The present paper presents the results of a study which examined fluctuations in the levels of foreign language anxiety (FLA) in the virtual world Second Life (SL) and factors accounting for such changes as reported by a female student of English philology. The student participated in 14 sessions over the period of one semester. Using data…

One of the possible ways of assessing students' collaborative work in Virtual Exchange (VE) is by the use of Peer Assessment (PA) -- a formative assessment technique in which students review each other's work to provide descriptive feedback on the basis of a set of criteria. This article describes a VE procedure, in which students from three…

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…

In order to obtain qualifications to teach English as a foreign language (TEFL), teacher candidates often need to commit themselves to writing a master's (MA) thesis. In efforts to shed light on how MA thesis supervisors can support supervisees in the writing process, drawing on the theoretical framework of language socialisation, this article…

This article investigates how engaging students to discuss topics that reflect their ideologies in lingua franca (LF) virtual exchanges can help facilitate global citizenship development. A six-week virtual exchange is explored with students from universities in Mexico, Poland, Spain, and the USA. This study utilizes five key elements of…

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.…

According to Kasper (1992), L2 pragmatic knowledge affects all communicative acts. It can be described as the speaker's ability both to adapt linguistic formulae to social contextual constraints and to understand the implications of indirect utterances. The Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR) describes pragmatic competence…

The article looks at language learner autonomy as a social construct in relation to the context and its user based on the example of "Italki", a social networking site for tandem language learning. Considering the two foci--the context and the learner--the study is divided into two parts, both carried out from the perspective of online…

This study examines intercultural learning during an email collaboration project carried out as part of an EFL didactics course attended by Polish and Romanian teacher-trainees. Email entries and the results of a final questionnaire were used as sources of data that offered insight into the intercultural dimension of the participants'…

In this article Brazilian teacher, Hugo Dart, describes how he partnered with Polish teacher, Karolina Isio-Kurpinska, to set up an online community where students from different places could interact and make discoveries about each other's culture while practicing their English. The article discusses the ten-week project that was developed for…

This edited volume offers an insightful theoretical conceptualization of issues central to 21st century foreign language learning and teaching. Drawing on research results obtained in the fields of pedagogy, social psychology and sociology of education, this book provides a comprehensive practical exploration of issues experienced by researchers…

The article investigates a system of academic education called tutoring implemented in a blended format. It looks at this teaching and learning experience based on the results of a student satisfaction survey (N = 9) as well as the analysis of the discourse between the tutor and six tutees recorded during four meetings: two traditional and two…

Students of initial teacher education need to be prepared for the classrooms of tomorrow. Teachers require the necessary skills and competences to teach in culturally diverse contexts, to collaborate across disciplines, and to use technologies in innovative ways; but the Digital Economy and Society Index reports that only 20-25% of students in…

This paper reports the results of an action research-based study that investigated participants' reflections on EFL learning and teaching in a computer-mediated communication (CMC)-based project. Forty pre-service teachers from two universities, in Poland and in Romania, exchanged emails on class-related topics; the email exchange was followed by…

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…