Language use and intercomprehension in telecollaboration among Italian mentors and heritage Spanish speaker mentees

This study addresses multilingualism in the paradidactic setting of telecollaboration. During the Fall and Spring semesters of the 2018/2019 academic year, a telecollaborative program was implemented with students from Roma Tre University (R3) who served as native Italian speaker mentors and students enrolled in Italian classes at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). CSULB offers targeted Italian learning courses for the substantial population of heritage speakers of Spanish to exploit the typological proximity of Italian and Spanish through intercomprehension. The telecollaborative program employed two different modalities: mentoring and partnership. In this study, we focus on the mentoring, to which 69 students participated: 15 native speaker mentors of Italian, (students of second language teaching at Roma Tre) and 54 mentees (first-year Italian language students at CSULB, some being speakers of Spanish). Our aim was to investigate the use of the languages in the linguistic repertoire of mentors and mentees to determine whether there were important differences between those who did and those who did not have Spanish as a heritage language in their linguistic repertoire. To do so, we observed the occurrence of meaning negotiation episodes and the languages used in 60 video-recorded Zoom-in-mentoring sessions of which the first and last five minutes were transcribed and coded. The results show that HSSs benefit from the presence of Spanish in their linguistic repertoire since they can use Spanish as a pivot language while learning Italian.