagogical activities. Besides, some students, as previous data suggested (Q2, Q3), had changed their attitudes from being negative to positive, and even showed the willingness to join a similar project in the future (Q4).
Actually, the researcher was aware that some previous studies only involved a small
number of volunteers, and the small size of samples was later claimed by those researchers as one of the study limitations. Involving the whole class in the current study was intended to give every student the chance to immerse themselves in the real English communication. Furthermore, since almost all the students never had any experiences communicating with a foreigner via e-mail, it was very possible that the present arrangement might lead to some different findings from that exclusive to the volunteers. There is no denying that motivated individuals tended to be more willing to sustain the follow-up e-mail interactions. However, merely having motivation does not seem to ensure long-term exchanges, which were related to various factors, such as more spare time and an active partner, as found in the current study.
Insufficient time is a common problem for the students in the current study. The heavy study loads usually led them to delay the writing. What’s worse, some students with weak proficiencies just skipped the replies. The teachers alike could hardly find time to have students share their e-mails with the class and check on their writings due to the tight schedule for regular courses. Take the final class presentations for example, with 5-7 minutes for each student, it took about more than three hours for a class of 39 CSHSs. In fact, the presentations had taken up 8 periods of English class time, since the sharing and feedbacks brought about a great sensation among the
students. As for the Polish counterparts, some of them failed to have the chance to make the presentations, for they had devoted themselves to the upcoming entrance exam and graduation. As a result, all they could do was submit the scripts and the files to their teacher.