Virtual exchange (VE) has gained prominence as a means to improve students' intercultural competence and foreign language abilities through forums and other supplemental activities. This study examines a supplemental activity referred to as the student-generated survey (SGS) implemented in the IVEProject, a large-scale VE with, at the time of this…

The importance of internationalization and effective online collaborative learning is well established, and the recognized value of cross-cultural exchanges by higher education institutions has resulted in a diverse range of initiatives including the use of virtual exchanges. Virtual exchanges are global online learning experiences for students…

This paper explores how immersion and engagement with different cultures in the home environment impacts Korean children's intercultural learning. More specific attention is given to the experience of nine Korean children whose families have voluntarily served as homestay host families and hosted foreign guests for more than seven years. This…

Purpose: This study aims to examine how participation in international exchange programs influences both the teaching practices and intercultural competence of student teachers. Focusing on the experiences of Vietnamese participants in Thailand, the study explores how these educators adapted their teaching methods in response to cross-cultural…

For agentive and influential involvement in online communities, language learners and teachers need to develop critical digital literacy (CDL), conceptualized by Darvin (2017) as an awareness of "how meanings are represented in ways that maintain and reproduce relations of power" (p. 5) and thus privilege some and marginalize others…

The student exchange programs are venues for learning opportunities by offering multicultural contexts. This study reports on the experiences of ten prospective English language teachers in a virtual student exchange program to investigate likely skill development in a multicultural and open and distance learning setting. This descriptive study…

We evaluate the use of a Virtual Exchange (VE) writing task, Stimulus Writing, which we assigned to groups of UK and Finnish business students. There were two learner cohorts in the study: one in the UK (mainly Chinese students), the other in Finland (mainly Finns). The Finnish students wrote authentic case studies about Nordic businesses, while…

Despite the rapid development of virtual exchange in foreign language education, its use in the field of Chinese language education is still rather nascent. Adopting a mixed-methods research approach, this study focuses on examining the pedagogical benefits of a Chinese-American virtual exchange as mediated by students' self-reported data. Two…

Through qualitative research, which involved qualitative interviews and focus group meetings with members of four student teams, we identified a number of barriers to the development of cohesiveness in teams of local and international exchange (IE) students, who were undertaking service-learning (SL) together. Lack of cohesiveness in such teams…

This study examined the determinants of international students' interactions with different friendship networks and the relationships of these interactions with study abroad outcomes, using data from 482 Korean college students who had participated in international student exchange programs. The results showed that students' participation in…

The Erasmus exchange program has a positive influence on students' intercultural awareness since they find the chance to meet other cultures. Despite high levels of proficiency, there may still be misunderstandings between students of different cultures. As a consequence, the Erasmus program might not achieve its pluriculturalism aim. Purpose of…

With the status of English as a global lingua franca (ELF), English is no longer the sole property of its Anglophone native English speakers (NES) problematizing the current dominance of Anglophone cultures and NES in the field of English language teaching (ELT). The notion of intercultural citizenship education offers a critical alternative model…

This study analyses the results of two parallel two-month online exchange projects launched during the spring semester of 2018. The first project was a bilingual one-to-one English/Spanish exchange project for undergraduate business students. The second one was a monolingual one-to-many intercultural practice in English between native and…

Universities around the world increasingly use online videos to recruit both domestic and international students. However, little is currently known about how such videos are used to market international programmes in the Global South. We analysed a sample of 19 videos that promote international programmes at Thai universities. After transcribing…

International education expands a student's perspectives, encourages interest in cultural variations, promotes critical analysis, and strengthens observational and interpersonal skills. Yet, even more research is seemingly needed to confirm the value of study abroad, not only for the individual students involved, but for communities and society at…