ABSTRACT
Telecollaboration has been designed, explored, and theorized as a new communication tool in the field of language teaching and teacher education and it affords language learners and teachers to interact with people from other cultures and engage with cultural otherness (Guth & Helm, 2010; O’Dowd & Lewis, 2016). In this chapter, we investigate teacher candidates translingual practices in a semester-long telecollaboration project between three teacher education classes offered at universities in France, Turkey, and the United States. Participating in this project, 117 teacher candidates from three classes (a) wrote pre-project expectations and post-project reflections essays; (b) asynchronously discussed the topics of immigration, gender, religion, ethnicity, and education within groups of six in light of assigned readings and videos; and (c) had two video-conference interviews. Reporting on the data from three groups, this chapter addresses the following research questions: How do teacher candidates negotiate and construct cultural identities in online translingual contact zones? How do they use translingual negotiation strategies as they negotiate and construct these identities? The findings suggest the teacher candidates employed: (a) envoicing strategies as they narrated their cultural identities; (b) recontextualization strategies in an effort to create multicultural framing and create a collaborative environment; (c) interactional strategies through clarification requests when communication broke down; and (d) entextualization strategies in which they anticipated gaps and preemptively explained cultural and procedural differences across their respective contexts. These findings implicate that telecollaborative projects should be complemented with an explicit language focus on the ways in which participants’ use of translingual negotiation strategies influence their intercultural and professional learning experiences in such virtual contact zones.
