2020 L2DL Symposium
Critical Transnational Dialogue and Virtual Exchange

This presentation explores the L2 digital multimodal composing practices of American undergraduates studying French abroad. Drawing on multiliteracies, multimodality, and translanguaging, I analyze how students leveraged languages and modes across multimodal reflections and vlogs. Findings illustrate how digital multimodal composing enhances learners’ linguistic and intercultural competencies and cultivates multilingual identities.

This session will examine  illustrative examples and implementation principles for designing, developing and using virtual field trips in L2 contexts using a create-to-learn framework.  The field trip pedagogy and practice will advance cultural perspectives and self-expression in the target language and reinforces collaboration, problem solving, visual literacy, and digital literacies.

The purpose of this presentation is to share how MULTEC (Multimodal Teletandem Corpus) is organized, what kind of content each document has and how the corpus is accessible to researchers interested in the various facets of telecollaborative practice.

Through the reflections of future teachers of English as an Additional Language (EAL) who tutored adult learners of English in Afghanistan online, this presentation explores shifts in participants’ framing of their linguistic proficiency in English, teaching experience, readiness to teach online, and the role(s) culture in their interactions with tutees.

This paper will discuss VE practices presenting data from two student cohorts who participated in the E+VE programme Cultural Encounters. The resulting analysis and discussion will cover themes on student gains, obligation, resistance, and self-realisation about the value of VEs, critical agentive digital literacies and transnational dialogues.

This presentation reports on a COIL program between a community college developmental course and a first-year composition course.  Using CUNY’s CBOX platform, students worked on two major projects, comparing their college education experiences by reflecting on a common essay reading and making an oral presentation on social injustice topics.   

This presentation aims at describing an experience of virtual exchange between English as a foreign language learners from both a Brazilian and a Mexican university. The partnership focused on providing learners the opportunity to interact collaboratively to develop their communicative skills and to raise their intercultural awareness through transnational interactions. 

This ongoing study explores teachers’ views on the importance of teaching EFL from a transnational perspective in Chile and the way such views intersect with their use of ICT in the classroom. Findings seek to describe the success of conditions for ICT use in technology-disadvantaged EFL teaching contexts.

This presentation establishes important theoretical connections between critical literacies and symbolic competence, proposing the concept of ‘critical symbolic literacies’ and introduces the results of a study evaluating L2 French students’ demonstration of ‘critical symbolic literacies’ in original multimodal compositions. This presentation provides results and an overview of the curriculum intervention used.

This presentation outlines the benefits of implementing an interactive virtual exchange component in curriculum design. We address gains in language proficiency, cultural competency, and student engagement, drawing on our incorporation of an interactive exchange between high school students of Russian and Kyrgyz “host families” into an intensive three-week immersion program.

This paper explores the multimodal discursive practices of emotional talk through the students’ learning diaries in the context of Virtual Exchange. Data was collected in the form of e-portfolios from two projects. Both virtual exchanges focused on tourism as the main theme and involved students from different disciplines.

This presentation examines digital composing practices of three multilingual, international students in a “mainstream” foundational writing course, focusing on sociocultural literacy development and user experiences (UX) while using the collaborative eportfolio tool, Digication. It argues for an expanded view of literacy and more inclusive digital and pedagogical practices.

This study proposes the use of digital gaming to promote digital literacies and enhance learners’ readiness for online instruction in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study conceptualizes digital games as texts, communities of practice, and semiotic systems to shed light on their learning potentials and discusses their pedagogical applications.

This presentation discusses individual learners’ experiences in an online intercultural exchange. The presenter will describe how three telecollaboration participants’ identities affected their engagement with the exchange, their attitudes towards it, and their intercultural competence development as a result of the project. Pedagogical and assessment implications of the findings will be discussed.

In the context of the Covid19 quarantine, a successful adult education program in Argentina has been forced to go online.  A team of educators is creating and implementing a digitally mediated program. The central goal is to maintain the dialogic nature of the curriculum in a distance modality.

This session reports on a virtual exchange project that uses digital collaboration to link technology, theoretical and pedagogical design, and practical experience. We highlight two platforms (Siftr and Slack) that helped to guide students through the critical exchange and image sharing and that engaged with their learning in virtual spaces.

Two Brazilian teaching assistants in the US describe their teaching practices in the face of the unexpected reality of video conferencing, online, synchronous and asynchronous classes. Alongside their coordinator, they reevaluated course contents, goals and curriculum considering the promotion of intercultural dialogue in this new scenario.

Virtual Exchange (VE) offers international and intercultural experiences for all students at higher education. However, not all learners have equal digital and semiotic skills. We will depict the differential lived experiences of two VE participants and illustrate the impact of the digital and semiotic skills gap on VE outcomes.

Mixed reality (MR) technologies have great potential to provide immersive and authentic experiences to language learners while deeply engaging them in the target language. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the design and development process of a MR-based Multiliteracies Manual for teaching Turkish language competence online.

With the philosophy that virtual exchange should be a part of teacher training, we implemented a project in our regular F2F courses based on experience as participants in the EVALUATE project. Due to Covid-19, these courses became online learning. We will share what we have learnt from the project. 

This presentation will discuss the use of podcasts in pedagogical materials for two different L2 settings to promote transnational dialogue and intercultural competence. The materials enable teachers and students to expand access to digital discourses available beyond the L2 classroom and to take part in them as legitimate participants. 

Multiliteracies pedagogy has been shown to overemphasize experiencing activities; however, analyses have focused primarily on materials and less on language use during implementation. This presentation discusses data collected from L2 multiliteracies digital interaction. It identifies language that both characterizes the process of experiencing and indicates movement into other knowledge processes.

Based on prior studies in informal language learning online in interlinguistic, intersemiotic and identity work, this presentation seeks to explore the potential of mirroring pedagogical approaches —pedagogical translation, transemiotization, and transculturality— for potential telecollaboration and virtual exchange projects.