Learners in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context seldom have the opportunity to interact with people from other cultures and experience intercultural communication in English to foster their intercultural competence (IC), whether inside or outside of the classroom. In an effort to create a brand new opportunity to boost target language…

This study investigates the uses and gratification of the Internet among students in the Department of Mass Communication, Delta State University (DELSU) Abraka. The study became necessary following the influx of and increase in the use of the Internet in education, which portends functional as well as dysfunctional roles on students if not…

Email is considered as one of the most widely accepted computer-mediated communication tools among university students. Evidence from the present literature shows that students make a significant amount of their course-related communications (e.g. discuss a topic with peers) using this tool. This study explores the dynamics of an email…

SMS based learning delivery platforms have been increasingly used in different countries and university learning situations to deliver vocabulary and concept learning content to university students. The present study sums up five mini studies in which a total of 1028 first year university students, majoring in social studies at chartered Israeli…

Twelve special education teachers and teacher assistants who have instructional experience using iPads with children with special needs completed a survey that queried their practices and perceptions. In general, teachers and assistants were extremely positive about the value of iPads for children with special needs, particularly for children with…

Over the past 18 years, a number of large scale reviews of the literature have documented that gender differences in computer attitudes, ability, and use tend to favor males. Since the use of laptops in higher education classrooms is increasing, it is important to examine whether this use is disproportionally advantageous to males and…

There has been much discussion about the issue of boundaries on Facebook. Some suggest faculty members can resolve potential dilemmas in relation to students by making sensible decisions about what to post and by fine-tuning privacy settings. But the challenges and opportunities run deeper. For those who want to be appropriately accessible to…

This paper examines the use of CMC in both Japanese and English dominated "domains" by Australian learners of Japanese. The natural, social online communication of 12 Australian university students with 18 of their Japanese contacts was collected for a period of up to four years, resulting in a corpus of approximately 2,000 instances of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report on one high school English-language-learner's (ELL) breadth and depth of vocabulary as he communicated with his teacher through e-mail across geographic boundaries for over 18 months. Design/methodology/approach: The authors began by separating 358 e-mails into three time periods (first beginning,…

The rapid development of ICT (information technology and communication) in the last two decades has changed society substantially as a whole. For higher education institutions, the external environment pressure to incorporate ICT in their educational and administrative processes has forced them to invest in resources for infrastructure and…

The influence of media richness, media attentional load, social influence and users' prior experience with media on selection of media to transmit different messages to peers within an educational organization was tested. Media were discriminated by all potential variables. Support was found for the role of prior experience and social influence in…

Formative assessment generates feedback on students' performance, thereby accelerating and improving student learning. Anecdotal evidence gathered by a number of evaluations has hypothesised that audio feedback may be capable of enhancing student learning more than other approaches. In this paper we report on the preliminary findings of a…

With the rapid development of mobile technologies, mobile learning has become a new trend in education. A better understanding of how to effectively use communication technologies to improve mobile learning is important. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the media richness of various message delivery methods in the proposed m-learning…

This study explores the pedagogical potential of instant messaging in a communication course. Two instructors made themselves available to students via instant messaging as a supplement to other modes of communication (e.g., e-mail, office hours). In order to gauge students' reactions to and use of the technology, the researchers kept logs of…

The purpose of this study was to analyze data related to rural teachers' use of online communities. Rural teachers are often isolated in their practice and sometimes have difficulty connecting with other teachers with their same assignments or needs due to their professional setting. As Internet availability increases and online communities…