There is no doubt that telecollaboration currently plays an important role in foreign language learning and, not less so, in the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Guth (2020) highlighted how telecollaboration has rapidly evolved in the past years as an innovative approach, and how it has brought together a whole community of academics…

This study addresses interculturality and Intercultural Competence (IC) by connecting university students in Spain and Sri Lanka through the use of the Soqqle app, an education-based video app. The students were asked to create five videos independently using English as a lingua franca and upload each video to the app related to the assigned…

For three months, Japanese university learners (N=40) utilized the YoTeach! application by Pedagogic and Active Learning Mobile Solutions (PALMS) Project, PolyU as a part of their English discussion class. Researchers re-purposed the application, which originally was designed to be an online classroom backchannel, as an asynchronous, pre-task…

Self-Directed Learning (SDL) has been the focus of attention on the part of scholars for at least four decades. However, it is with the advent of technology and the possibilities offered by the Internet that researchers and practitioners have begun to look more closely at what students do autonomously to support their own learning outside of the…

This volume includes a collection of short papers presented at the second International Virtual Exchange Conference (IVEC) hosted virtually at Newcastle University in September 2020. The contributions address the conference theme, towards digital equity in internationalisation, and offer fresh insights into the current state and future of online…

During our six-week Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) module (Oct.-Nov. 2019), 58 students jointly developed task-based projects on expressions of popular culture in Albany (USA) and Caracas (Venezuela). In teams of seven to eight participants, learners from both countries reflected on variations of popular culture through…

Assessment of students' work in Virtual Exchange (VE) frequently focuses on their participation in the activities and may also include an evaluation of students' learning. In this chapter, we discuss a two-sided approach to assessing students' work in an intercultural VE project. On the one hand, we evaluated students' engagement in the exchange…

In the digital era, where everything seems to move at the speed of light, unfortunately certain regions and countries are limited by economic, political, social, or cultural circumstances, as is the case for Venezuela. New technologies are particularly fundamental in the educational field, and every day Venezuelan students need to deal with the…

New communication technologies are changing the way we work and communicate with people around the world. Given this reality, students in Higher Education (HE) worldwide need to develop knowledge in their area of study as well as attitudes and values that will enable them to be responsible and ethical global citizens in the workforce they will…

Computer-mediated communication tools facilitate international collaboration projects between foreign language learners and peers abroad (O'Dowd, 2018). Social Virtual Reality (VR) applications allow for synchronous interactions and task-based communication in which learners can experience telepresence and immersion and conversate in a foreign…

Telecollaboration, or 'virtual exchange', are terms used to refer to the engagement of groups of learners in online intercultural interactions and collaboration projects with partners from other cultural contexts or geographical locations as an integrated part of their educational programmes. In recent years, approaches to virtual exchange have…

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 paper presents a six-week telecollaborative project carried out between B2 (Common European Framework of Reference for languages -- CEFR) level learners of English from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Spain, and B1 (CEFR) level students of Spanish as a foreign language from the University of Bath (UK). The aim of the project…

The aim of the study was to investigate whether telecollaboration is a suitable environment for the acquisition of the speech act of apologies. Participants were aerospace engineering students from the Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain) who performed six open role-plays to elicit apologies. The Control Group (CG, n=17) carried out the…

Navigating the shift towards blended learning in Higher Education (HE) provides opportunities for enhancing language teaching in the classroom. This paper will present a Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL)-based project which aims to create a more collaborative and interactive classroom using open access file sharing services which focuses on…