Explore the vast range of titles available.

This paper reports on crossing borders virtually via an e-Tandem scheme and presents the findings of a study, in which students of English from an Austrian university were paired with students of German from the UK and the USA. Drawing on data from 19 in-depth interviews, the study aims to identify links between e-Tandem language learning and foreign language enjoyment (FLE) (Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2014, 2016). A category-based qualitative text analysis (Kuckartz, 2014) revealed that a majority of the interviewees felt e-Tandem language learning contributed to their FLE. Furthermore, a range of reasons underlying students’ perceived enjoyment of learning a language in Tandem emerged: having authentic conversations in the target language with L1 (first language) users (Dewaele, 2018), perceiving each other as cultural mediators and a difference from language classroom contexts on the level of power relations, which made students feel more at ease. Helping each other, receiving one-on-one feedback and perceiving improvement in their linguistic mastery were furthermore mentioned as factors they felt boosted their enjoyment and so was developing friendships with L1 users. According to the interviewees, these aspects specifically increased their interest and enjoyment in using and learning the language and their eudaimonic happiness. The findings demonstrate that e-Tandem language learning can be a resource to enhance perceived enjoyment in foreign language learners at tertiary level and they illustrate that social and private components of FLE seem to be interlinked.

Playing video games engages children and youth and offers a potential for learning in general and situated language learning in particular. The aim of this paper is to explore the situated conditions and affordances for facilitating in-game interaction, as well as to discuss the language learning potential and educational implications of these conditions. In this paper, this is discussed through two datasets: a) a pre-study, a survey among students in grades 4–7 (n = 65), as well as b) playtests with child volunteers (n = 6), conducted in pairs in a laboratory setting. The results are discussed in relation to interactional practices, what game genres and mechanics are relevant to tandem language learning and the implications that in-game competence might have on such learning.

We present findings of a project that investigated the potential of an online tandem program to enhance the foreign language learning of two groups of school-aged beginner learners, one learning English in Colombia and the other learning Spanish in New Zealand. We assessed the impact of the project on students’ learning with a free writing activity done as pretest and posttest and used a semi-structured interview to explore their attitudes towards language learning and their perceived development of their native language. Data analysis indicated statistically significant gains in foreign language writing and positive attitudinal changes toward foreign and native language learning.

The article attempts to approach stereotypes from both the theoretical and empirical perspectives. First, it endeavours to explain the term “stereotype”, looks into its characteristics and functions and then presents selected aspects of the Polish-German tandem project devoted to stereotypical thinking.

This paper presents the results of a study that examined learner scaffolding in e-mail tandem exchanges between secondary ESL and FSL students. A group of French-speaking ESL students in a secondary school in Quebec communicated by e-mail with a group of English-speaking FSL students in a secondary school in Ontario. This study was carried out following the principles of online tandem learning (Brammerts, 1996; Little et al., 1999), a form of computer-mediated communication in which two native speakers of different languages communicate with one another for the purpose of learning the other’s native language. In this type of exchange, students are asked to use the L1 and L2 in equal proportion and to correct each other’s mistakes. Drawing on a sociocultural perspective (Lantolf, 2000), this study sought to answer the following question: What strategies are employed by secondary ESL and FSL students to provide scaffolding to their e-mail tandem partners? E-mails were coded using a taxonomy adapted from Villamil and Guerrero’s (1996) taxonomy of “substrategies for providing scaffolding”. Findings showed that both ESL and FSL students provided scaffolding to one another by resorting to a variety of strategies.

Virtual exchange is a well-known pedagogical approach in foreign language (FL) education which involves engaging classes in online intercultural collaboration projects with international partners as an integrated part of their educational programmes. This paper begins by reviewing e-tandem and telecollaborative approaches to virtual exchange which are currently being used extensively in FL education and presents two case studies which illustrate the common learning outcomes and limitations of such approaches. I then propose an alternative model of virtual exchange which maintains many of the key characteristics of earlier approaches but which incorporates the principles of global citizenship education and which moves away from bilingual–bicultural approaches. I conclude by outlining the main characteristics of this model and presenting some examples of how this approach could be put into practice.

Language teachers are often masters of using the physical space in their language classrooms, rearranging furniture, groups, and artifacts to facilitate meaningful encounters with and among learners. Indeed, during the COVID‐19 crisis, many language teachers are sharing that these human encounters—reading learners' needs through body language, moving in and out of conversations, or engaging each other face‐to‐face—are the biggest felt loss in their emergent digital language classrooms. Yet, the new digital realities do not necessarily mean that teachers must sacrifice real collaboration among their learners. Digital tools were often designed to explicitly facilitate multimodal collaboration, and, with a wider variety of humans and human stories than may be found within the four walls of the typical classroom. This article aims to help language teachers facilitate more diverse interactions in the target language through the use of tools, spaces, and strategies that can be easily incorporated into our digital classrooms. We describe three categories of such activities (mobile‐assisted learning, tandem learning, and service‐learning) and explain how these can be most effectively incorporated into an online language class. The Challenge Videoconferencing tools such as Zoom are being widely used as an immediate response to remote language teaching needs. However, these tools are rarely ideal as a replacement for the classroom's physically embodied engagement. What alternatives exist for educators facilitating students' language growth and human collaboration?

This paper presents the findings of a six-week telecollaborative project between sixteen American students enrolled in a second-semester German class at an American university and sixteen German students enrolled in an advanced English course at a high school in Germany. Students discussed various cultural topics with their partner in two e-mails per week. The study strove to reveal the American college students' understanding of their own and of German culture, their interest in cultural learning, and possible changes therein through telecollaboration. Moreover, the study aimed at exploring if intercultural competence can be exhibited, and thus assessed, through an e-mail exchange. For that purpose, Byram's model of intercultural competence (1997) was used for the data analysis. In addition, pre- and post-surveys were administered to help answer one of the research questions. The results of the study revealed that students' interest in cultural learning did not change significantly. Additionally, the results showed that the majority of Byram's objectives can be demonstrated in an e-mail exchange.

Generating and analyzing overlapping peptides through multienzymatic digestion is an efficient procedure for de novo protein using from bottom-up mass spectrometry (MS). Despite improved instrumentation and software, de novo MS data analysis remains challenging. In recent years, deep learning models have represented a performance breakthrough. Incorporating that technology into de novo protein sequencing workflows require machine-learning models capable of handling highly diverse MS data. In this study, we analyzed the requirements for assembling such generalizable deep learning models by systemcally varying the composition and size of the training set. We assessed the generated models’ performances using two test sets composed of peptides originating from the multienzyme digestion of samples from various species. The peptide recall values on the test sets showed that the deep learning models generated from a collection of highly N- and C-termini diverse peptides generalized 76% more over the termini-restricted ones. Moreover, expanding the training set’s size by adding peptides from the multienzymatic digestion with five proteases of several species samples led to a 2–3 fold generalizability gain. Furthermore, we tested the applicability of these multienzyme deep learning (MEM) models by fully de novo sequencing the heavy and light monomeric chains of five commercial antibodies (mAbs). MEMs extracted over 10000 matching and overlapped peptides across six different proteases mAb samples, achieving a 100% sequence coverage for 8 of the ten polypeptide chains. We foretell that the MEMs’ proven improvements to de novo analysis will positively impact several applications, such as analyzing samples of high complexity, unknown nature, or the peptidomics field.

This study examined whether 30 learners of Japanese in the United States who engaged in a semester-long video-based eTandem course made gains in global language comprehensibility, that is, ease of understanding, and what linguistic correlates contributed to these gains. Speech excerpts from Week 2 and 8 of tandem interactions were retrieved and later assessed subjectively and objectively for global comprehensibility and its linguistic correlates (lexical appropriateness, lexical richness, speech rate, and morphological accuracy) in a pre/posttest sample design. The results revealed that, although the group made significant gains in vocabulary and some gains in grammar, improvement in overall comprehensibility was subject to considerable individual variability. According to a follow-up cluster analysis and discriminant analysis, increase in speech rate was the strongest predictor of those individuals who improved comprehensibility. The findings suggest that telecollaborative interaction may promote the development of vocabulary and, to some extent, grammar, but that significant gains in comprehensibility come mostly from the fluency trait of speech rate and may require longer interactional intervention. The findings have implications for the design of telecollaboration that supports second language learning. (Verlag).