Videoshadowing is a synchronous video-collaboration practice for learning foreign languages and cultures; it is related to the field of digital ethnography applied to the development of communicative competence. The study discusses this methodology's strengths as an interpretative and reflective approach; emic perception linguistic data are qualitatively analysed and conclusions show that videoshadowing creates a potential environment in which learning processes occur spontaneously, and that students perceive and verbalise such processes in forms relatively akin to the descriptors of competence of the main reference models and documents in the field. The implication is that videoshadowing can be an enabling methodology.