BACK IN ANALOG DAYS...

My colleague, Natasha Lord, and I used to have our students call each other up during class time. We both taught at the same hour at different colleges in Washington. That might have been good phone practice, but the shared culture (American), geography (Washington) and language (broken Russian at both ends) hardly made for exciting language activities.

Then one day, I visited the class that I shared with my team-teacher, Anna Borisovna. She was handing her cell phone to a student:

— Ну, двайте, набирайте сначала код города, 812, и телефон 267-90-67.

Anna Borisovna was asking the student to call her (Anna’s) parents. The 812 area code wasn't for Bloomington, Indiana but for St. Petersburg, Russia. This was 1999, and phone rates had just gotten low enough to make such a class activity affordable.

VOiP

Then along came Skype. In 2005, I began arranging in-class Skype calls to Russians with Skype access. I would assign first-year intensive students to come to class prepared to ask questions of a family of four: two parents and two kids, one near college age. The pre-arranged call, put onto a smart classroom screen with speakers, would last about 15 minutes. All in all, we now have about three such in-class exchanges per year, once the first-year intensive students have about 150 contact hours behind them. Often the conversations have involved the very Russians whom the students have seen in their online videos.

This is not to say that Skype exchanges work perfectly. To begin with, the technology is not flawless. Calls can be dropped. The number of Russians available is not large. Broadband is just getting off the ground in Russia. And the people I find to participate in Skype conversations do so out of generosity.

Attempts to arrange individual Skype exchanges with Russians is also fraught with problems. In 2006, I set up independent studies for two fourth-year students that involved Skype language exchanges with beginning English students in Petrozavodsk. For one of our students things went swimmingly. Skype was the start of a solid friendship. My other student was less successful. He himself had problems with Skype. And his two Russian partners often failed to show up online at agreed meeting times.

On the other hand, the availability of paid tutoring services through Skype, as well as nascent efforts for the Russian learning environment in Second Life, suggests that real-time computer-mediated aural / visual environments are at our doorstep. Moreover, as speech recognition software improves, we should foresee a day in the not too distant future when casual users will speak to each other in computer mediated environments generating on the fly captions.