Together… Alone in the Digital Terrain: Experiences of Interculturality in English as a Lingua Franca Virtual Exchange Among University Students in Canada and Jordan

Virtual exchange (VE) has enabled geographically dispersed learners of English as an Additional/Second Language (EAL/ESL) to collaborate in developing intercultural competence (IC) (O’Dowd, 2011). However, recurring applications of IC constructs that overlook technology-mediated contexts and social practices common in VE restrict exploration of newly emerging practices of IC (Thorne, 2016) and the ‘simplexity’ of the VE environment (Dervin, 2016). Likewise, continued centering of the “native speaker” in VE problematizes students’ essentialist engagement with so-called “authentic cultural representations” (O’Dowd, 2021). There is therefore an urgent need for research exploring how students navigate IC in English as a lingua franca (ELF) VE environment. This study adopts an exploratory qualitative design, combining digital ethnography (Hine, 2015) with a multiple case study approach (Yin, 2014), to examine the interculturality (Dervin, 2016) experiences of EAL/ESL university students in a VE between Canada and Jordan. It investigates what experiences shape students’ strategies for engaging with IC in small groups, what factors influence their engagement, and how these experiences contribute to evolving epistemologies of IC in technology-mediated language learning. Data sources included a pre-study survey, semi-structured interviews with stimulated recall (Gass & Mackey, 2022), and observations of participants’ multimodal interactions and artifacts. Interpretive thematic analysis (Clarke et al., 2015) and multimodal discourse analysis (Kress, 2010) were used for within- and cross-case analysis. Findings show that students’ IC strategies were co-constructed through relational dynamics shaped by the VE context. Participants used storytelling, mentorship, linguistic adaptation, politeness, let-it-pass strategies, and distributed leadership to navigate tasks. These were influenced by pedagogical choices, learner identities and evolving experiences, ELF as a shared communicative ground, and the digital affordances of VE tools. While some intercultural traits aligned with conventional IC models, the findings challenge static views of cultural knowledge. Learners co-constructed diverse cultures of learning where IC emerged as fluid, emotional, and context dependent. The study contributes to VE scholarship by emphasizing a shift from individual to relational understandings of interculturality in VE and wider TMLL environments. It offers implications for designing equitable, emotionally aware VE experiences and extending IC frameworks to better reflect the complexities of digital intercultural communication.

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