A landscape of innovations in ELT: blending ELF and intercultural telecollaboration

The purpose of this chapter is to present a European project called Intercultural Telecollaboration: Italy-Finland that was carried out in the 2014-15 academic year, the aim of which was to improve the participants' intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 2008) by means of Web-mediated communication. It involved a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) composed of volunteer Italian and Finnish high-school students who used English as a lingua franca (ELF) (Crystal, 1997; Jenkins, 2000; 2007; Widdowson, 2003; Seidlhofer, 2011; Mauranen, 2012) to discuss a selection of topics related to their lifestyle and sociocultural backgrounds. The present study was designed to investigate whether English Language Teaching (ELT) should resist language change, or instead, following Cogo and Dewey (2012), adjust to language diversification and reformulate its models and practices. My intent is to provide an overview of this field research to show how possible it is to implement an innovative language teaching and learning experience based on the integration of telecollaboration (Antoniadou, 2011; Belz, 2002; Ware and O'Dowd, 2008) and ELF (Sifakis and Sougari, 2010; Seidlhofer, 2011; Cogo and Dewey, 2012; Grazzi, 2013; Vettorel and Lopriore, 2013; Jenkins, 2015). From a pedagogical perspective, empirical evidence suggests that telecollaboration and network-based language teaching (NBLT) (Warschauer and Kern, 2000) may well be incorporated into the syllabus of the subject English in order to give teachers and learners the opportunity to heighten their awareness of ELF and be prepared to cope with the changing scenario of contemporary English on a world scale.