Over the last 25 years, cultural competence education has gained prominence in various helping professions (Kaihlanen et al., 2019; Shepherd et al., 2019; Stubbe, 2020). Interestingly, there are opposing perspectives regarding whether cultural competence training is necessary and/or relevant in such fields. Examples of such divisions are captured…

Virtual Exchanges (VEs) are flourishing yet there are still few courses in higher education that offer in-service teachers the fundamental theoretical and practical knowledge necessary to organize and conduct a telecollaborative project in their own educational settings. This paper aims to provide a resource to teacher educators and course…

This project was conducted in a five credit course in English as a Foreign Language, which was a compulsory module in first year business administration studies. The data includes students' learning diaries and a post-course online questionnaire (N=21). The data were analysed using a content analysis method. The results indicate that the students…

This paper presents information on the factors affecting the development of multilingual and multicultural communicative competence in interactive multimodal learning environments in an academic context. The interdisciplinary course in multilingual interaction offered at the University of Jyväskylä aims to enhance students' competence in…

Scaffolding is crucial as transfer of learning does not occur naturally and teaching-learning strategies found to be effective for experts may not be suitably adopted as is for novice learners. Furthermore, opportunities are often "found" or "made." The quality of solutions, however, is mediated by different conceptualizations…

Instructors from two different disciplines collaborated to teach a preservice teacher education course examining the concepts of language and culture with the expectation that mindfulness-based reflective practice could enhance comprehension of course content and provide introspection for transformation. Two questions were studied: how to promote…

This paper describes an upper level foreign language course designed to enable students to "learn about conversation" as both a universal and culture-specific form of talk, and to "learn to converse" at an advanced level and in culturally appropriate ways with speakers of French from France and Francophone countries. Students…