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Communicating and collaborating in online contexts can be quite different from face-to-face situations and requires students to acquire multiple literacies in addition to foreign language skills and intercultural communicative competence. This paper looks at how the development of multiliteracies can be included in the EFL classroom through the practice of telecollaboration, that is internet-mediated intercultural exchange. The integration of multiliteracies in the task design of the three stages of a telecollaboration project is illustrated through practical examples from an exchange which used English as a lingua franca.

The aim of this paper is to explore how a shift1 in the language of teaching and learning can lead university lecturers of a range of disciplines to reflect on and innovate their teaching approaches. The paper is based on a case study of a single university in the north of Italy which is gradually becoming a bilingual higher education institute. Through a thematic analysis of questionnaire and interview data gathered from 53 lecturers who attended professional development courses designed to support them in this move, the authors show how for many lecturers this language shift has offered an opportunity to collectively reflect on their pedagogic approach and become more aware of student needs, as well as their own. This study focuses on a single university, but it helps to shed light on the challenges, implications and also the potential that a language shift can bring. The findings suggest that professional development to support lecturers should be designed to address not only language needs but also to offer space for reflection on practice and to raise awareness of the ‘inherent multilingualism’ of higher education (van der Walt, Christa. 2013. Multilingual Higher Education: Beyond English Medium Orientations. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.)

In language learning contexts, telecollaboration is understood to be internetbased intercultural exchange between people of different cultural/national backgrounds set up in an institutional context with the aim of developing both language skills and intercultural communicative competence. Generally students interact with one another on 'safe' topics and subsequently reflect on and discuss their interactions with teachers and peers. This paper presents a dialogic model of telecollaboration which breaks from this tradition as it entails interaction on topics which are seen as divisive through dialogue in groups led by trained facilitators, the Soliya Connect Program (SCP). The differences between this model of telecollaboration and traditional models are illustrated, and then the author presents the results of a survey study which looks at participants' evaluation of this program, what they perceive to be the role of the facilitators and their personal learning outcomes.

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Telecollaboration is an approach to intercultural learning that uses Internet technology as a tool to facilitate intercultural communication between classes of learners in different countries. The question of what language learners can gain from telecollaboration is fundamental in putting the case forward for its place in a language course. This paper looks at what learner diaries can tell us about learners’ gains, in terms of intercultural competence, from participation in telecollaboration projects. It also explores the potential of quantitative corpus-processing tools as a supporting tool for qualitative analysis of narrative diaries

English Medium Instruction (EMI) is increasingly being introduced across European universities in countries where English is not a commonly-used language, such as Italy and other central and southern European countries. However the competences and concerns of the lecturers involved are not always considered when such developments are introduced and support or training may not be offered. This paper reports on a survey on English-Medium Instruction (EMI) to which 115 lecturers in a public university in northern Italy responded. The survey was carried out by the university’s Language Centre as part of the LEAP (Learning English for Academic Purposes) Project which was developed to support lecturers in EMI. The survey sought to identify what the lecturers perceived as their strengths and weakness in English, their concerns and also their evaluations of the experience of teaching through English if they had had any. The findings discussed in this paper shed light on the needs of lecturers that are involved in EMI, which relate to methodology as well as language issues. The implications of this for European Language Centres intending to support EMI at their universities are discussed in the conclusions

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