ELF and intercultural telecollaboration: a case study

This chapter discusses an intercultural telecollaboration project led by the authors in the 2012/2013 school year. A group of ten Italian high-school students of English from Rome, and a group of ten American intermediate learners of Italian from the University of Arizona volunteered to be connected online asynchronously by means of a wiki to discuss a wide range of topics about their cultural backgrounds and lifestyles. The main purpose of our research was to enhance the participants’ intercultural competence (Byram, 1997; Kramsch, 1998) via the creation of a Web-mediated, multilingual and multicultural communicative setting in which the students’ second languages, English and Italian respectively, would be used as effective mediational tools. From this point of view, this project has shown that the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) by non-native speakers (NNSs) of English within a networked-based context is not a hindrance to communication and mutual understanding. On the contrary, it proves to be an appropriate affordance that L2-users develop through social cooperative practices in order to carry out pragmatic communicative goals. This study is based on integrating Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) and Sociocultural Theory (SCT). Our goal is to show language practitioners how to create a web-mediated community of practice (CoP), the members of which seek to improve their intercultural competence while using their respective L2s as an affordance to carry out several communicative tasks online. Our CoP, for example, interacted through a website and a wiki that were purposely designed for the needs of the project. As regards the pedagogical implications of our project, the qualitative results indicate that Web 2.0 technology could play an important role in teacher education, as it promotes a valid alternative to face-to-face instruction. It reduces the gap between the teacher and the student, as the former becomes familiar and learns to interact with forms of communication that are second-nature in younger generations. This research confirms that integrating telecollaboration into the foreign language syllabus is a promising option. It helps the learner gain a new impression about the languaculture systems they are exposed to and, in the case of non-native speakers of English, it favours the emergence of ELF as an authentic communicative tool in multilingual and multicultural web-mediated settings.