Virtual Exchange for Intercultural Language Learning and Teaching

Group Submission Type: Book Launch

Description of Session

This book illustrates new virtual intercultural practices for language learning from primary to tertiary education and highlights the transversality of these practices throughout the language curriculum. The current English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) perspective sets the framework as a possible vector of cultural exchanges in a variety of contexts, and from which the different authors coming from Europe and all over the world present their studies.
The book deploys diverse educational exchanges within a wide range of technological tools and with varied approaches to the intercultural dimension in language learning. Through these virtual exchanges, different languages and educational cultures come together to create emerging communities of practice co-constructed for the limited time-space of the collaborative projects. This volume opens a dialogue with researchers from different back- grounds and theoretical and methodological perspectives as technology can no longer be apprehended without its purposeful human and semiotic meanings and, conversely, human and semiotic meanings can no longer be apprehended without Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
Going beyond strict polarised views on the technology or humanistic approaches, this book presents a more nuanced, interrelated stance and will appeal to researchers, scholars, post graduate students, and teachers in applied linguistics, language learning and teaching, education, information studies, cultural studies, and intercultural communication.
This book has been a true intellectual challenge as its ambitious objective is to link research on the intercultural dimension in language learning and teaching to technological mediation. Another objective was to relate research and practice more closely; in other words, to bring together applied linguistics and additional language learning and teaching. These aims were formulated and the various studies were conducted pre-Covid, but the whole project now seems even more relevant. The combination of the intercultural with information technology has hitherto propelled these studies towards the main challenge in language teaching and learning in the era of a pandemic. What do language teachers do when student mobility worldwide grinds to a halt? How do we foster intercultural encounters under these unprecedented circumstances?
What was clear for the editors of this book, who participated in two European projects (TILA and TeCoLa ), was the need to allow some interdisciplinary space or dialogue for researchers in technology-mediated pedagogy and in intercultural, plurilingual, and pluricultural pedagogy. Hence, the challenge of this book and the reason why the introduction chapter is organised as an exceptional dialogue between three eminent scholars: Geneviève Zarate, whose work influenced the European discourse in Applied Linguistics, Richard Kern whose work contributed to the North-American and English-language discourse on intercultural language learning and teaching online, and Anthony Liddicoat whose work contributed to a less biased English-speaking discourse in applied linguistics.

Sub Unit

• Pre-Conference Workshops, Book launches, and Visual Art Exhibits / Book Launch

Chair

• Fiona Smythe, Université de Bordeaux

Discussant

• Fiona Smythe, Université de Bordeaux

Book Launch Presenter

• Martine Derivry-Plard, University of Bordeaux