Several studies on Virtual Exchange (VE) have highlighted positive learning experiences, increases in technological pedagogical and content skills (TPACK) and foreign language (FL) competence. However, most VE research to date use qualitative or descriptive case-studies of how VEs have been implemented, and what "might" have worked. In…

Increase in diversified teaching contexts has led researchers to investigate the potentials of telecollaboration in multicultural learning environments. While there are abundant telecollaboration studies, improving intercultural awareness through a theoretical model is usually under-investigated. Based on Byram's (1997) co-orientational and…

This study examined the online exchanges of 28 pre-service foreign language teachers (14 in Russia, 14 in the US) as they discussed in English their opinions about cultural products, practices, and perspectives, and their study abroad experiences via voice-based telecollaboration. Informed by intercultural competence frameworks, a qualitative…

An Activity Theory framework has been increasingly applied for understanding the tension or contradictions in telecollaboration. However, to date, few researchers have applied it to the analysis of digital stories, and none of them, to our knowledge, have used it to analyze the co-creation of multilingual digital stories. In this study, we explore…

Although the effectiveness of computer-mediated collaborative writing (CMCW) is confirmed by many recent studies, only a few have investigated whether linguistic knowledge and writing skills learned through collaboration can be internalized and transferred to individual writing. This study uses a pre-and post-test design to investigate the impact…

This article attempts to analyse to what extent a distance collaboration project between two groups of university students sharing the same lingua franca (English), but with different course educational objectives can benefit its participants. We build on the knowledge gleaned from previous studies of second language telecollaboration which point…

One of the main objectives of the European Networked Interaction in Foreign Language Acquisition and Research (NIFLAR) project is to make foreign language learning and teaching processes more relevant and rewarding for reaching intercultural communicative competence. This is realized by offering foreign language learners and pre-service teachers…

Within a European project on Networked Interaction in Foreign Language Acquisition and Research (NIFLAR), "Second Life" was used as a 3D virtual world in which language students can communicate synchronously with native speakers in the target language, while undertaking action together. For this context, a set of design principles for…