The purpose of this chapter is to present peer group mediation as one of the assessment practices within Teletandem Brasil, a Virtual Exchange (VE) project which uses tandem practice between university students of different countries for foreign language learning, carried out through videoconferencing tools. Peer group mediation sessions are…

Globalisation amplifies the need to improve Intercultural Communicative Competences (ICC). However, telecollaborative cross-cultural communication may be affected by different factors such as morals, values, and differences in viewpoints, as observed in numerous European and North American projects. Still, there is a dearth of experiments from the…

Game-based learning is gaining popularity in language education. For the present study, three games were developed with a central focus on intercultural interaction to be played internationally in dyads or small groups using Video-Communication (VC) tools or a Virtual World (VW). The interactions were carried out in Spanish as a Lingua Franca (LF)…

In this article, Camille Debras explores face-to-face tandem interactions between undergraduate university students who are native speakers of French and English and the role multimodality plays in these. Drawing from linguistics research on the multimodality of tandem interactions, four multimodal interactional linguistics studies based on the…

Compensatory strategies play an important role in second language (L2) processing because of limited language knowledge and ensuing anxiety and could help assure understanding and void communication breakdown. Previous studies about compensatory strategies largely adopt laboratory settings and neglect the strategies in authentic oral…

The globalised world in which we live demands multilingual and cross-culturally aware professionals. The role of intercultural awareness is now, more than ever, crucial in the language classroom in order to allow students to become competent and independent adults who will be highly employable beyond graduation. The recently published Companion…

Social Virtual Reality (VR) applications enable real-time interpersonal conversation and allow users to perform activities together. They have the potential of changing the ways learners practise speaking a foreign language. Following a previous study (Jauregi Ondarra, Gruber, & Canto, 2020), we designed the present study to explore how…

Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) has become very trendy in the field of language learning; however, while there are many studies that include WhatsApp, used here to connect cultures and/or widen participation, very few articulate how students view it or its impact in acquiring and developing linguistic, cultural, and intercultural competencies. This…

This descriptive study presents the first research cycle with four synchronous telecollaborative language learning sessions on Zoom between Irish and Chinese teenagers. Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (ISS) post-questionnaire results show that the mean of interaction enjoyment scale is the highest compared to the other four categories, which…

Digital technologies have proliferated communications between speakers of different languages, but the widespread use of online machine translation has now become a disruptive force for foreign language education, as it permits intelligible exchanges between persons with little or no knowledge of a foreign tongue. As machine translation technology…

The provision of effective feedback is challenging and remains a much-criticised element of the Higher Education (HE) student experience. This case study examines innovative approaches to providing feedback for modern foreign language assessment, based upon a small scale study at the University of Manchester (UoM). We identify problematic areas in…

This paper reports our preliminary observations of a pilot project carried out from February to April 2019 with a group of students learning Spanish at the University of Central Missouri and students learning English at the University of León. The project combines challenging escape room activities with intercultural and interlinguistic…

The guiding research question of this essay is: What are the perceived benefits of participating in a transient professional community? The author used an ethnographic approach to collect data. The data analysis shows that one benefit of participating in a transient professional community is the feeling of belonging that partners described and…

Synchronous online language teaching involves the simultaneous employment of a range of techno-semio-pedagogical competences (Guichon, 2012). Indeed, given their flexibility and versatility, digital tools and the Internet can render teacher-student interactions dynamic. Among the necessary professional skills and strategies for online synchronous…

Assessment of students' work in Virtual Exchange (VE) frequently focuses on their participation in the activities and may also include an evaluation of students' learning. In this chapter, we discuss a two-sided approach to assessing students' work in an intercultural VE project. On the one hand, we evaluated students' engagement in the exchange…