APVEA25

This study explores the experiences of Indonesian EFL students participating in the International Virtual Exchange (IVE) Project, focusing on how intercultural communication is developed through online global interaction. Using a narrative inquiry approach, the research investigates three main questions: (1) What are the experiences of Indonesian EFL students in participating in the IVE Project? (2) How do these experiences contribute to the development of students’ intercultural communication skills? and (3) What challenges do students face during intercultural interactions, and what strategies do they use to overcome them? Data will be collected through reflective journals, semi-structured interviews, and students’ online discussion logs to capture personal narratives and intercultural engagement. Preliminary findings are expected to reveal that participation in the IVE Project enhances students’ intercultural awareness, language confidence, and global communication competence. Students are likely to demonstrate growth in understanding cultural diversity, empathy, and openness toward different perspectives. However, challenges such as language barriers, differing communication styles, and limited digital literacy may emerge during the exchange. To address these, students are expected to employ strategies such as peer collaboration, self-reflection, and the use of translation or digital tools to facilitate effective interaction. Overall, this research aims to contribute to the growing body of knowledge on virtual intercultural learning in EFL contexts, highlighting how digital exchange projects can foster meaningful global connections and support the development of 21st-century communication skills among language learners.

Over the past decades, English has become a means of global communication. People from different parts of the world and different linguacultural backgrounds use English to interact in intercultural spaces from private to educational to corporate. For many speaker-learners in the Asia-Pacific or Europe, however, using English is often burdened with feelings of inferiority, dissatisfaction, and anxiety. In ELT, possible solutions are in particular addressed by scholars and practitioners working in the fields of global Englishes language teaching (GELT) or English as a lingua franca (ELF) pedagogy. Key pedagogical concepts and approaches emphasize overcoming the mismatch between what is going on in the ELT classroom and how English is used in the real world. Publications and conference contributions focus on criticising native-speakerism and unequal Englishes, raising teachers’ and students’ awareness of ELF, decolonizing ELT practices, providing spaces for pedagogical translanguaging, or calling for a critical perspective on ELT to ensure social justice. All these discussions, whether in the Asia-Pacific or in Europe, have one thing in common: they pay only little attention to speaker-learners as responsible agents of their own communication and learning. In my talk, I will introduce a socio-psycholinguistic model of intercultural ELF communication that places speaker-learners at the center. The model integrates speaker-learners’ MY English repertoires, their communicative capability, and their own requirements of communicative and communal success as beacons of orientation. With reference to these dimensions and informed by case study observations, I will discuss how a pedagogical lingua franca immersion approach can be implemented through virtual exchange to enable LEARNERS of English to develop their own voice as emancipated SPEAKERS of English.