ELF and the development of intercultural communicative competence: an Italian-American telecollaboration project. In P. Vettorel (Ed.), New frontiers in teaching and learning English. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Publishing (pp. 179-204). ISBN 978-1-4438-7458-8

English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and Telecollaboration are two relatively recent research areas within the broad field of Applied Linguistics, the growth of which is directly connected to the implementation of the technology known as Web 2.0. This innovation brought about a fundamental change in the use of the Internet, because users were able to interact and exchange information online. On one hand, the rise of ELF is an interesting sociolinguistic phenomenon that largely depends on the success of Web-based communication (Jenkins 2007; Seidlhofer 2011); while, on the other hand, Telecollaboration represents one of the greatest uses of Web applications thus far focused on the improvement of foreign language learning and intercultural competence (Belz 2002). It is therefore plainly evident that studies in ELF and Telecollaboration share common ground, and it would be fruitful to attempt to carry out integrated research on the pedagogical implications of Telecollaboration where the use of ELF is concerned. The aim of this paper is to present an Italian-American research project called Intercultural Telecollaboration, which was co-designed by Stefano Maranzana , a PhD student in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, and myself , and carried out between September 2012 and March 2013. The project was the product of a partnership involving Rosella Manni, a teacher of English who coordinated a group of ten volunteer Italian high-school students attending the final year at the Liceo Classico Statale “Ennio Quirino Visconti” of Rome, and a group of ten volunteer American intermediate level-students of Italian from the University of Arizona, coordinated by Maranzana. Our main goal was to improve the students’ intercultural competence, a) by fostering their mutual understanding through the use of their L2s, and b) by supporting cooperative practices through web-mediated communicative activities (Belz 2005a, 2005b; Thorne 2003, 2010).