Although co-creation of artefacts is a common practice in virtual exchange (VE), there are still few studies that explore the connection between collaboration on multimodal texts and student teachers' development of intercultural and pedagogical awareness. Based on a trinational VE, coincidentally developed during the outbreak of the pandemic in…

Intercultural competence (IC) is essential for fostering meaningful interactions and understanding in diverse environments, particularly in today's pluralistic societies. The impacts of both intercultural competence and incompetence are profound, shaping relationships and outcomes in various ways. Many definitions of IC emphasize being 'effective'…

This study examined the perceived benefits and challenges of using synchronous videoconferencing as a tool to teach academic content and engage United States (U.S.) elementary students in intercultural exchanges with peers in other countries. The study employed a sequential mixed-methods design that consisted of first surveying, then interviewing…

This study explores reflections from academics (N = 13) from 12 higher education institutions in eight countries who relied on informal conversations in an online community of practice to switch to emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the absence of formal academic development, they needed to develop themselves in…

In this paper we present the analysis and interpretation of data collected during an intercultural virtual exchange undertaken in 2020 in which students from Argentina and the USA explored how trauma and suffering associated with COVID-19 can be channeled through collaborative artistic multimodal creations, and how approaching this in a productive…

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…

Online program design is important for cross-cultural learning and cultural awareness and responsiveness. Because of the importance of these areas in journalism and similar fields, this research studies an intercultural "bridge" project with journalism and media-related students at a southwest U.S. university and four universities in…

This study reports on how the affordances of the WebEx platform were used as multimodality resources during the negotiation of meaning by participants engaged in an English/Spanish eTandem video-conferencing exchange. The exchange involved five dyads of university students with an intermediate level of language proficiency. A total of seven tasks…

The COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented educational challenges. In order to ensure the continuity of formal education and to compensate for interruptions, emergency remote teaching practices were initiated worldwide. Like all other courses, foreign language teaching applied internet technologies as a teaching-learning media during the…

This study aimed to explore critical cultural awareness improvement of prospective teachers with a transnational virtual exchange project. Within the scope of this study, prospective teachers of English studying at English Language Teaching (ELT) department in Turkey attended a virtual exchange project that was organized with other prospective…

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 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…

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…

Empathy is widely perceived and understood as an unquestioned component of Intercultural Competence (IC). The authors see the ability to empathise with others and to see their point of view as an important condition for developing an ethnorelative viewpoint, and therefore consider it important to incorporate activities into the intercultural…

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,…