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When virtual exchange projects pair up L1 English speakers and ELF speakers, the first can be implicitly positioned as language experts, the second as learners. But ELF speakers are often more experienced in negotiating spoken and written communication. Are speakers of native English equally prepared to accommodate ELF speakers? This consideration inspired a project that connected students in the US with students in Italy. These students recorded spoken interactions that we analyzed to explore how the students used specific communication strategies (CS). Results show that ELF speakers efficiently used CSs, especially self-rephrasing, a key self-repair strategy based on pre-empting problems of understanding in ELF. Compared to L1 English speakers, ELF speakers proved to be more resourceful and more adept at transforming spoken communication into an act of mediation. Training in ELF did help the L1 English speakers adjust their speech, but these students need more extensive and systematic training to develop their communication skills in ELF interactions.

The importance of creating projects that allow students enrolled in American universities to collaborate with students enrolled in foreign institutions cannot be overemphasized. However, for these projects to be effective in terms of learning outcomes, it is important that instructors identify the factors that either prevent or prompt fruitful collaboration across cultural boundaries. The power of cultural boundaries demands that research on intercultural communication conceptualize and measure cultural difference. Additionally, research on intercultural communication has been irrevocably altered by the pace of communication technology change that allows for rapid and rich cross-cultural communication across great distances. An understanding of culture that takes into consideration how the variety of communication technologies that Arjun Appadurai calls “technoscapes” (Appadurai, 1996) allow faster and denser interaction across all sorts of boundaries can help researchers ask questions that are relevant.

“Development” is an insidious word in that it often provides moral justification for aggressive neoliberal policies. When imposed from above and orchestrated by financial and corporate elites with no understanding of the real needs of ‘undeveloped’ communities, development sanctions a covert form of imperialism that relies on the world accepting the credo of free trade in primis, but also American forms of democracy, law, and governance. With the aim of questioning neoliberal orthodoxies and challenging colonial arguments (accepted as commonsense) about saving the “natives” from their backwardness, a group of scholars have joined forces in the anthology reviewed here to unravel the most typical discursive practices and the historical foundations of the rhetoric of development.

International audience; Partnerships involving language projects have been common, but most have paired just two nations at a time (Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999; Flammia, 2005, 2012; Herrington, 2005, 2008; Humbley et al., 2005; Stärke-Meyerring & Andrews, 2006; Mousten et al., 2010). That changed in 2010, when universities in five nations, long involved in the Trans-Atlantic Project (TAP) began a far more complex international learning-by-doing project (Maylath et al., 2013). By 2012, universities in two more nations were added. In forming their students into cross-cultural virtual teams (CCVTs), instructors asked, how can students best learn experientially to manage complex international/interlingual technical documentation projects? During multilateral collaborations, two projects took place simultaneously: a translation-editing project and a writing-usability testing- translation project. The undertakings’ complexity was central in the students’ learning, thereby preparing students for the international, multilingual, multicultural environments in which students can be expected to operate after they graduate. Further, the projects succeeded in increasing trans-cultural and language awareness among students with little in extra funding.