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Intercultural competence (IC), a desired outcome in many international schools, comprises the necessary knowledge, skills, and attitudes to effectively navigate intercultural situations. However, international schools are often elite institutions catering to affluent expatriates and host country nationals, thus aligning the development of IC to elite norms. This study explored the perspectives of six local scholarship students in a Central American international school, finding that these students have internalised this elitism as part of their IC development. This suggests that international schools could better serve the broader community by incorporating a critical stance towards IC that promotes equity without reinforcing elitism.

To facilitate intercultural communicative competence, language learners are invited into the triadic capacity of Thirdness, where the social and critical interpretations of intercultural dialogue are explored. Little is known of the specific pedagogical stages to create such a terrain for the development of students' sustainable intercultural competence. Situated within a tertiary-level English classroom in China, this study reveals how teachers can employ five pedagogical stages and humanised pedagogy to decentre cultural imperialism and promote plural values, behaviours and ways of knowing, and how students relativise their own beliefs to those of the target language culture.

This paper outlines the different aspects of language contact in Newar, the ethnic indigenous language community of the Kathmandu valley, focusing on language use and attitudes. The data were collected in 2016-2017 with the help of survey questionnaire, key informant interviews, informal interviews, and various observations based on the socio-ethnographic research on language contact situations in different domains, namely social, cultural, economic, and official as well as media-related activities where the informants were asked to use different languages along with the use of their own mother tongue, i.e. Newar. The findings mainly include various traits of language use and attitudes of the Newar-speaking people living in the capital city in which the people are shifting towards Nepali, English, and Hindi languages because of media, migration, globalisation, education, and other factors. The paper concludes by providing some clues to preserve and revitalise minority languages that have been shifting, changing, and dying because of various socio-political reasons in the multilingual cities like Kathmandu where language policies have been dramatically changed and get the attention of public discourses to understand the dynamic nature of language contact.

This study explores multilingual international students' narratives of mobility and socialisation through online discursive spaces of interview conversations. Drawing upon an ecological approach to transnational narratives, the researcher analyzed international students' multiscalar interactions and transformations in sociospatial practices. The analyses provide ethnographic accounts of the participants' translingual discourses, transcultural trajectories, and translocal community lives that involve transnational connections across temporal and spatial borders. The findings also suggest that interview conversations with peers promote international students' dynamic narrations of their life experiences of multilingual mobility in continuously evolving ecological communities.

Skilled adult readers are those who read fluently, but multilingual learners do not always exhibit the same reading proficiency in the different languages they know. Among the variables that influence learners' silent reading fluency, a research trend points to musical aptitude as an individual ability that affects language learners' reading competency. Common auditory features of reading and musical skills have been observed in studies with children and adolescents, but studies involving multilingual adults learning an additional language are scarce. This study aims to observe the potential relationship of multilingual learners' musical aptitude and their silent reading fluency in all the languages the learners know and in Spanish, an additional language they are learning as adults. 157 Flemish university students were tested in Dutch, French, English, and Spanish. Learners' sociocultural data , their musical aptitude and their silent contextual word reading fluency in all languages were tested. In addition, a reading comprehension test in L4 (Spanish) was administered. The statistical results indicate a significant correlation between their musical aptitude and their L1, L2, L3 silent reading fluency, but not with L4 (Spanish).

Increased globalization of the world economy, growth in human migration, and rapid developments in science and technology have required people to develop intercultural communication skills. Teachers play a crucial role in developing intercultural competence among students in our globalized, multilingual classrooms. The need for fostering collaborative discourse among students with diverse cultural and linguistic repertoires and building intercultural competence among students is a common blind spot in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics teacher praxis. This can inhibit efforts to cultivate safe and supportive learning environments for "all" students and can ultimately threaten multilingual student success. As part of a larger study, this narrative inquiry explores the phenomenon of intercultural competence development through the lived experiences of a Midwestern secondary science teacher. Time series data were collected from the participant (11 semi-structured, in-depth, online interviews over 8 months). Field notes and artifacts served as secondary data. Informed by Michael Byram's Multidimensional Model of Intercultural Competence, interviews were designed, conducted, transcribed, and member checked. Then, transcripts, field notes, and artifacts were coded and analyzed using Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly's three-dimensional narrative inquiry framework to arrive at synthesized stories of experience around coalescing themes. The findings revealed the participant utilized several strategies aimed at developing intercultural communicative competence, particularly in support of multilingual students. This paper focuses on the four themes that relate most directly to intercultural communicative competence development. The findings and implications are discussed within the context of Byram's model and conclusions are drawn to inform current and future work in this area.

To prepare teachers for effectively addressing students' cultural diversity in K-12, physical education teacher education (PETE) programs need to include intercultural competence training. Global Link is a pedagogical module, which has been designed to promote students' intercultural competence in a PETE program. In the past 13 years, the module has been used successfully in a graduate course working with PETE programs in Belgium, China, Italy, South Korea, Turkey, and USA. Based on lessons learned from multiple implementation experiences, this article aims to introduce the Global Link module and present a four-step procedure for designing and implementing the module, teaching strategies and suggestions, and an example of a Global Link module. Four steps for organizing Global Link include: finding and establishing partnerships, planning for Global Link, implementing Global Link, and reflecting on Global Link experiences. Collaboration and communication between instructors involved in the Global Link are cornerstones to successfully proceed step by step. Incorporating the Global Link type of virtual exchange in PETE programs is suggested to better prepare preservice teachers for interacting with students from other countries in classes and to expand the scope of instructional content to international.

For the past four decades, intercultural bilingual education (IBE) has been a common policy prescription to address Indigenous/non-Indigenous education gaps in Latin America. Initiatives have grown from small, localised pilots to national and state-level initiatives across thousands of schools. While there is some rigorous evidence of the effectiveness of IBE pilot initiatives at a small scale, there is very little evidence that expanding them to a larger scale benefits learners to the same extent. This article reviews the existing evidence on IBE's effectiveness and identifies a number of challenges in replicating success at scale. The authors identify factors which have limited our understanding of IBE's effectiveness, as well as factors which may have contributed to less-than-ideal outcomes for larger programmes, including uneven coverage, varying teacher quality, and limited resource availability for smaller Indigenous languages. Addressing these issues will be crucial for improving IBE programmes' ability to operate successfully at scale.

This article examines the prevalence of white privilege and supremacy in the context of English education in Thailand by presenting an auto-ethnographic exploration of the raciolinguistic experiences of a Filipino English language teacher. It explores the macro, meso, and micro levels contributing to the prevalence of monolingual ideologies and injustices encountered by non-white and non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in the country. We argue that since the field of English education has the potential to serve as a locus of inequality while simultaneously providing an opportunity to contest the white privilege and native English speaker-teachers' (NESTs) hegemony, cultivating linguistic and cultural diversity and equality is a way to challenge and resist the monolithic view of English, giving equality and justice to all English language teachers, regardless of their race and nationality. Facilitating transformative endeavours can be achieved by promoting critical and reflective approaches to policy, pedagogy, and teaching practices, highlighting the importance of intelligibility in cross-cultural and multilingual interactions.

The teaching of English as an additional language or dialect (EALD) in Australia has been problematised partly due to teachers' limited understanding of learners' linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The gap could be potentially bridged with the integration of intercultural pragmatics (IP). Adopting a qualitative case study approach, this study explored how a teacher with awareness of the role of IP in intercultural communication could incorporate IP into adult EALD classrooms to enable learners to use the target language appropriately in the multicultural context of Australia. The findings illustrate the teacher's awareness of multiple aspects of IP and how these aspects were meaningfully taught in adult EALD classrooms. The study thereby confirmed the usefulness of IP teaching in the investigated setting in particular and adult EALD classrooms in general. Hence, it suggests a need for systematic integration of IP into adult EALD programs and reveals pedagogical implications for IP teaching regarding not only teachers' classroom practices but also teacher education and teacher professional development.

In this critical case study, we examined the ways civic culture developed at an action civics summer camp and provided implications for civics teaching and learning. Findings highlight how the camp context produced and simultaneously failed to yield a culturally participatory inclusive civic culture. Specifically, we found the emphasis on dialogue, inquiry, and attention to place during the camp experience supported actors in developing positive civic culture exchanges. However, the civic culture that emerged at the camp also included white hetero-normative cultural practices and ideologies which discouraged participation among some students with non-dominant identities. Further, students of all identities did little to engage in civic experiences beyond the camp. We suggest that these shortcomings might be overcome by intentionally designing learning experiences to address these concerns, supporting counselors to understand how to mediate sensitive projects, and demonstrating to students how to perpetually engage with civic concerns.

Work placement is an important aspect of higher education studies and career preparation. Effective preparation is crucial for students to succeed in placements, yet little is known about international students' placement preparation, particularly regarding their sensemaking. This qualitative study, guided by an integrative theoretical framework, examined international health science (HSc) undergraduate students' sensemaking behaviors as they prepare for in-person placements in a host country. Data were gathered through 36 semi-structured interviews with 12 international HSc undergraduate students (three with each student). Findings unravel complicated psychological and interpersonal processes undergone by student participants during pre-placement sensemaking. These insights can inform institutional strategies to support international students in building sensemaking capacities to effectively prepare for placements and post-study work transitions.

The spread of English and its increasing importance in intercultural encounters have challenged essentialist perspectives of culture in English language teaching. In addition to using English as a means of communication, students are expected to develop intercultural awareness, which allows them to analyse and reflect on their intercultural encounters and to participate in social activities. Such a need draws great attention to language teachers' perceptions of and engagement in intercultural teaching. As a narrative inquiry, this paper examines the reflections of English language practitioners who have returned from an overseas study experience and have become English language teachers in China. It focuses on their study abroad experiences, encompassing both their achievements and challenges in the context of intercultural learning, and examines how these experiences have influenced their current involvement in intercultural teaching. The findings help shed light on the shifts in teachers' perceptions of intercultural encounters and how the processes of making sense of intercultural experiences inform their orientation towards intercultural learning. The paper considers the importance of helping teachers use their experiential understanding of language and culture to generate a critical pedagogical stance to promote intercultural education.

This article presents a model of intercultural learning that may be used in the planning and implementation of citizenship education in foreign/second/world language teaching. The Cycle model of intercultural learning aims at the development of global citizenship and comprises four phases: noticing, comparing, reflecting and interaction. Among the central concepts are critical cultural awareness, perspective awareness, local and global contextualisation, and decentering. The article further shows how language learning and intercultural learning may be integrated by combining the Cycle model of intercultural learning with task-based language learning and language learning via chunks and keywords. The argument is illustrated by results from an action research project carried out in Denmark in the school year 2021/2022. Thematically, the project draws inspiration from The UN Global Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities, and addresses students of English, German, and French in grade 8 (15-year-olds). In this article, the focus is on one of the English classes, but the article concludes with reflections on the relevance of all languages.

Achieving inclusion and equity in international business (IB) education remains a challenge, given the rising costs of college tuition and the increasingly diverse and non-traditional student population. These changes may reduce the feasibility and relevancy of activities, such as study abroad programs, and an MNE-centric IB curriculum for a significant number of college students today. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we share our findings from a case study on a virtual service-learning project that fostered cross-border interactions between undergraduate students in North America and small business owners in Central America. Over the course of one semester, students worked to draw connections between their unique individual backgrounds and skill sets, connect IB and global strategy concepts to small business operations, and deepen their understanding of sustainable development. Our findings demonstrate that this practice can enhance student enjoyment, academic learning, professional growth, and civic learning. Overall, virtual service-learning can be effective as an alternative teaching and learning approach to address the significant challenges in IB education.

This mixed-methods study explores whether undergraduates in a multilingual, multicultural university -- and more specifically in a multi-dimensionally internationalised classroom -- manifest transcultural competence when starting university studies. The article precisely focuses on the role of intercultural friendships and personal and family plurilingualism in the construction of an identity that reveals such competence, namely, a transcultural identity. Data include profile and transcultural competence questionnaires as well as interviews and classroom observations. Descriptive statistics and regression analyses show that first-year undergraduates in such a university display transcultural competence at the start of their studies, but more so students with intercultural friendships, personal or family plurilingualism, or belonging to a multi-dimensionally internationalised classroom. Qualitative data document that this educational context may trigger affordances for diversified plurilingual intercultural interactions in which transcultural competence may manifest in the form of a complex transcultural "twenty-first-century youth identity" that is linked to sensitivities and attitudes valuing heritage as well as a transnational way of life.

The study examined the role of Chinese-Japanese cognate awareness in Japanese vocabulary acquisition among college Chinese learners of Japanese. Thirty-seven college-level students participated in this study and they completed a bilingual cognate awareness test which covered both crosslinguistic similarities and differences. In addition, vocabulary learning measurements including vocabulary knowledge and lexical inference ability were also administered to them. The results showed that Chinese-Japanese cognate awareness in general predicted vocabulary knowledge and lexical inference. More critically, the awareness of false cognates was found to systematically predict all the tested vocabulary measurements. The discussion emphasised the cognitive demands and language specificity underlying the cognate facilitation of vocabulary acquisition.

Although in the educational context the virtual exchange practices have become popular since pandemic, there is a need to examine and provide more evidences and lessons learned from this kind of international experiences in order to advance in teaching on line and to train students how to be efficient when working in virtual teams. This paper studies the results of a virtual collaboration among three universities in two different countries (Peru and India). It discusses the methodologies and pedagogies of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) and global virtual team (GVT) and presents an instrument that was developed to understand student's needs and interests in several aspects (work in international teams, acquisition of intercultural knowledge and skills). A survey was applied to 77 students in Peru and India. The results showed the development of students' communication and collaboration skills as well as cross-cultural understanding and appreciation of other cultures. Despite the challenges that appeared during the project such as time difference, schedule, language barriers and engagement of some team members, students appreciated the opportunity to engage with peers from another country and to learn more about their culture. The COIL methodology, in contrast to GVT method, offers students more holistic and transformative learning experience supported and guided by lecturers. Trained faculty and awareness of COIL pedagogy characteristics and its implications are critical to a student's success.

We reviewed articles on computer-assisted language learning, focusing on intercultural education studies published in the last five years. We investigated the following aspects: (1) the theoretical foundation that the studies were based on, e.g., theory, hypothesis, model, or framework, (2) the technologies used by the participants, (3) the languages and cultures that the studies focused on, (4) the methodology of the reviewed studies, and (5) the findings reported by researchers. Our results showed that Byram's intercultural communicative competence model, sociocultural theory, and social constructivism were the most frequently used theoretical foundations. The participants frequently used discussion forums, Facebook, email, and Skype. English was the most popular language, and American culture received more attention than any other culture. In terms of the methodology, most studies were conducted for four to 18 weeks, and undergraduate students with advanced language skills were the most frequent participants. The participants interacted with their partners, e.g., introduced cultural backgrounds, created collaborative products, and reflected on learning experiences. Researchers in most studies used questionnaires and interviews to collect the data, and their results demonstrated that intercultural telecollaboration in foreign language education promotes language and culture learning. Benefits such as students having positive attitudes toward technology-supported learning activities and learning activities contributing to developing language abilities and intercultural skills were reported by the researchers. However, according to the results, high cost and learning burdens were the most frequently reported drawbacks of CALL for intercultural education. Several implications were drawn from the results of this review study. The significance of this study is that it provides up-to-date information on CALL-based intercultural education, keeps track of changes in technologies and their applications to language and culture learning, and focuses on aspects that are important to the field but were neglected in earlier review studies.

The largest group of international students pursuing their overseas higher education in the UK come from China; and yet, little qualitative research has explored the experiences of Chinese students who have recently made this transition, with even less focusing on the experiences of both undergraduate and postgraduate students. The present article set out to explore the unique perspective of a small sample of first-year undergraduate and first-year postgraduate students (N = 18), on their experience of transitioning to a higher education institution in the UK. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, and thematic analysis was used to explore their experiences in greater depth. Two superordinate themes are reported here: "Education Dialogues and Scholarship" and "Intercultural Relations and Notions of Difference." The findings suggest that despite advances in institutional practices to support international students' transition to higher education in the UK, more work needs to be done to redress the sociocultural (and other) challenges that continue to exist for international Chinese students.

This study examined within and cross-language relations, and specifically, the role of phonological awareness (PA) skills in reading among young Hindi-speaking children (L1) who were learning to read English (L2) in Delhi, India. Data was collected from 143 children in Grades 1 and 2 using measures validated for this population. The analyses examined the associations between L1 and L2 PA and decoding, both within and across the two languages. The results showed that PA skills within each language significantly predicted decoding in that language. Furthermore, there was evidence of cross-language transfer with Hindi PA significantly predicting English word reading even after controlling for English PA. English PA also significantly predicted Hindi decoding, however, these effects decreased once Hindi PA was added to the model. These findings emphasize the important role that both L1 and L2 PA plays in reading among emergent Hindi--English bilinguals. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings on literacy instruction in India are discussed.

Despite the global trend of growing diversity in student enrolment, most teacher education programmes remain inward-looking, oriented to national core standards and resist academic calls for internationalisation. While we agree that internationalisation at home is possible under certain circumstances, we put forward the argument that dialogic contact between student teachers in different national contexts has the potential to foster teacher education students' intercultural competence and offer opportunities for professional development that go beyond those offered by traditional programmes. This paper reports on the creation of a virtual transnational 'third place' for teacher education students based in Hamburg and Sydney, built around the mutual analysis of their respective visual linguistic biographies. We will show that such a transnational space and reflexive activity enhances student teachers' awareness of what it means to be and become a multilingual subject in other parts of the world, thus promoting self-awareness and the ability to decentre. Additionally, we claim that these activities have the potential to enhance teacher education students' attitudes towards the implementation of multilingual pedagogies.

The paper focuses on the communication of three bilingual couples, each speaking a different lingua franca (LF). Positioning theory offers a methodological framework to explain language choice in interactive positioning within personal contacts. A comparative view of the couples' storylines benefits from the differences between them. The analysis herein shows how the speakers are positioned in the subtle interplay of self-positioning and the positioning of the partner. The couples draw on their language resources and specific linguistic features which index language ideologies. Reasons for the choice and maintenance of a LF in the couple are informed by attitudinal factors which contribute to the discursive production of interpersonal positions. Findings outline multidimensional perspectives on LF couples by showing how different positions are created and how positioning is connected to the negotiation of a common language. This paper advances the debate on LF communication in intercultural relationships by demonstrating that positioning helps to investigate the ways in which diverse language resources intertwine to create different linguistic constellations and eventually improve our understanding of the performance in a third language.

This article presents a study on novel language forms and uses across evolving digital environments, and questions whether emerging digital communication conventions should have a place in language education. The study was motivated by the deepening gap between the content of and approaches to language instruction evident in popular mobile-(assisted) language learning (MALL) apps and the sophisticated evolutions in digital communication over the past 30 years. A team of researchers conducted an environmental scan to locate academic journals publishing on digitally-mediated language and language teaching/learning applications, and to determine topical themes and discussions. This scan was followed by a collaborative in-depth focused literature review to document technological advances and evolutionary changes in social communication across the lifespan of the WWW. The authors posit that language teaching theory and practice must attend to digital convergence and posthumanism, and pose uncomfortable questions for the language teaching profession, such as: What is the place of conversational digital agents in language teaching? Should new media grammar forms be specifically taught? Who is the arbiter of appropriate language use in digital communication?

Purpose: The negative cultural bias vis-à-vis international business and cross-cultural management has been duly acknowledged, necessitating recommendations towards investigating its positive effects. Methodologically, quantitative research clearly predominates, and there have been calls for alternative approaches. Thus, this conceptual paper addresses the research gap (methodological and thematic) by investigating if multicultural teams can be an essential part of the global workforce and whether positive effects exist regarding dynamic capabilities, learning and knowledge transfer. Design/methodology/approach: The underlying ethnographic research design enabled exploring within the embedded single case study from an emic perspective, including qualitative observation and semi-structured expert interviews, and provided detailed insights into the company's multicultural work environment. Findings: The results reveal that applying a qualitative design allowed the needed exploration and show that multicultural, geographically dispersed teams are positively experienced and considered necessary in today's globalised world. They are likely to increase in the future. Moreover, dynamic capabilities (multicultural competencies) are indispensable for multicultural teamwork. Regarding learning opportunities, different viewpoints for discussion and the ability to reflect on these offer valuable insights. In line with theory, multiculturality is considered a "two-edged sword", providing simultaneous benefits and challenges. Contrary to the theory, even highly important information transfers can occur virtually, although occasional physical contact is essential for trust building. Originality/value: The multinational family business offers a unique example of a positive relationship between multiculturalism and organisational excellence and demonstrates how the application of a qualitative methodology can support theory building by delivering a revised model of dynamic capabilities in multicultural environments with geographical dispersion.

This study aims to explore the panorama of international education development in China from a retrospective policy mapping perspective. In China, international education is closely linked with educational internationalization and opening to the outside world. The internationalization of education in China refers to the cross-border communication, cooperation, and integration of educational undertakings of different countries to realize the understanding and respect of multicultural society. In general, the international education policy in China includes four stages: From 1949 to 1976, the international education policy is the exploratory stage, from 1976 to 2000, the steady development stage of the international education policy in the reform and opening up period, from 2000 to 2012, the comprehensive development stage of the international education policy in the new century, and from 2012 to now, the new international education policy under the background of 'One Belt and One Road' and the new policy challenges under the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the conclusion and implication are offered in the last.

While student engagement has long been associated with students' learning, development, and success, the climate and culture of historically white institutions often create barriers to engagement among racially minoritized students. Given the institutional responsibility to facilitate equitable engagement, there is a need for new policies and practices that meet students' needs. One increasingly popular intervention is comprehensive college transition programs (CCTPs) that provide multipronged approaches to promote the success of underrepresented students. While there is growing evidence that these programs benefit students' outcomes, very little research has explored how they might shape students' engagement--a prerequisite for student success. Therefore, this sequential explanatory mixed methods study used longitudinal data from a multicampus CCTP to understand various aspects of engagement among students with different racialized identities. We found that racially diverse students participating in a CCTP engaged similarly across groups with their peers, faculty, staff, and CCTP academic courses. Key explanations for the similar levels of engagement among racially diverse students that emerged from our analysis included the compositional diversity among students and educators, structured opportunities for meaningful interactions across racial groups, and the identity-conscious approaches used by educators in this CCTP. Our qualitative findings aligned with previous research on college environments, providing empirical evidence that such environments foster similar levels of engagement among racially diverse students. Thus, this study offers important implications for researchers, educators, and administrators to promote equitable engagement among increasingly racially diverse college students.

This paper describes the process of developing classroom culture that promotes reciprocal intercultural encountering in the primary school. Storycrafting, an oral storytelling method used for democratic encounters between participants, was used to connect classes in Scotland, Finland and Belgium over three cycles of design-based research. Abductive analysis produced a theoretical framework of seven key dimensions that influence the learning space for reciprocal encounters: power, knowledge, relatedness, purpose, structure, continuity and meaningfulness. These dimensions were used to identify four kinds of learning spaces that occurred during the implementation of the story exchange: the ambivalent space, the space of information, the transitional space and the space of reciprocal encountering. The intervention created a platform for children's encounters that reinforced mutuality and reciprocal interactions rather than Othering the exchange partners.

This essay posits that an institution's program design mandates the curriculum for the classes we teach and that curriculum affects the concept of "canonical" literature, teacher preparation, textbook content, and comfort with discussing difference in the second language classroom for undergraduates. For that reason, this essay argues for the need for intentional curricular design that incorporates the ethnic diversity of Spanish-speaking communities at all levels of undergraduate Spanish-language instruction and proposes that literature written by Spanish-speaking writers of African descent should always be an integral part of the introductory literature course. In this course, literature is examined as an expression of culture and used as a tool for the development of both critical thinking skills and intercultural competence. While inclusive teaching methodologies are inherently universal and have application in teaching literature in any language, what follows describes an approach to teaching Afro-Hispanic literature in undergraduate Spanish classes that ensures the development of intercultural competence, endorses a pedagogy with a foundation in antiracist philosophy, and is rooted in inclusive and equitable teaching practices that is both deliberate and student-centered.

Purpose: This program evaluation aimed to investigate the benefits and challenges of an international, intercultural, e-community-engagement experience involving youth and higher education students. The authors sought to understand the meaning that participants would make of an international, intercultural, e-community-engagement experience. Design/methodology/approach: The program evaluation component of this project was qualitative, participatory and action-oriented. It was composed of online reflection sessions with small, international groups of higher education students from Iraq, India, Morocco, South Africa and the USA immediately following each of five interactive exchange sessions with youth from South Africa. It also included one culminating reflection session to which all of the higher education student participants were invited and a written questionnaire that was completed by the youth participants at the conclusion of the project. The reflection sessions were recorded and transcribed. Transcripts and survey data were reviewed for emergent themes. Findings: Cultural exposure emerged as the primary theme with participants valuing the opportunity to learn about different cultures and to connect with individuals from across the globe. Research limitations/implications: This program evaluation was not designed as a generalizable study. This pilot initiative provides evidence of the potential value and importance of international, intercultural e-community-engagement experiences for youth and higher education students. Practical implications: The potential value of technology to build exchange opportunities for young people is immense and largely untapped. International, intercultural e-community-engagement initiatives can be made available to students globally with relatively limited resources. A highly structured and focused plan provides clarity about expectations and requirements for students. A high level of commitment is required by all participants, including the faculty coordinators. Social implications: Although the project was brief, exposure to numerous countries and cultures allowed participants to challenge their assumptions about different peoples and places in the world. The potential benefits for greater compassion and understanding of communities and cultures in an international context are high. Originality/value: This program evaluation contributes to and extends the literature on the possibilities and challenges of international e-community-engagement; it demonstrates the potential for e-community-engagement across multiple countries to broaden students' exposure to and interest in global perspectives.

A growing body of research on identity and language learning has investigated how immigrant learners construct their identities in the process of acquiring a second language (L2). Much of the research, however, is situated in Western contexts. This study looks at how three Thai immigrants acquired an L2, Cantonese, and constructed their identities in their host society--Hong Kong. Drawing on the data collected from semi-structured interviews, onsite observation, and informal conversations, this study shows that the three Thai immigrants built multiple identities that allowed them to have access to the target language learning resources and practices. They embraced selective acculturation by maintaining their Thai identity and preserving their cultural heritage, which had a positive influence on their acquisition of the target language. The study suggests that language learners need to claim powerful identities and exercise human agency in their interaction with target language speakers to facilitate language learning.

By investigating the first thirty minutes of ten initial student group meetings (cf. Rampazzo & Aranha, 2019), this study explores the interactional resources that participants display during online talk-ininteraction. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is applied to the data consisting of "Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2" (GAT2) transcriptions of recorded Zoom video conferences. Virtual Exchange (VE), also referred to as Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), is a method of intercultural online learning in which groups of learners collaborate with partners from another culture or geographical area in an authentic and immersive setting. Despite the collaborative and immersive nature of virtual exchanges, microanalytic studies regarding interaction in this field are still underrepresented (Dooly, 2017). This is also and particularly true for the concept of interactional competence (IC) (Kramsch, 1986) which has hardly been considered in VE research so far. IC is a competence model that comprises interlocutors' interactional resources such as turn-taking, repair, sequence-organization, multimodal resources and other. This paper depicts the interactional strategies that EFL students adopt in online video team meetings. Further, it argues that some L2 IC features, such as turn-taking and multilingual resources, come with particular dynamics and characteristics in a VE context and provides examples for these practices.

In pedagogical debates about Global Englishes (GE) and English as a lingua franca (ELF), there is widespread agreement concerning an urgent need for liberating teachers and students from the normative constraints of ELT's orientation towards standard English by raising their awareness of the characteristics and complexities of GE/ELF communication. ELT students are generally perceived as weak GE/ELF communicators requiring remedial education based on the analysis of recorded GE/ELF exchanges. Contrary to this deficit view, this article calls for acknowledging ELT students as 'speaker-learners', who are endowed with a natural capability for communication including strategic creativity, contextual inferencing, empathetic cooperativity, and communication monitoring. Through a social constructivist lens, they appear as principal agents of 'MY English' development, guided by their personal requirements of communicative and communal success and their aspiration for speaker satisfaction. A normalizing account of GE/ELF communication and an emancipatory MY English perspective on ELT provide the theoretical-conceptual underpinnings of an immersive pedagogical GE/ELF approach, preferably implemented through virtual exchange in a blended learning environment. Pedagogical mentoring is essential for helping students assume MY English responsibility, make best use of their ordinary communicative capability, and exploit the translanguaging range of their resources when faced with unfamiliar challenges in GE/ELF encounters.

In intercultural and transcultural communication contexts within multilingual education, English learners should be able to communicate and interact with other people who have a different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. For this reason, intercultural content should be incorporated in EFL textbooks to promote learners' intercultural competencies and communication skills. The contents are designed to contain Anglo American and British cultural dimensions and learners' home and foreign cultures. It is to prepare learners to become global citizens. The principal aim of this study is to investigate how teachers apply English textbooks to promote learners' intercultural competencies and intercultural communicative skills within multilingual education. It is a qualitative study consisting of three main data gathering methods: semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and group discussions. Given the research data focusing on teachers' English textbook practices, researchers play a role within multiple realities. The data were collected using semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and group discussion to gather the research data. This article showed that intercultural representations incorporated in EFL textbooks are used as useful resources for helping learners develop their intercultural competences and communication skills. Also, the ways teachers carry out their teaching in the classes are measured. This study shows that the teachers employ EFL textbooks effectively with utilizing potential teaching materials containing cultural values to promote learners' intercultural competences and communicative skills within multilingual education. This study also suggests that English teachers need reinforcement in multilingual education.

In this paper we present the analysis and interpretation of data collected during an intercultural virtual exchange undertaken in 2020 in which students from Argentina and the USA explored how trauma and suffering associated with COVID-19 can be channeled through collaborative artistic multimodal creations, and how approaching this in a productive way can lead to self-transformation in terms of intercultural and civic growth. To obtain unbiased data, we did not give the students information on the Council of Europe's Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC; 2018) which was fundamental to our conceptualization. Here, we apply an ex post facto research method to explore which of the 20 competences for democratic culture included in the RFCDC were mobilized and deployed by our students during this project. We do so by analyzing their multimodal artistic creations, social actions, and their civic statements from the perspective of the RFCDC definitions and descriptors. Findings indicate that the virtual exchange project contributed to the cultivation of 'democratically and interculturally competent citizens' as conceptualized in the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture.

Since its inception in 2004, Siena Italian Studies (SIS) has worked to offer students a challenging and engaging intercultural experience thanks to the implementation of the service-learning pedagogy and the practice of reflection combined with language acquisition. Over the years, SIS courses have been aligned with European policies and developments so that students could better understand the impact of their experience and build competences useful for their future as global citizens. For this reason, the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC) was incorporated in the syllabus of the renewed reflection course, "Intercultural Dialogue, Democracy and Global Citizenship through Reflection". The sudden change of habits and perspectives due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020 abruptly caused a shift in education. Therefore, proceeding along its ever-evolving path, SIS has come to develop new ways of educating to democracy: a digital and a hybrid reflective course. This contribution will present the Democratic Reflective Syllabus used in the EUFICCS (European Use of Full-Immersion, Culture, Content and Service) approach and compare its in-person version with its two updated versions developed.

This article presents an analysis of a teaching concept we developed based on the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC) (Council of Europe, 2018), that not only provides opportunities to practice communicative skills but puts a major focus on democratic competences. Mathematics students and TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) students from the USA and Germany engaged in a virtual exchange project to reflect upon local and global issues that can be seen from more than one perspective. The topics they chose are all related to the domain of 'values' in the RFCDC. The students created short stories in which they address these issues and collaborated in the production of a multimodal, digital storybook. The aim of this article is to examine how education for democracy can be fostered through interdisciplinary intercultural citizenship projects. The unit of analysis is the teaching concept, with a focus on the results of the interdisciplinary collaborative process and its outcomes.