Search

This study involves translating, cross-culturally adapting, and validating the "Literary Response Questionnaire" (LRQ) for 413 Spanish adolescents. It explores the evolution of literary education in Spain and its alignment with the Reading Responses paradigm. The LRQ, adapted across various locations, is validated in Spanish through Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The research analyzes reading responses in dimensions like Leisure Escape, Insight, Empathy, Story-driven Reading, Concern with Author, Imagery Vividness, and Rejecting Literary Values. Findings reveal widespread indifference and rejection toward literary reading among the adolescents, along with a clear disapproval of the historicist-authorial approach to literary education. Significant variations were identified based on students' gender, enrollment in a bilingual program, and notably, the number of books read per year. This underscores the significance of introducing literary reading practices in secondary education that align with the leisure preferences of adolescents, encouraging personal and experiential engagement with texts. This could materialize in the classroom the shift from a historicist to a reader-centered approach suggested by the current Spanish curriculum.

The present study draws on earlier research on learner-learner dyadic interactions in an e-tandem virtual exchange and examines negotiation of meaning episodes based on the qualitative data. These data come from learner-learner interactions during oral tasks carried out using a video conferencing tool. The aim is to unveil the interactional patterns that emerge during negotiation of meaning episodes which have been deemed beneficial for L2 development, particularly those which offer opportunities for modified output to occur (Gurzynski-Weiss & Baralt, 2015; Long, 1996; Pica, 1994; Schmidt, 1990). The results highlight the role that metalinguistic information plays in scaffolding the process of negotiation of meaning and emphasize the benefits of e-tandem exchanges where learners alternate between the roles of expert and learner, depending on the language used during each language-related episode.

Telecollaboration has proved to be an excellent means for the development of students' intercultural skills (O'Dowd & Dooly, 2012). Based on this presumption, a telecollaborative project was carried out between B2 level (CEFR) learners of English from Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain) and B1 level (CEFR) students of Spanish as a foreign language from the University of Bath (UK). The aim of the project was to help learners from both universities, Aerospace Engineering students in particular, to develop their intercultural communicative competence. Throughout a six-week period, students carried out asynchronous discussions focusing on two cultural topics in groups of four and participated in synchronous Zoom sessions in pairs. The topics at the core of the discussions were a) Catalan Independence b) Digital Education. Topic a) was conducted entirely in Spanish and topic b), in English. The social network used for students' written interaction was MeWe (www.mewe.com). To conclude the project, the participants completed a collaborative task with their overseas partners that was assessed by the instructor. Qualitative data was gathered through the students' posts on MeWe (which was then analysed following Byram's (1997) proposed objectives for the assessment of Intercultural Communicative Competence), analysis of transcripts from the Zoom sessions as well as a final project survey. The results from the qualitative analysis show traces and instances of all the objectives proposed by Byram (1997), while the findings from the final project questionnaire reveal that at the end of the course all participants felt they had learnt something about their partners' culture. The quantitative analysis further demonstrates a correlation between the number of videoconference sessions and spontaneous conversation about cultural topics, which suggests that, in order for a telecollaborative project to be successful, students should attend the scheduled sessions.

Internationalising the curriculum in higher education offers cultural insights and exchanges to live and work in a changing and connected world. The authors are tertiary music educators working in three different countries (Australia, Spain, and the United States of America). Though geographically dispersed yet virtually connected, they delivered a series of five music professional learning workshops to Bachelor of Primary Education students at a university in Spain (March 2021-April 2021). They draw on narrative reflections and student voices to discuss intercultural perspectives of teaching and learning using the 5P model of professional development. The authors use thematic analysis to code and analyse the data discussing two overarching themes: collaborative professional learning and professional sharing. The authors contend that cultivating collaborative initiatives through virtual platforms can purposefully contribute to intercultural communication where ideas, knowledge, skills, and pedagogies are shared. While this paper focuses on one group of students, a limitation in itself, recommendations are offered that can be adapted and adopted across other learning areas. The implications indicate that further research is needed to assess whether intercultural teaching from cross-cultural and culture-specific perspectives stimulates sociocultural learning and growth for teachers and students for whom English is an additional language.

Purpose: Considering the potential of Collaborative International Online Learning (COIL) for cross-boundaries interacting and collaborating effectively, this study aims to explore the intercultural awareness of pre-service language teachers after participating in a COIL project. Design/methodology/approach: Following a quantitative research approach and an exploratory cross-sectional method, the authors administered a 13-item questionnaire to unveil the perceptions of 64 future language teachers from Spain after their online experience with counterparts from the USA. Findings: Participants consider that COIL may have enhanced their intercultural and global awareness and equipped them with valuable skills and knowledge for the future, being women more positive than men. Moreover, the results also suggest that those participants who have not traveled abroad consider COIL to be a good opportunity to compensate for the lack of knowledge or experience with other cultures resulting from not having had the opportunity to visit other countries. Practical implications: COIL needs to be seen as a powerful tool to promote global learning, intercultural understanding and the development of skills among students that will be vital for success in today's interconnected world. Nevertheless, universities and teacher training centers need to rethink the preparation of future teachers for the increasing demands to prepare students for the requirements of the global world, and to do so, they need to consider that COIL may offer them significant benefits. Originality/value: This work offers an interesting exploration of teachers' attitudes toward COIL, providing insights into the potential of online collaboration for developing intercultural awareness.

Purpose: This study aims to delve into the interplay between didactic audiovisual translation (DAT) and computer-assisted language learning (CALL), exploring their combined impact on the development of intercultural competence (IC) among learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Design/methodology/approach: Using a quasi-experimental approach with a quantitative research design, the study analyses the outcomes of a questionnaire answered by 147 students across 15 language centres in Spanish Universities. These participants actively engaged in completing the lesson plans of the Traducción audiovisual como recurso didáctico en el aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras project, a Spanish-Government funded research initiative aimed at assessing the effects of DAT on language learning. Findings: The current study confirms the reliability of the instrument developed to measure students' perceived improvement. Beyond validating the research tool, the findings of the current study confirm the significant improvement in intercultural learning achieved through DAT, effectively enhancing students' motivation to engage in language learning. Research limitations/implications: The current research solely examines students enrolled in higher education language centres. This paper closes with a CALL for additional research, including participants from other educational stages, such as primary or secondary education. In the broader context of CALL research, this study serves as a valuable contribution by exploring the potential of DAT in fostering IC in EFL settings. Originality/value: This research confirms the potential of DAT and CALL to promote students' learning process, as the combination of these approaches not only yields linguistic benefits but also intercultural learning.

In today's global world, many people can move across borders as travelling has become much easier in many ways. However, the securitization of borders has not been relaxed, implying that multilingual police-civilian interactions are becoming more 'commonplace'. Within the framework of conversation analysis, this article presents a novel study on multilingual police border checks. These are police encounters "on the ground" (not in police custody), and as such, there are no interpreters or language experts present. Focusing on the analysis of a single-case police encounter in which participants have to rely on a second language (English) that none of them are proficient in (i.e., 'novice-novice interaction'), this article examines practices that speakers use to resolve a crime involving the illegal possession of drugs. In addition, some complementary findings from other border checks are presented. Overall, this study shows that participants attempt to achieve intersubjectivity by using interactional (and embodied) practices (e.g., word choice, repair, speech simplification) oriented toward recipient design. By doing so, participants shape the progressivity of the encounter and ultimately achieve their objectives in the interaction. As such, this article shows how a high-stake (police) multilingual situation can also be resolved in the absence of a language expert.

Study abroad programs and the need for multicultural education is becoming more popular in United States higher education institutions. These multicultural programs can include various types of programming such as faculty-led, university international center sponsored, third-party providers, or a combination thereof. Understanding the perceptions of participants can influence the type of programs needed within an institution. This study examined the perceptions of students participating in a study abroad, faculty-led program sponsored by the university with the assistance of a third-party provider. The results suggest students are not fully aware of the complexity of organizing study abroad opportunities and hold faculty most responsible. Additionally, qualitative data analysis demonstrated that students find language issues as the most challenging aspect of their study abroad experience. Conversely, making new relationships and experiencing new cultures was found to be the most rewarding.

In the context of Virtual Exchange (VE) it is often assumed that participants will be naturally prepared to interact online successfully with their international partners. However, there is ample evidence in the literature to suggest that VE participants are usually unaware of effective communicative strategies in synchronous and asynchronous online communicative contexts. Through action research, this article investigates how teachers can provide scaffolding for both these communicative modalities in online intercultural environments. It reports on a qualitative content analysis of conversational and self-reported data from a corpus of three VEs that were collected and triangulated in order to identify when, in what areas, and in what ways students could benefit from pedagogical mentoring. The article then presents key mentoring stages and strategies that were identified and provides insight into the type of scaffolding that VE teachers can provide their students to help them achieve successful (a)synchronous online intercultural interaction.

The implementation of the European Union's Erasmus Plus (E+) Program has resulted in the possibility of joint initiatives across-borders led by teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), who can bring classroom practice closer to education as a key area for employability and prepare students for work and communication in multicultural and multilingual settings. Thus, a novel context for project-based learning (PjBL) has emerged, which allows for experimentation, innovation, and research in the classroom. To illustrate this concept, Project Estonia is presented in this paper, introducing interconnected project work to provide a purposeful, real-world experience that extends the classroom setting beyond national frontiers.

Introduction: This article analyses the impact of an intercultural learning intervention in a Spanish university post-European Higher Education Area implementation. Objective: Our research's main objective consisted of measuring the development of intercultural competence in the first cohort of a Translation and Intercultural Communication bachelor's degree in a Spanish university, before and after taking specific courses in intercultural studies and spending a study abroad semester. Methodology: A mixed methodology was implemented, in which the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) was used as a measuring instrument. Additionally, in-depth personal interviews were conducted to complement the data obtained. Results: The results of this study show that the programming and sequencing of specific courses, together with experiences abroad, contribute to the development of intercultural competence. Conclusions: More intercultural learning interventions are needed in higher education courses to develop and build an intercultural campus and educate global citizens. When applying intercultural learning interventions and intercultural methodologies, students develop their intercultural competence, a key competence for 21st-century graduates.

In 2019, Spain became the country with the third highest number of asylum applications in the EU and it continues to be one of the top destinations for international migration (Migration Policy Institute 2022). This is a particularly pressing issue in the southernmost regions of Spain, namely the Canary Islands, Ceuta, Melilla and Andalusia, which have become the main gateway to Europe for those arriving by sea (Martín-Ruel 2021). As a result, the need for interpreting in international protection settings has increased, as these services prove essential for overcoming cross-linguistic and cross-cultural barriers, facilitating better integration of asylum applicants and refugees into the host society, and safeguarding their language rights (Wallace and Hernández 2017). In this article, we propose that the interpreter training provided by Andalusian universities can be used to respond to the needs identified in the international protection sector, thus contributing to the professionalization of the activity, and enhancing graduate employability in this field. To that end, we first describe the profile of an ideal interpreter for the stakeholders in international protection settings, then analyze current interpreting training programs, and finally suggest how specific training may be incorporated to provide better services in this field.

This study examines whether foreign language acquisition occurs through sharing information when students participate in an online writing task using English as the lingua franca. It also explores whether the students with higher levels of linguistic knowledge relating to the foreign language share this information with their peers throughout the writing process. The study was conducted in two Spanish classrooms, where the participants were bilingual in both Catalan and Spanish. A pre-questionnaire was used to determine the level of exposure to the English language and English culture outside of the classroom. The students were scored on their responses and then divided into three groups: low-, medium-, and high-level exposure to the English language and culture. A one-way ANOVA was used to determine whether exposure to the English language and culture outside of the classroom would influence writing abilities on the subject matter, and there is an interaction effect between language exposure and the pre-writing task F(2, 57) = 4.752, p = 0.012. Upon the conclusion of the collaborative writing task, a one-way ANOVA was used to determine whether there was an interaction effect between language exposure and the post-writing task F(2, 57) = 2.828 p= .068. In collaborative writing and knowledge building tasks, students learn about the content from their peers, and the information disperses throughout the group so that, upon completion, there is a shared understanding of the content. This study supports these findings; the students with more foreign language knowledge prior to the study disperse their knowledge in the same manner so that the knowledge, including writing in the foreign language, equalizes across the groups.

This study aims to expand the existing scientific, theoretical and empirical knowledge about the influence of the variables age, gender, nationality and place of residence on the probability of developing social skills that generate social wellbeing, and, in addition, to identify the relationship between the most influential variable and the academic success of immigrant students. We hope that the educational community, in an intercultural context, can benefit from and apply this knowledge to assist immigrant students. In this study, a sample of n = 749 students aged between 12 and 18, of 41 different nationalities, is analyzed using the Social Skills Scale for Young Immigrants (SSSYI). Data analysis is performed with the SPSS and STATA statistical programs. Multiple linear regression (MLR) analyses verify that nationality is the most influential variable. In addition, when calculating the Pearson correlation, high and positive correlations are found between social skills, nationality and students' grades, with which academic success was measured. In conclusion, we find that students who emigrated from the European continent present better social skills, better social wellbeing and greater academic success.

This article addresses visual literacy as a crucial competence for fostering intercultural literacy and intercultural dialogue. Visual literacy has been defined as a combination of skills needed to interpret the meaning of images, latent reasons behind their making and their impact on audiences. Individuals need to develop such skills to critically read the 'vocabulary' (content) and 'grammar' (composition) of images they are constantly flooded with to fully understand and appreciate the underlying meaning of visual representations of their own culture and other cultures, as well as the people belonging to different cultural groups. The Council of Europe's "Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters through Visual Media" (AIEVM) has been designed to promote interculturality through the reflection on the other, as portrayed in visuals. By analysing AIEVMs produced by 18 adult learners of English in two contexts -- featuring explicit intercultural training prior to AIEVM completion vs. its application without such previous input -- the present study examines the impact of pertinent training in visual and intercultural competence development. The data suggest heightened levels of metacognition and critical thinking in the former context. Results for both groups also disclose the development of a powerful sense of self-discovery and empathy toward alterity, induced by the commonalities detected between the respondents themselves and the depicted. Overall, implementing the AIEVM seems to narrow the gap between the intercultural awareness discerned in both contexts, yet the dissimilar depth of the narratives produced corroborates the value of prior intercultural learning. The article concludes with a critical overview of the potential of the AIEVM, comprising prospective courses of action to supplement this instrument to sharpen users' visual literacy and boost deeper intercultural reflection.

Acquiring intercultural competences is critical in order to avoid prejudice and increase tolerance in the global workforce. This case study describes and evaluates a learning experience designed to develop intercultural competences. Cross-cultural leadership theories were incorporated into the syllabus of a Work and Organizational Psychology (WOP) course. Students applied these theories while gaining international exposure through Online Intercultural Exchanges (OIE). Students from the University of Valencia (Spain) and the University Centre of Brasília (Brazil) participated in the exchange. The sample was composed of 22 undergraduate psychology students who worked in international pairs to address cross-cultural leadership. Results showed that students gained knowledge about cross-cultural leadership, developed intercultural competences, and evaluated the learning experience as satisfactory. These findings encourage the use of OIE to incorporate cross-cultural aspects in WOP.

To respond to the needs of the language industry, further specialisation in terminology at Master's level is needed to equip students with the necessary skills to work as corporate and institutional terminologists. For this purpose, curricular design should envisage the general and specific competences identified by practising terminologists in the workplace. Moreover, the competences established by the European Master's in Translation Competence Framework (2009, 2017, 2022), adapted to terminology work, can be used to identify course content and expected learning outcomes. Teaching and learning strategies should promote life-long learning and learner autonomy. Finally, course instructors should include both lecturers and practitioners. This paper discusses the curriculum developed for corporate and institutional terminology training within the Master's Degree in Professional Translation at the University of Granada (Spain), a programme that was incorporated into the EMT network in 2019. The ultimate goal is to train highly qualified terminologists who meet the demands of the market, and who have the necessary competences and skills to continue their self-training, once they have completed their postgraduate studies and have entered the labour market.

This activity report describes a sample unit (Effective Data Presentation) from a communication course prepared as part of an Intellectual Output within the BADGE Project, which was carried out by 12 partner universities from 10 countries during 3 academic years (2019-2022). The article first describes the results of a survey which show that language and communication classes need to integrate more LSP competences so that students become better acquainted with both general and specific language. Moreover, the report analyses and explains the existing practical difficulties for language and subject teachers alike in maintaining a distinction between "knowledge of a subject" and "knowledge of the language of a subject." Secondly, the report presents a sample from a communication course prepared for engineers encompassing effective data presentation and its interpretation during LSP courses. Finally, the article reflects on the future challenges for LSP teachers and the reasons why academics should integrate professional knowledge and specialist language within the same course.

Although contexts of learning abroad have traditionally been conceived as optimal settings for language and intercultural learning, Researchers advocate the implementation of pedagogical interventions that promote qualitative intercultural dialogue and guidance in language and intercultural learning process. Yet, studies are needed that carefully document and critically examine these interventions. This qualitative interview study explores how guided reflection efforts influence sojourners' intercultural learning by means of critical reflection. We analyse students' narratives collected during the intervention and draw conclusions regarding their ability to engage in critical reflection and the role of the instructor in fostering their reflection processes and intercultural learning development abroad.

This paper presents the first phase of a study conducted to analyze Knowledge Building forums for evidence of second language acquisition. This study is an analysis of the posts within an existing forum in search of evidence of foreign language learning. The analysis found that the collaborative writing project shows evidence that the students passed through the stages of construction of knowledge within their foreign language classroom, however factors, such as confounding variables, inconsistencies in error types, and the small number of posts by the participants made it challenging to determine whether there is evidence of language acquisition for each student. The forum posts show evidence of knowledge acquisition, but further investigation is required to determine whether collaborative writing in knowledge forums is effective for foreign language acquisition.

While research on Western multimedia platforms, such as YouTube, is prolific and interdisciplinary, Asian portals remain unknown. We explore this field by analyzing the juvenile and intercultural uses of a popular visualization system in Japan and China, known as "danmaku" or "danmu". This technology inserts dynamic and contextualized comments on a photogram, with several typographical possibilities. Based on a corpus of 1,590 comments on "The Ministry of Time", collected from a fandom platform with millions of users, we analyzed the topics that arouse the most interest among Chinese fans. We combine content analysis, which incorporates coding and counting techniques of the categories with the most interventions (n>16), with multimodal discourse analysis (TV series, Asian platform and user comments). Results show that the viewers are most interested in the film genre (time travel), the characters, the plot, certain sociocultural contents, and the Spanish language. Their discussions address issues of interculturality, some topics that are taboo in China and the fandom culture in Asia. Our study illustrates the potential of participation, communication, and learning in Asian social media, and constitutes an interesting and innovative contribution to the field of media and digital literacy, with various suggestions to promote intercultural competence with the use of popular culture.

This paper explores the interactions of a groupwork team composed of both local and exchange students, with heterogeneous competence in English, in an English-medium CLIL context at a technical university in Catalonia. Plurilingual and multimodal conversation analysis is used to trace how the students jointly complete an academic task. The research conducted specifically analyses how students categorise themselves and each other in terms of their expertise, and the procedures and resources the students deploy to accomplish the task. The data show that participants' heterogeneous linguistic repertoires are not an obstacle for successfully completing the task, for constructing subject knowledge, or for establishing a climate of mutual understanding and cooperation. The analysis refers to the tension emerging in the data between the interactional principles of progressivity --actions oriented towards task completion--and intersubjectivity--actions oriented towards resolving communicative difficulties. It also focuses on how co-participants mobilise diverse resources from their communicative repertoires, including plurilingual resources, gesture and material artefacts, in managing the task. The main argument put forward is that in instructional environments in which students are expected to build subject matter knowledge using languages that they are simultaneously learning (e.g. CLIL), considering their whole communicative repertoires as valuable resources for their learning is a promising approach.

This paper presents qualitative research examining to what extent sojourns abroad engage their participants in intercultural interactions and whether or not such experience translates into students' intercultural growth. The results of the study demonstrated that studying abroad did not provide students with ample opportunities to immerse into the local community and fully discover a new cultural environment. However, students surrounded by local and their fellow international students met foreign cultures, which motivated them to explore and interpret the encountered diversity, and thus equipped them with knowledge about foreign cultures, sensitizing them to cultural diversity. Sometimes such contacts challenged students' preconceived judgments and stereotypes of specific cultural groups, their ways of thinking, valuing and acting, and resulted, to a lesser or greater extent, in rethinking these, leading to changing attitudes and values. International experiences also stimulated students to self-analyze their own cultural identity, and thereby contributed to their growth in self-awareness in this respect. By offering opportunities for experiencing cultural differences and prompting students to develop coping strategies and to make references to the home culture, the sojourn is thus of significant importance for tertiary students, allowing for fostering their intercultural development to a certain degree.

The increase in the internationalization of universities has been accompanied by an increase in multiculturalism in classrooms. Due to this situation, with the objective of knowing the conceptions of university professors around pluricultural competence and attending to the connection with their positioning in relation to the models of cosmopolitan citizenship; a mixed research is developed in the Hispanic-Japanese context of higher education, focusing attention on education and social sciences professors. In general, it is concluded that there are connections between the positioning of multiculturalism and cosmopolitan citizenship. Thus, the university professors of both countries highlight the advantages of cultural plurality in educational environments and, despite the fact that there is governmental support for academic internationalization, in the sample of Japanese professors, there is a greater concern about the preservation of national identity in cultural plurality.

Global competence is an increasingly important disposition for today's society. Prospective teachers will have to be able to teach effectively in multicultural classrooms as well as develop dispositions of global competence in their future students. This pilot study was aimed at investigating what aspects of global competence should be integrated into initial teacher education programmes. Twenty-four teacher educators from fifteen European countries were involved in a qualitative study to underscore the topics, the contexts, the actors and the methodologies that can support the integration of global competence into programmes for preservice teachers. The findings indicate that global competence is a multidimensional concept associated with aspects directly related with the teaching profession such as cooperation, inclusion, social engagement, multicultural dialogue. The results also identify the methods and the contexts for an educational pathway for preservice teachers where the idea of global competence can emerge more easily.

Globalization has impacted higher education to an unprecedented degree, resulting in a need for students and teachers to be prepared for interaction in culturally and linguistically diverse environments at home and abroad, in both the university and the workplace. The present case study at a university in Spain collected questionnaire, individual interview, and focus group data from students pursuing academic degree programs with international profiles, to investigate students' level of intercultural communicative competence by looking at their attitudes, knowledge, experience and reflections. Recommendations for improving students' intercultural experience are extrapolated from the results.

Over the past ten years, employability has been one of the key issues in translation and interpreting (T&I), both in professional practice and in academic settings. However, very few studies focus specifically on the employability of the graduates in the Public Service Interpreting and Translation (PSIT) sector. This article focuses on the latter in a postgraduate programme taught in several language pairs in Spain. Its objectives are to identify aspects that characterise the graduates' professional situation within the PSIT labour market, to analyse the graduates' perception regarding the training received and its applicability to the labour market, and to identify tendencies and differences by language pairs. The results, based on a questionnaire sent to eleven cohorts of graduates, will be used to assess the extent to which the programme prepares for market needs, to analyse adaptation possibilities, and provide information that can be useful for programmes that involve several language pairs. Moreover, programme designers, researchers, and PSIT employers can also benefit from the differentiation of the findings by language pairs, which shows different interests within the labour market, and the reflection on skills that may affect employability in the T&I sector.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, most classes in higher education were offered online, and student and staff mobility came to a sudden halt. With its focus on online interaction and collaboration between students from different cultural backgrounds, Virtual Exchange (VE) has presented itself as an excellent opportunity to students and educators to combine the benefits of both digitalization and internationalization. This paper looks at the role of a series of factors in the interdisciplinary VE called 'the new normality', which took place between BA Social Psychology students at a large public research institution in Spain and students from different BAs enrolled in Spanish proficiency courses at large public research university in the Netherlands. This project had two main goals: (1) to create an environment for students to share their pandemic experiences across cultures and disciplines; and (2) to determine to what extent this exchange of ideas contributed to the development of students' intercultural awareness and competence and communicative competence.

By using small focus group discussions, the present study aims to gain insight into students' perceptions about the impact of WhatsApp use in their learning process. More specifically, this study presents a cross-cultural analysis of British and Spanish university students' personal beliefs about the effectiveness of using WhatsApp to complete group tasks outside the classroom. In so doing, this research represents a step forward in technology-enhanced instruction insofar as it not only incorporates the voices of learners themselves, but also contrasts students' beliefs with their group interactions on WhatsApp. The exploration of these WhatsApp interactions makes it possible to argue that the use of WhatsApp does not seem to create a natural context for non-native language users to produce contextualise relevant utterances while interacting with native English speakers. Furthermore, the results show that the lack of pragmatic competence on the part of the participants prevents them from communicating effectively. These pragmatic failures, in turn, have a negative impact on their interpersonal relationships and make them develop negative opinions towards the use of WhatsApp as a learning tool.

As in other countries, bilingual/multilingual education has become widespread in Spain. However, research either focuses on Spanish programs' implementation, students' performance or teacher training, but not on their contribution to graduates' self-perceived linguistic success (understood as a combination of intercultural competence, international mobility and employability). Therefore, this paper studies whether Spanish bilingual education results in higher self-perceived competences. An instrument examining these three elements is applied, and Facebook Audience Insights is used for sample targeting. Findings prove that Spanish bilingual education graduates have higher self-perceived intercultural competence and international mobility. In terms of gender, women who have participated in Spanish bilingual education show higher self-perceived intercultural competence, whereas men who have studied in these programs consider themselves more interculturally competent and mobile. Conversely, there is no evidence of more positive self-perceived employability than in monolingual education. All in all, participation in a Spanish bilingual program is demonstrated to be an influential factor in self-perceived global linguistic success, employability, and intercultural competence.

Due to the multicultural nature of society and the failure of some of the educational models adopted to respond to cultural diversity, there is a need to pay greater attention to teachers' training. This study examines Teacher Education students' beliefs about cultural diversity and their relationship with pre-service teacher training as key aspects in designing intercultural teacher training proposals and improving educational practice. This quantitative, descriptive study was carried out with 1464 participants enrolled in teacher training programs. The results show that future teachers have positive beliefs about cultural diversity in general terms, but their positions diverge when dealing with specific aspects and transferring them to professional practice. These beliefs vary depending on the year group, with students who are finishing their training process having more intercultural beliefs.

This investigation examined intercultural knowledge development in a short-term study abroad program in a cultural and linguistic minority context (Basque Country, Spain). A pre- and post-program quantitative and qualitative design was used with 26 participants. The quantitative, survey-based results demonstrated an increase in intercultural knowledge over the study's five-week duration. Qualitative analysis of interview data indicated that students' intercultural knowledge aligned with Lussier's (2007) description of knowledge about "small c" culture and included knowledge of social groups--a distinct finding from prior research. Students' knowledge changed over the period abroad, indicating adjustment to City Life and Time and Schedule norms. Additionally, knowledge growth was greatest with respect to subthemes strongly linked to the minority context (e.g. Basque ethnicity, culture, language). This study offers detailed information about intercultural knowledge development during short-term study abroad experiences and demonstrates that minority context programs encourage development of intercultural knowledge about "small c" culture and social groups.

Traditionally, the speech act of requesting has been regarded as a face-threatening act (Brown & Levinson, 1987) due to the impositive nature on the addressee's negative face. Yet, in specific service encounters, requests can no longer be seen as threatening (Antonopoulou, 2001). This is the case of tourist information offices, where mitigators may not be present due to the task-oriented nature of the exchange. This study aims to widen the scope of research on service encounters by examining 147 naturally occurring requests by native speakers of English in a tourist information office taking into account the variable of gender. Our findings suggest that females used more direct questions whereas men employed want statements to a much higher extent. These results have to be understood within the context of this specific service encounter, in which direct requests do not imply impoliteness or threats to the requestee's negative face.

Living in a global world involves not only mastering languages, but also dealing with different habits and values. It becomes critical with students trained to deal with a multicultural public, such as the group of learners from tourism covered by our research. Our proposal aims to analyze whether the virtual world of Second Life (SL) facilitates the development of English for Specific Purposes and the acquisition of intercultural communication. To cover the objective qualitative and quantitative research were conducted along a four-phased in/out SL instruction. Questioning about the differences between the mean score obtained by experimental and control groups shows no significant differences in the acquisition of language regarding face to face and Second Life interaction, but demonstrates a positive tendency in the case of intercultural competences.