New Zealand Learners and Chinese Tutors Co-constructing Learning/Teaching Environments in Videoconferencing Sessions

Massey University (MU) relishes opportunities for new learning opportunities in its long-standing distance language teaching programme. In partnership with Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU), our Synchronous Chinese Online Language Teaching (SCOLT) programme has brought together MU students of Chinese and BLCU trainee teachers in single-learner videoconferences for their mutual benefit in furthering learning aims. Our students have valued opportunities for real-time interaction with speakers of Chinese willing to focus on their learning needs. Recordings of the sessions and related processes have provided rich sources of information about how sessions have evolved. Essential here is the influence of three factors, the human agents, language in focus and multimodal environment, on the process of negotiating a curriculum meeting participants’ own preferences for topics, language to be covered and working process. This chapter examines how these have interacted in the case of two contrasting learners and asserts the value of SCOLT as a very flexible tool.