Abstract:

As the ways of communication and interaction have diversified thanks to the constantly developing and changing technological possibilities, educators try to do their best to follow the recent implementations and activities to better prepare their students for real world demands. Telecollaboration (aka virtual intercultural exchange) is one of such implementations for language educators and students which is an affordable alternative for study abroad. Through these studies, educators design some tasks and activities for their students in which learners could interact with peers from other contexts synchronously or asynchronously. As one of the outcomes of these projects, educators or researchers plan to develop intercultural communicative competence (ICC) of the learners. In the first part of this paper, the researchers discuss the necessity of intercultural communicative competence in language education by elaborating on the skills that an individual with ICC should have. In the second part, we present the affordances and challenges of telecollaboration projects. In the final part, we unpack some critical issues to be considered in the design of a telecollaboration project. We consider this part as a set of guidelines for researchers planning to engage in telecollaboration as part of their teacher education and research practices.

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