Dorothy Chun, professor and vice chair in the Department of Education at the Gevirtz School at UC Santa Barbara, has edited the collection Cultura-inspired Intercultural Exchanges: Focus on Asian and Pacific Languages (National Foreign Language Research Center, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, 2014).
Although many online intercultural exchanges have been conducted based on the groundbreaking Cultura model (a web-based pedagogical model designed to bring intercultural learning and discovery to the forefront of the language class), most to date have been between and among European languages. This volume presents several chapters with a focus on exchanges involving Asian and Pacific languages. Many of the benefits and challenges of these exchanges are similar to those reported for European languages; however, some of the difficulties reported in the Chinese and Japanese exchanges might be due to the significant linguistic differences between English and East Asian languages. This volume adds to the body of emerging studies of telecollaboration among learners of Asian and Pacific languages.
Dorothy Chun is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Education at UC Santa Barbara. Her research areas include: L2 phonology and intonation, L2 reading and vocabulary acquisition, computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and telecollaboration for intercultural learning. She has conducted studies on cognitive process in learning with multimedia and has authored courseware for language and culture acquisition. Since 2000, she has been the Editor in Chief of the online journal Language Learning and Technology and in 2004 became the founding director of the Ph.D. Emphasis in Applied Linguistics at UCSB.