Living in the 21st century means living in an era that is increasingly globalising where cross-cultural communication is essential; thus, students should be given opportunities to cultivate their Intercultural Communicative Competences (ICC). This paper reports on Phase 3 of ClerKing, a Franco-Jamaican telecollaborative project, which involved…

This qualitative study explores how native peers as teaching assistants can support language learning in Higher Education. The data of five semi-structured group interviews of 15 teaching assistants in total were analysed thematically. The results indicate that the assistants embraced multiple roles during the programme and within the lessons.…

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 study analyzed eTandem video-conferencing exchanges between five pairs of university students of English as a foreign language (EFL) and Spanish as a foreign language (SFL). The exchanges, which involved discussion of seven tasks, took place on a weekly basis. Drawing on an interactionist perspective (Ellis et al., 2001a; Loewen, 2005), the…

Target 4.7 in Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) aims to ensure that education is equally accessible to all genders who are taught to appreciate human rights and cultural diversity as global citizens. Understanding and sympathy for intercultural differences become important in higher education. With a focus on the foundations and dimensions of…

Purpose: This study aims to examine how teacher candidates (TCs) in Türkiye and the USA navigate their intercultural communication skills in a telecollaboration project. Design/methodology/approach: Forty-eight TCs participated (26 in Türkiye and 22 in the USA) in the study. TCs discussed critical issues in multicultural education on an online…

This paper presents a two-year pedagogical, teacher-as-researcher, action research project at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Sousse, Tunisia, which investigates how the integration of the Soliya Connect Program, a facilitated dialogic online exchange programme, with a theoretical course on critical intercultural communication…

With increasing focus placed on global rankings, partnerships, and student mobility, institutions are increasingly embedding internationalisation within their strategic language and approach. This paper examines the four countries of Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and Viet Nam (CLMV) to explore the challenges and opportunities for institutions in…

The Linguistic Landscape (LL) is a relatively new field which draws from several disciplines such as applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and cultural geography. According to Landry and Bourhis (1997),"the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop…

This study investigates the interaction of native speaker--non-native speaker (NS-NNS) dyads engaged in conversational interaction as part of a video-based synchronous computer mediated communication (VidSCMC) eTandem language program. Previous work has indicated certain advantages of NNS-NS conversational interaction for language learning (e.g.,…

Virtual exchange is an umbrella term used to refer to the engagement of groups of learners in online language and intercultural interaction and collaboration with partners from other cultural contexts or geographical locations as an integrated part of course work, and under the guidance of educators and/or expert facilitators. The majority of…

As Virtual Exchanges (VEs) become more common in foreign language classrooms around the world, teachers are rightly asking 'what will my students be getting from this'? If their students are advanced, they can enter into in-depth interactions thus attaining broader and deeper intercultural knowledge as a minimum, from participation in VE. However,…

In the context of learning a second language, the passing on of cultural information as a means to further the development of intercultural competences is primarily viewed as being unidirectional--the "native-speaking culture" passing on information to the language learning student. However, in EFL (English as a foreign language)…

Telecollaboration allows for students to develop foreign/second language competences linguistically, culturally, and interculturally. The use of platforms, such as WhatsApp and Zoom, is now more frequently exploited in foreign language education to ensure that a wider cross section of students, including Jamaicans, can develop global competences.…

Japan has made developing global human resources ("gurobaru jinzai ikusei") a national priority. The government has invested billions of yen annually to double the number of Japanese students studying overseas, double the number of globally competitive Japanese universities, and improve Japanese students' English test scores. A broad,…