Social networking sites have become ubiquitous in our daily communicative exchanges, which has brought about new platforms of identification and opened possibilities that were out of reach for many minoritized communities. As they represent an increasing percentage of the media we consume, these sites have been considered crucial for…

This paper provides insights into online language practices among bilingual teenagers who speak and learn a lesser-used language. Regarding language diversity, the internet is seen to pose both challenges to and opportunities for smaller languages. Focusing on German-Upper Sorbian adolescents, this study enquires to what extent new media and…

By investigating the first thirty minutes of ten initial student group meetings (cf. Rampazzo & Aranha, 2019), this study explores the interactional resources that participants display during online talk-ininteraction. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is applied to the data consisting of "Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2"…

The article presents research findings on the professional growth of three in-service EFL teachers from Germany who took part in a teacher education programme centred on technology-mediated plurilingual education. The study investigated how the programme influenced the development of the teachers' pedagogical and digital skills in creating and…

This study aimed to explore critical cultural awareness improvement of prospective teachers with a transnational virtual exchange project. Within the scope of this study, prospective teachers of English studying at English Language Teaching (ELT) department in Turkey attended a virtual exchange project that was organized with other prospective…

This paper reports on research conducted within the frame of an international online cooperation between Germany and Israel (CoGI). Diverse, multilingual student groups co-construct multilingual websites on educational initiatives. The aim is to raise prospective teachers' language awareness (LA) and cultural awareness (CA) for cooperation in…

This paper discusses the potential of immersing foreign language learners in Social Virtual Reality (SVR) in an international seminar, designed by the authors, called SpEakWise VR, combining the tandem language learning paradigm with gamification in immersive virtual environments. SpEakWise VR builds on an existing telecollaboration (SpEakWise)…

This mixed method case study explored globalization and complex relationships through a virtual exchange project between students from Germany and Colombia in upper intermediate level English classes. We believed by providing a space for online conversation, written collaboration and discussion, students would enhance their plurilingual and…

The present study investigated the effects of group set-up in a semester-long telecollaborative discussion forum project in second-semester German. In order to explore whether group set-up affects learning in discussion forums, small groups of non-native speakers (NNS) of German were partnered either with native speakers (NS), other NNS with the…

The focus of this research is the practicalities of adjustment to a semester of teaching language wholly online in the current COVID-19 pandemic at a German university. Such a study is important in order to illustrate the ways in which language instructors who were already proficient in teaching online were able to marshal existing resources and…

Mentored online intercultural interaction offers foreign language learners the opportunity to develop different competences, including intercultural, linguistic, and digital competence (O'Dowd, 2021). Such virtual exchange (VE) projects typically involve computer-mediated communication via, for example, Zoom. However, the use of high-immersion…

In this paper the results of an online survey (n=210) regarding the usefulness of Facebook for informal L2 learning will be presented. Participants were individual Facebook users who study either German (n=118) or Japanese (n=92). By using a combination of open and closed questions, the mostly quantitative findings of the survey indicate that for…

This paper aims to contribute to the growing literature on how prospective foreign language teachers can learn to be successful telecollaborators. We investigate Polish and German TEFL students' perceptions of how they develop the competences, attitudes, and beliefs described by O'Dowd (2015) through experiential learning in a virtual exchange.…

The sudden shift to online learning thrust upon universities worldwide by the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis created unique challenges related to effective online education. Challenges were most acute for highly interactive classes that were forced to move to asynchronous online learning environments. In response to these challenges,…

Online exchanges among learners are an important form of communication in language learning contexts. This is due to the affordances this medium of communication creates for learning as well as the growing interest in internationalization of curricula. In fact, online communication can foster connections between people, including learners, across…