Preparing Students for Successful Online Intercultural Communication and Collaboration in Virtual Exchange

In the context of Virtual Exchange (VE) it is often assumed that participants will be naturally prepared to interact online successfully with their international partners. However, there ample evidence in literature suggest VE are usually unaware effective communicative strategies synchronous and asynchronous contexts. Through action research, this article investigates how teachers can provide scaffolding for both these modalities intercultural environments. It reports on a qualitative content analysis conversational self-reported data from corpus three VEs were collected triangulated order identify when, what areas, ways students could benefit pedagogical mentoring. The then presents key mentoring stages identified provides insight into type help them achieve successful (a)synchronous interaction.