Integration of Telecollaboration in the Language Teacher Education Curriculum: Critical Insights from Teacher Educators from Türkiye, Brazil, and the UK

Virtual Exchange (VE) has been acknowledged as a postmodern approach to second language teacher education and a transformative - albeit challenging - learning experience that can help with acquiring new competences and rethinking language teachers’ beliefs through a local and global lens. As VE has a long history, O’Dowd (2014) states that its origin can be traced back to pre-Internet exchanges set up by Freinet in France in the 1920s and by Lodi in Italy in the 1960s (2014, p. 132). At the heart of a VE, both then and now, was/is a drive towards cooperative communication (Sadler & Dooly, 2022, p. 245) and co-construction of knowledge. VE is an ideal approach to foreign language teaching and learning as it adheres to the core principles inherent to both communicative competence and intercultural communicative competence (O’Dowd & Dooly, 2020) while providing opportunities to develop transversal and professional competences (Orsini-Jones & Lee, 2018). The increased use of VE for teacher education, especially after the pandemic (e.g. Finardi & Guimarães, 2020) that has somewhat normalized online and remote learning, has opened up more dynamic and interactive ways to integrate telecollaboration in ELT curricula and practice. The integration of VE in English language teacher education is also giving the opportunity to explore interesting decolonised horizons in the ELT field. Research on VE suggests that different modes of integration of VE into higher education exist e.g.: (a) classroom independent: (b) classroom integrated (c) institutional integrated (Lewis & O’Dowd, 2016). This chapter aims to explore the integration of VE in the teacher education curricula in three different Higher Education contexts: Turkey, Brazil, and the UK. The analysis of the integration of VE in these ELT contexts will address and discuss modes of integration, tasks and technologies, institutional support, challenges, and solutions, the effect of contextual factors, the pedagogical mentoring issues encountered, educators’ motivation and institutional support for the implementation of the VE projects discussed here and share the lessons from them.