ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how the language teachers in an online mentoring exchange project developed their competence in making strategic use of the affordances of different technological tools to create pedagogical tasks and to sustain interpersonal interactions with their adolescent mentees. It discusses how the multimodal affordances of these tools fostered unique online communication spaces in which mentors and mentees experienced the presence of 'the other' with different degrees of closeness. The notion of affordances helps researchers examine a range of symbolic resources, interactional contexts, and modes of communication that are increasingly available in Internet-based interactions. Turning to task design, tasks in online language exchanges have been discussed in a number of ways. Mentors learned about the design and delivery of instruction for English as Second Language students in class and used the online mentoring as an authentic context for building language learning tasks that aligned tool properties with different pedagogical strategies.
