With increasing global interconnectivity, effective cross-cultural interaction has become crucial for global citizens. However, learners in non-English speaking countries often lack practical English communicative skills and opportunities for authentic language practice. This study explores the effectiveness of a virtual exchange programme in…

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…

Virtual Exchange (VE) has grown out of telecollaboration, which originated in the language-teaching field and has now expanded to all areas of knowledge as a collaborative methodology to enhance learning and fostering soft skills and intercultural competences. VE has recently received growing interest from higher education institutions due to the…

This article contributes to the literature on the value of Virtual Exchanges (VEs) in the field of technology-mediated language learning. Specifically, we report on a pilot program for high school English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Slovakia and English as a Second Language (ESL) learners in Michigan, USA who engaged in a 10-week,…

By investigating the first thirty minutes of ten initial student group meetings (cf. Rampazzo & Aranha, 2019), this study explores the interactional resources that participants display during online talk-ininteraction. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is applied to the data consisting of "Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2"…

Undergraduate language students from the Open University (OU) and master's degree students from Aix-Marseille Université (AMU) participated in an innovative Virtual Exchange (VE) as part of our institutions' internationalisation at home strategy. Due to the pandemic, the one-week Residential School (RS) abroad, which is part of the Bachelor of…

The technical institutions Institut Mines Télécom in Albi, France (IMT) and Trier University for Applied Sciences at the Environmental Campus of Birkenfeld, Germany (UCB) have been running Virtual Exchange (VE) projects since 2013. These projects allow the French and German students to use the vocabulary learned in class in a real context and to…

This article presents an analysis of a teaching concept we developed based on the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC) (Council of Europe, 2018), that not only provides opportunities to practice communicative skills but puts a major focus on democratic competences. Mathematics students and TEFL (Teaching English as a…

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…

Language tandem exchanges offer students valuable opportunities for autonomous learning and authentic intercultural communication encounters. This paper will discuss the key principles of tandem language exchange, and in particular online ones, and then present the EU-funded European University Tandem (EUniTa) project which was developed by…

Virtual Exchange (VE) is of great import to language and culture teachers and researchers but is also gaining popularity in other fields. However, around the world and in the Asia-Pacific region in particular, the number of exchanges is not high and the quality of those that exist needs to continue to improve. It is essential that the latest…

This volume examines many of the complex issues regarding the language skills and professional competencies acquired by students studying Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) at universities in the United Kingdom and across Europe. It also outlines the innovative pedagogical strategies, methods, and resources employed by language academics to help…

This article describes the process by which the authors created a Virtual Learning Community for cultural and linguistic exchange between college students of Portuguese in the United States and undergraduate and graduate students of English in Brazil. In addition to describing the way the so-called tandem model for telecollaboration was adapted to…