Introduction
Traditionally, access-oriented postsecondary institutions such as community colleges have primarily focused on practical education rather than largely theoretical or purely ‘academic’ subjects. For humanities disciplines in community colleges, this has meant that delivered courses are in many cases limited to general education college writing courses, as well as foreign language courses. Linguistics as an academic field of study has, therefore, largely been limited to universities (McKee et al. 2015); linguistics has, often correctly, been understood as abstract and not connected to students’ lived experiences, a tendency that has been reinforced by the prominence of formalist Chomskyan linguistics in many North American linguistics departments in much of the past few decades. Working in the City University of New York (CUNY) community college system, Levinson (2005), however, makes a persuasive case for the value of teaching linguistics, in particular sociolinguistics, in diverse urban community colleges. Specifically, Levinson (2005) contends that:
While offering a linguistics course may appear to be a shift in focus away from preparing students in college-level reading and writing, it has proven to be otherwise: the nature of linguistics, in particular sociolinguistics, has dovetailed quite well with the enhancement of language development by providing students with a concrete context for their own potential options as language users in a diverse society. (Levinson 2005, 199)
As Levinson suggests, teaching sociolinguistics classes at diverse community colleges gives students the opportunity to: a) learn about the social aspects of language; b) become more inquisitive about their language learning experiences; and c) become aware of linguistic choices that they make, while exploring topics such as gender, bilingualism, and dialects. Levinson (2005), furthermore, believes that sociolinguistics classes lead community college students to improve their analytical skills—and to become more aware of their own family’s language background(s). In a more recent study at the same institution, Voorhees and Vorobel (2021) provide an autoethnographic account of the principal investigator’s attempts to engage community college linguistics students in New York City in authentic research activities as part of the course.
While the literature on teaching sociolinguistics in a community college is continuing to develop, there is very limited research on connecting linguistics courses in postsecondary institutions, access-oriented or not, through the use of collaborative online international learning (COIL)—that is, having postsecondary classes in two or more different nations work together on collaborative research projects through the use of digital technologies, also known as virtual exchange. This limited research is despite the fact that the content of sociolinguistics courses seems well-aligned with making connections across national and linguistic boundaries, the very thing that COIL collaborations are designed for. Accordingly, this study describes a COIL project connecting a sociolinguistics course at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) of the City University of New York (CUNY) with a general education linguistics course at the University of the Bahamas.
According to Gibson, the psychologist who coined the term (see Gibson 1966; 1986), affordances are features of an environment which people are in that provide opportunities for interaction and/or learning to happen. In a technology-enhanced language learning context such as a COIL exchange, the digital platforms on which students interact and the social environment which is created through technology together provide opportunities for awareness and learning (see, for example, van Lier 2000). In the context of our COIL project, the affordances are the many potentials for learning provided by the environment and the assignment sequence. Although the word affordance originated in the field of psychology, it has been used extensively in second language research. Accordingly, inspired in part by the work of Satar and Hauck (2020) and Bilki et al. (2022), we posit the following affordances for virtual exchange projects connecting linguistics students, in particular linguistics students at diverse access-oriented institutions:
- Encouraging students to challenge standard language ideologies and ideologies regarding second language learning
- Building students’ metacritical awareness of their language learning processes
- Building intercultural knowledge and competence
Institutional Profiles
First established in the 1960s, BMCC is a two-year community college serving approximately 22,000 students of ethnically and linguistically diverse backgrounds, many of whom eventually transfer to four-year institutions. Reflecting the great diversity of New York City, the institution has students stemming from at least 129 countries (BMCC Fact Sheet, n.d.). BMCC students speak at least 79 languages other than English at home, including Spanish, Chinese, Bengali, Russian, Haitian Creole, and Arabic (Facts and Statistics, n.d.). As an example, the specific class that participated in the COIL project included students stemming originally from all of the following nations: the Dominican Republic, China, Bangladesh, Palestine, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, the UK, and Japan.
The University of The Bahamas (UB) is, on the other hand, the national four-year postsecondary institution of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, serving approximately 5,000 full-time and part-time students (Why UB? n.d.). The student body of the University of The Bahamas is, almost exclusively, Black Bahamian Christian, speaking varieties of English along the Bahamian Creole Continuum between the basilect (Bahamian Creole English) and the acrolect (Standard Bahamian English). Thus, UB students have few opportunities to interact with other students of different nationalities or linguistic backgrounds (see, Oenbring and Gokcora 2022). The only significant minority group of students at the University of The Bahamas is Haitian Bahamians, an immigrant group stigmatized in broader Bahamian culture, and thus these students are usually keen to assimilate to Bahamian English language varieties. While the UB is not entirely open-admission, it is an access-oriented institution, largely serving first-generation postsecondary learners.
An Introduction to COIL
In collaborative online international learning (COIL), two or more classes in different parts of the world work on a common project to investigate a researchable topic across national boundaries to participate in intercultural learning, develop digital competencies, and learn course content with an international perspective. A typical COIL project can last five to seven weeks, engaging students in the same or cross-disciplinary subject areas in a face-to-face, hybrid, or fully-online course setting. While it is common for COIL projects to focus on the teaching and learning of foreign languages (e.g., Hagley and Wang 2020; Canals 2020), virtual exchange has benefits in any field where instructors wish to build students’ intercultural career skills and foster cross-cultural communication (King de Ramirez 2021; Rubin 2017). Other benefits of virtual exchange that have been suggested in the research literature include: building fluency and accuracy through peer feedback (Ware and O’Dowd 2008); establishing critical digital literacy (Hauck 2019); and encouraging learner autonomy (Fuchs et al. 2012).
The Courses
BMCC students participating in the COIL exchange were enrolled in LIN 100, Language and Culture, a course designed to introduce students to the fundamental topics of linguistics, including: phonology; morphology; syntax; nonstandard dialects; language and gender; bilingualism; and, most importantly, second language acquisition. LIN 100 has a somewhat unique institutional place at BMCC in that it is available as a for-credit elective course even for students who have only completed the minimum ESL prerequisite but who are unable to take other credit-bearing courses until they pass an English reading and writing proficiency test. Accordingly, the course attracts many students who are just beginning their journey pursuing a postsecondary education in the United States. Since most of the students in the class do not come from backgrounds where they speak the language of power in the United States (that is, Standard English) as a first language, learning about the theoretical foundations of second language acquisition provides an opportunity for these students to critically interrogate their own second language learning process by developing an understanding of scholarly ideas related to second/foreign language acquisition (e.g., Krashen 1982; King and Mackey 2007; Tedick, Christian and Fortune 2011; Garcia 2011; Loven 2021), immersion, dual immersion, ESL, and the English only debate.
On the other hand, at the University of The Bahamas, the students participating in the COIL project were enrolled in Linguistics 225, a general education linguistics course looking at language and discourse in the Bahamas. While Bahamians almost exclusively speak Bahamian Creole English as their home language, the majority of Bahamians are not aware that their language constitutes a unique creole; many Bahamians understand their unique variety as just a dialect—that is, a “broken” or “bad” version of English (see, for example, Oenbring and Fielding 2014; Dyer-Spiegel 2019; Laube and Rothmund 2021). Further, Bahamians are keen to distance themselves from the notion of creole, as they associate the label creole with Haitian Creole, the language spoken by the stigmatized Haitian minority. Consequently, one of the major goals of Linguistics 225 is to inoculate Bahamian students against folk attitudes to language and bias against their home language and to challenge standard language ideologies. The course also provides students with an introduction to the historical development of Bahamian Creole English and a general introduction to the study of discourse analysis.
The COIL Project
Our collaboration took place in Spring 2021, while both campuses were still operating remotely due to COVID-19 protocols. The COIL exchange took four weeks and involved two live (synchronous) Zoom sessions involving students in both classes. In the first live synchronous Zoom session, students, after a brief icebreaker, worked in groups of three to discuss and evaluate their opinions about statements related to misconceptions of learning a second language (e.g., myth 1: bilingual children will have a speech delay), an exercise based on King and MacKey’s (2007) work (see also Garcia et al. 2017). Students then arranged times to interview COIL partners about their beliefs about second language acquisition, using a series of questions specifically designed for student interviews of one another developed by noted TESOL scholar Ryuko Kubota for her Applied Linguistics for Teachers course at the University of British Columbia (personal communication at the 2018 Symposium on Second Language Writing). In particular, these questions focused on the respondent’s opinions about immigrants learning the dominant language of the country and the effectiveness of various instructional methods used for learning a foreign language. For example, in one of the questions students asked each other: should immigrant parents speak English at home with their children so that the children acquire English quickly? Based on the findings of the interviews, students in both classes wrote four-to-five page research papers including the interview with the partner and analyzing their partner’s answers by using references from the research literature. Finally, students were asked to revise their papers after getting comments from their instructor.
For this study, the authors collected data through a variety of fora, including: students’ informal reflections and freewrites on the sessions at the end of our Zoom meetings; a formal survey at the end of the COIL project; and evidence from students’ essays. Although both classes were asynchronous and remote, all students on both campuses participated in COIL tasks. The project received human subjects approval from BMCC’s Institutional Review Board, and all students consented to participate in the study.
Affordances of The Second Language Acquisition COIL Project
Affordance 1: Encouraging students to challenge standard language ideologies and ideologies regarding second language learning
Although the Bahamas is a multilingual nation, with Bahamians themselves speaking an English creole as their first language, the prevailing ideology of nationhood in the Bahamas is decidedly English monolingual. As in other Anglophone Caribbean nations, English-as-mother-tongue curricula—that is, curricula that treat English as both the L1 of the population and target language—are pervasive in the Bahamas (see, for example, Milson-Whyte, Oenbring and Jaquette 2019, 5). Indeed, despite the fact that most Bahamians speak Bahamian Creole English (referred to locally as Bahamian Dialect) as a home language, many Bahamians do not recognize that they speak something other than international Standard English, often referring to their esteemed target variety with the deferential (post-)colonial epithet the Queen’s English.
Similarly, despite the fact they speak languages and English varieties other than the dominant language of the United States (that is, Standard English), BMCC students generally have not previously had fora to critically consider standard language ideologies in the US context. In fact, many seem to have accepted the dominant linguistic ideology in the United States—that is English monolingualism. Further, despite coming from diverse communities, BMCC students are not aware of the rich ethnic and regional varieties of English spoken in New York City (e.g., Jamaican Creole English, Nigerian Pidgin English, African American English). Accordingly, the COIL exchange becomes an awareness project regarding language varieties, and students start to question the notion of “proper” varieties and dialects.
COIL virtual exchange offered students at both institutions the opportunity to think outside the boundaries of English monolingual ideology in both the US and the Bahamas. That is, the COIL assignments, as they required students to compare the contexts of language learning in their home nation with those of their COIL partner, caused students to think in complex ways about the relationship between language and nationhood. For example, one UB student, after previously talking about the economic value of learning English in Spanish-speaking Venezuela with her COIL partner, noted in a reflection piece that:
Since English is the Bahamas’ main language, one may not understand why the students in the Bahamas learn English. We learn English for a number of reasons and the main reason is that Bahamians have their own dialect that they would carry into other English speaking countries and they would run into trouble trying to translate the dialect into the ‘proper’ English. Our dialect is strong and unique[;] we understand each other but others will not because we tweak the original word and make it our own. For example, other countries may understand light rain or drizzling but as Bahamians we use the term “sprying.”
As we can see in the above quote, the interaction with their COIL partner encouraged the UB student to think critically about the place of international Standard English and Bahamian varieties in the Bahamian context, including, for example, placing ‘proper’ English in scare quotes.
Similarly, BMCC students were able to take insights from their discussions with their UB COIL partners to critically analyze the standard language ideologies and ideologies of second language learning in the US context. In a reflection, one BMCC student summed up his discussion with his UB COIL partner as follows:
We discussed all the questions concerned with language acquisition. First, we discussed whether immigrant parents should speak English at home with their children so that the children acquire the English quickly. According to [my UB COIL partner’s] experience, … most of his non-Bahamian friends who grew up in homes where their parents are non-English speakers are able to speak English fluently. For example, the parents of his Haitian friends do not speak English. However, [his Haitian friends] can speak English fluently. In fact, some would consider English to be their first language. Some of them are unable to speak Haitian Creole fluently, even though they grew up in homes where only Haitian Creole is spoken.
Notably, the COIL partner interview led this BMCC student to make connections to generation one vs. generation two language learning in other environments. After the above passage, the student made further connections to research on second language learning in the United States context, noting that:
According to the Pew Hispanic Survey, “more than six in ten (61%) Latino adults in the U.S. say they can carry on a conversation in English ‘very well’ or ‘pretty well.’ A similar share (60%) say they can read a newspaper or book in English ‘very well’ or ‘pretty well’” (Pew Research Center). [This] shows that immigrants can learn fine without their parents speeding up the process of their English language skills. Also, as explained by King and Mackey (2007), “there are now literally thousands of opportunities and hundred ways to learn second languages in the United States.” (20)
As these interactions suggest, our COIL virtual exchange activities offered students in both contexts the opportunity to view inside the linguistic ideological matrix of the other country and apply those insights critically to their surrounding environment.
Affordance 2: Building meta-critical awareness of their language learning processes
Although most BMCC students are non-native English speakers who are learning English, they have not been learning theories of language learning as they learn English. By learning the theories of second language acquisition, LIN 100 students become aware of the importance of the emphasis on communication and interaction while learning a second language. Related to the emphasis on the importance of communication in language learning, one BMCC student reflected upon her experiences in learning Arabic in a freewrite activity after a COIL inter-class discussion about language learning. She had taken Spanish in high school, and in her freewrite she compared an Arabic language class at BMCC with the Spanish class she had taken years before. Referring to her own functional use of language in the Arabic class, she noted that:
The way the class is taught is very different from the Spanish language course I took in high school. In high school I learned pronouns, names of fruits, and I would have to watch videos of people speaking the language. Whereas for Arabic, I started from the alphabets, then learned how to connect them and then I was taught how to form sentences … I also enjoy the way the professor teaches the class because he does it in a way that is engaging. He will show us a video on how to do certain things then we will be put in breakout rooms to try the material he has taught us. In these rooms, both native and nonnative speakers are paired up and we help each other understand the work. I enjoy taking Arabic because it is the language in which I study my holy book as a Muslim, and it helps me understand the meaning of what I am reading.
As we can see in the above quote, the student refers to the communicative aspects of the Arabic language course by referring to the professor's meaningful student engagement. Even though the student was a student rather than an instructor in the course, she has learned to appreciate meaningful, communicative tasks/activities that enable students to engage in peer-to-peer interaction, leading to student success in a language classroom.
Similarly, another BMCC student who is conscientious about communicative language teaching highlighted the emphasis on using the target language in class and the proficiency-based elements, such as using the target language in a real context. In a freewrite after a COIL discussion on second language learning strategies, the student offered praise of the communicative approach used by an Italian professor she had previously had at BMCC, stating that:
[Our Italian instructor] used to make us participate in some small language games, which was what made the class more interesting. She also made us do role-playing, with different scenarios. Our class would blast with laughter and excitement…She invited us for a coffee break and told us to order coffee in the Italian language. I cannot forget the shocking faces of the waitresses. I've enjoyed my class because this foreign professor was really the bridge between us and the Italian culture. The class was never boring because all the students were engaged together in the classroom and we were all motivated to learn.
The student above refers to an important element of using the target language (L2) that facilitates learning a second language, especially when an authentic setting is created. What she is referring to is promotion of equity in the foreign language classroom as foreign language professors engage more students in the activities by making the activities/tasks much more interactive and engaging students in meaningful, communicative activities instead of memorization and regurgitation. Similarly, the COIL exchange allowed BMCC students the opportunity to engage in meaningful and authentic communication with their UB COIL partners.
Affordance 3: Building intercultural knowledge and competence
A final affordance of the COIL sociolinguistic exchange is that students learn from each other’s cultures—that is, building intercultural knowledge and competence, what some researchers in the COIL tradition refer to as “online intercultural exchange” (O’Dowd 2007; O’Dowd and Lewis 2016). For instance, prior to the COIL exchange, most BMCC students admitted to knowing little about the Bahamas—other than the fact that it is a collection of islands—and had little knowledge of Bahamian culture. Some students even expressed that they didn’t think that there would be a university in a location famous for sun and sand vacations. However, as virtual exchange creates a shared reality, it provides opportunities for students to learn from each other. For example, one BMCC student claimed that she was surprised to learn of all of the different majors available at UB, noting that:
[Meeting my COIL partner] opened my eyes to see all different majors that I haven't thought about. … [I also] learned about Bahamian culture and gained a deeper understanding of the University of the Bahamas. Also, I learned about my partner's views on immigrants learning a second language. Although we came from different countries, we were all able to respect the cultures of different countries very well.
As we can see in the above quote, COIL collaboration offered students the opportunity to reflect upon their cross-cultural learning experience and how it has enhanced their overall learning. When students are asked about the most significant thing that they learned about their peers as a result of their COIL exchange, they usually mentioned learning about new cultures, appreciation of it, and the awareness of unique languages.
More than just building awareness of other cultures, the COIL virtual exchange offered students the opportunity to make personal connections with postsecondary students in a very different cultural and linguistic environment. For example, one BMCC student commented that:
The most significant thing I learned from my peer was that she has accurately planned her academic career. She also has accurate goals, etc. I also got to know and learn something about a country I didn't know before. … Even though we both were from different places of the world, we both have a common goal of education and the reason behind why we want to achieve it.
As we can see, the simple fact that her COIL partner, in a different nation, had detailed and planned goals, goals which they were able to discuss and reflect upon, clearly made an impression on the BMCC student.
Conclusion
As we have suggested in this study, including topics such as bilingualism and second language acquisition in COIL exchanges using digital technology increases students’ metacritical awareness of their language learning. This combines fruitfully with students’ opportunities to practice the target language(s) through the COIL interactions. Further, in COIL collaboration students are given the opportunity to reflect on their cultural experiences and the language choices that are provided to them. No matter what their language background is, through studying topics of bilingualism, dialects and second language acquisition in a contrastive manner through the context of COIL, students become aware of various learning opportunities of learning a language and establish metalinguistic awareness of studying languages.
Although we believe our study to be a unique contribution to the research literature on virtual exchange and teaching sociolinguistics at access-oriented institutions, one limitation we had during our study was the at times limited number of students who have actively participated in the virtual exchange and the course in general. As we have noted, the collaboration took place in the Spring semester of 2021 when most courses at both institutions were still conducted remotely due to the pandemic. While, as elsewhere, the rapid transition to online education during COVID-19 was well-intended at both institutions, it brought up many challenges among students. Although getting a college education can be perceived as an opportunity for personal challenges and growth, some scholars have observed that first-generation college students at community colleges perceive significant amounts of stress when there are adversarial conditions (Bono, Reil, and Hescox 2020, 39). Therefore, under the circumstances of the pandemic, there was some student disengagement among students at both institutions during our study. Indeed, although there were 24 students enrolled in the BMCC course, 11 students either withdrew or did not participate in the course. Another limitation of our study was the lack of specific peer feedback on their partner's essay on second language acquisition. After students composed a short research paper on their partner's beliefs on learning a second language, they did not exchange their papers to read and provide specific feedback on the content as well as the organization of the paper. We have included peer feedback in other previous COIL projects; however, since we have decided to allocate only four weeks for this collaboration, there was no time at the end of the semester for peer feedback. Colpaert (2020) and Jiang (2022) mention that peer feedback/peer evaluation could be the primary feature of a COIL project. That is, it enables students to reflect on what they have learned and will broaden their insights about second language learning, and the goals of the course.
In sum, we believe that our study is a valuable and timely contribution to the literature of collaborative online international learning (COIL). Our study demonstrates that virtual exchange projects do not only occur in tandem with foreign language courses, but there is a growing interest in application of COIL, whether it is during the pandemic period or not, in other discipline areas such as linguistics which are considered more ‘scholarly’ and ‘theoretical’, even in access-oriented institutions. The findings of this study highlight the affordances of COIL collaboration between linguistics courses in two diverse access-oriented postsecondary institutions. The affordances we posit are: challenging standard language ideologies and myths regarding second language learning; building metacritical awareness of the language learning process; and online intercultural exchange. We believe that the third of these affordances is especially relevant for students at institutions such as the University of The Bahamas where students do not have as many opportunities to interact with international students as students at many postsecondary institutions do. That is to say, online digital collaboration allowed Bahamian postsecondary students to—as referred to in Winner and Shields’ noteworthy (2002) study of an online collaboration between Bahamian postsecondary students and American postsecondary students—break the island chains.
