Telecollaborative Projects for Teaching English for Professional and Academic Purposes

Abstract

Implementing the project-based approach in telecollaborative environments seems to be helpful in the foreign language classroom. This research aims to analyze the perception of students on the need to communicate internationally following the classification of the most usual communicative situations proposed by Lehman and DuFrene (2013). To this purpose, an experiment was implemented among students from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) and Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (KPI) during the spring term in the schoolyear 2020/21. Students from both universities worked virtually in mixed international teams on their projects to create blogs on the topic 'Sustainable development today’. Our results showed that students from both institutions enhanced their confidence in communicating in professional and academic contexts during the completion of this project. Participants improved their communicative competence in international online environments, and this virtual exhange experience helped them develop their digital and intercultural skills, among others. The value of this research is the implementation of a telecollaborative project work in the foreign language classroom aiming at helping students communicate in a global context about technical issues, such as sustainability.