In this article, I describe an online intercultural citizenship experience in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom in Argentina. An action research project on the Malvinas/Falklands war fought between Argentina and the UK in 1982 was carried out in 2012. Through a comparative methodology involving Argentine and English foreign language…

Recent years have witnessed rapid growth in language learning within online collaborative learning projects constructed between educational institutions in different cultural and pedagogic contexts. This qualitative case study investigated the role of teacher communication in a short online project between language classes in secondary schools in…

This paper examines the different social categories that are made relevant when geographically dispersed speakers of English as an additional language communicate in chat rooms. Although the literature characterizes these interactions as English as a lingua franca, this paper explores to what extent interactants see themselves as lingua franca…

Virtual intercultural communication is of great interest in intercultural research. How can a researcher gain access to this field of investigation if s/he does not or only partially speaks the languages used by the subjects? This study is an example of how categories relevant to research can be accessed through in-depth interviews. The interview…

The widespread use of English has--for better or worse--shaped the social and communicative norms and practices of many people the world over, and the likelihood of this continuing for the foreseeable future raises questions concerning English ownership, linguistic imperialism, language attrition, and mutual intelligibility, to name a few. These…

The internet affords its users an unprecedented level of contact with people from other cultural and social groups. It is often assumed that because of this it can facilitate intercultural communication and reduce the perceived distance between cultures. This article will examine this assumption by exploring two questions. Firstly, do the…

There is a small body of research which shows how intercultural communication is constituted in and through talk-in-interaction, and can be made relevant or irrelevant by interactants on a moment-by-moment basis. Our paper builds on this literature by investigating how cultural assumptions of national food-eating practices are deployed, contested…

This article looks at a year-long network-based exchange between two groups of student-teachers in Spain and the USA, who were involved in various network-based collaborative activities as part of their teaching education. Their online interaction was facilitated through diverse communicative modes such as Skype, Moodle, Voicethread and Second…

This paper takes as its focus discourses about young people, intercultural citizenship, voice and participation on a range of youth civic websites surveyed during the project CivicWeb. This was a 3-year, seven-country European Commission funded study of young people, the Internet and civic participation. Specifically, it calls upon evidence from…

In this study, we intend to discuss questioning as a sign of Intercultural Communicative Competence in plurilingual environments, stressing the relationship between questioning and the process of developing discovery skills in Romance chat-rooms. Focusing specifically on episodes beginning with intercultural questioning, we will analyse: (1)…

This paper is based on an analysis of chat transcripts from an English-language telecollaboration project between students at universities in Chile and California. This research found that the richest intercultural interactions involved events that could not have been foreseen: the immigrant rights demonstrations in the USA and the massive student…

Telecollaboration is an approach to intercultural learning that uses Internet technology as a tool to facilitate intercultural communication between classes of learners in different countries. The question of what language learners can gain from telecollaboration is fundamental in putting the case forward for its place in a language course. This…

In this article, the "multiple voices" of 13-15-year-old German and Italian adolescents in internet guest-books are analyzed. The study is based on guest-books texts with a mixture of different registers, languages and dialects. In particular, the German adolescents from the Augsburg region (Bavaria) display a strong regional linguistic identity…

This article investigates the development of intercultural awareness in an electronic mail (e-mail) discussion project between Hungarian learners of English and American speakers. Students discussed topics relating to cultures, languages, and pedagogical issues. The e-mails were analyzed in terms of language skill improvement, apprehensiveness…

Since its inception in 2003, the popularity of "Second Life (SL)", an online 3-D virtual environment, has increased exponentially. The global reach of "SL" and the opportunities it provides for cross-cultural exchange using multiple modes of communication in real and virtual worlds make it an ideal venue to examine cross-cultural engagement.…