The myriad of possibilities brought about by the advent of Web 2.0 in terms of communication and interaction have revolutionised educational practices over the past few years. One of the most promising educational approaches resulting from this revolution is online intercultural exchange or telecollaboration, which has been reported to contribute…

Affordance refers to the opportunity available to a learning activity. Taking affordance as a theoretical and analytical construct, this exploratory study investigates learners' attitudes and the opportunities WeChat may provide for Chinese cultural knowledge (CCK) learning. The aim is to find out the potential new affordances and compare learners…

Interacting with native speakers in various types of virtual exchanges is becoming increasingly accessible for language learners and teachers around the world. The present study examined the experiences of beginning and intermediate level learners of Spanish in the United States as they interacted weekly with native Spanish speakers over the…

The aim of this study is to compare how two different Virtual Exchanges (VE) contribute to language learning in a Japanese university context. Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) using VE has been a focus in this study. There are huge advantages of using technology in language teaching such as increasing language use opportunities, feedback, and…

On its website, APVEA reminds us that "virtual exchanges are technology-enabled, sustained, people-to-people education programs". This chapter addresses the question of what we exchange when we engage in virtual exchange by exploring the meaning and value of virtual exchange as intercultural dialogue, and by considering the impact of the…

The personal experiences of three of the authors of this document as Au Pairs in the United States exposed some issues related to social justice and discrimination that made the participants reflect on their identity as speakers and future teachers of English. This article shares, analyzes and interprets these reflections collaboratively in search…

With the present situation of economic globalization, simple inter-flows of information within and between countries have become standard to meet the development needs of college and university students, who now require and demand intercultural communication to improve their understanding of the globalized world. In recent years, online platforms…

In this paper we explore and identify emerging patterns of synchronous digital discourse trajectories between dyads of native (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS), with a particular focus on (absence of) negotiated interaction. We will present a new model of L2 learning interaction that is a schematic representation of two main types of hearer…

This study measured changes in cultural awareness levels between two groups of US students in their third semester of a Spanish class. One group (experimental group) collaborated via Skype with a group of English language learners from a Colombian university and the other group (control group) did not. The experimental group met seven times during…

This chapter reports the challenges that both the students and the teachers experienced in a telecollaborative project between a Japanese university and an American university. In this semester-long project, the students in groups of three to five from both universities worked collectively mainly asynchronously and in occasional synchronous…

This paper reports on two distinct models of telecollaboration--the Soliya Connect Program, a synchronous Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) project, and the Intercultural Franco-Irish Exchange, an asynchronous CMC project--which seek to provide students with a learning space to promote a more politically engaged and reflective pedagogy…

This case study reports on an Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange (E+VE) course at the University of Bordeaux. VE enables students to develop communication skills in an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) environment (Helm, 2016; Kohn & Hoffstaedter, 2017). The present study reports on student language and content learning experiences through E+VE, where…

This article examines personality and participation in an online intercultural exchange (OIE) between 57 university students in Japan (n = 28) and Taiwan (n = 29). The two-month OIE used Facebook (FB) as the medium of communication. During the online exchange, participants communicated linguistically using English as their common language and…

This study compares the willingness to communicate (WTC) of Canadian Anglophone and Francophone students to measures of their self-assessed, multiskilled second language proficiency and strategy use before and after a short-term intracountry bilingual exchange experience. The central question is whether a student's WTC exists before an opportunity…

This article reports the findings of a small-scale investigation into the Internet user behaviour of generation Y (Gen Y) students, with particular reference to social networking sites. The study adds to the literature on cross-cultural Internet user behaviour with specific reference to Gen Y and social networking. It compares how a cohort of…