O n f e r e n c e

Short paper 
Introduction 
Online foreign language interaction is becoming increasingly popular in education as a 
way to enhance language acquisition (Canto et al., 2013; Chapelle, 2001; Lamy & 
Goodfellow, 2010; Warschauer & Kern, 2000) and Intercultural Communicative 
Competence (Belz & Thorne, 2006; Byram, 2014; Guth & Helm, 2010; O’Dowd, 2007; 
Liauw, 2006). Online communication tools can be used to facilitate telecollaboration, that 
is, the possibility “to bring together classes of la
nguage learners in geographically distant 
locations to develop their foreign language skills and intercultural competence through 
collaborative tasks and project work” (O’Dowd 2014: 340).
Most experiences and research results reported so far on online foreign language 
interaction and telecollaboration refer to tertiary language education (Pol, 2013). 
Educational experiences and research studies are needed in order to find out whether the 
positive results of research on telecollaboration related to adults at tertiary education 
(impact on motivation: Jauregi et al. 2012; on communicative oral competence: Canto et 
al., 2013; and on intercultural competence Canto et al., 2014)
3
do apply to younger 
students who are learning languages in quite a different educational setting.
The European project TILA originated from this very specific need. TILA, Telecollaboration 
for Intercultural Language Acquisition
4
, (Jauregi et al., 2013) seeks to:

Innovate and enrich language teaching programs at secondary schools and make 
them more motivating and effective by stimulating telecollaboration for 
intercultural awareness with peers of other cultures;

Empower (student) teachers for developing ICT literacy skills, as well as 
organisational, pedagogical and intercultural competences for telecollaboration; 

Study the added value that telecollaboration may have in language learning for 
intercultural understanding of younger learners. 
Six countries are represented in the TILA consortium: France, UK, Germany, Spain, the 
Netherlands and Czech Republic. Each country collaborates with a secondary school and 
a teacher training institution. The project languages are Catalan, English, French, 
German and Spanish. 
After creating teacher training materials and providing workshops to the teachers 
interested in engaging 
in telecollaboration practices at secondary schools, 
telecollaboration pilots were carried out between December 2013 and February 2014. 
Eight secondary schools, 200 pupils and 20 teachers, have participated in these pilots.
They all used synchronous communication tools: Big Blue Button, an open source 
videocommunication environment where participants can see each other while talking, 
chatting and sharing documents with one another (sound and video are recorded in the 
system) and OpenSim, an open source 3D virtual world, where learners communicate 
orally and by chat. Users are represented as avatars, who can walk, dance, fly and visit 
all kinds of scenarios together (museums, beach, hotels, markets, shops, cinema, 
houses, hospitals, etc.) while carrying out communication tasks. 
3
The research studies reported here were carried out from the experiences of a previous European project: 
NIFLAR (Networked Interaction in Foreign Language Acquisition and Research: www.niflar.eu).
4
TILA is a European project funded by the European Commission within the Lifelong Learning Programme and 
runs between January 2013 and June 2015. 

---

-193- 
2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be