Words Out of Feelings: Global Competence and Emotional Intelligence in a Virtual Exchange Program

Introduction

Since the advent of digital technologies, a range of telecollaborative projects have emerged around the world, opening possibilities for students from different countries to work together to foster interculturality. Terms such as online intercultural exchange, virtual exchange or mobility, COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning), internet-mediated intercultural foreign language education, e-tandem and teletandem, have been used interchangeably to refer to activities involving the engagement of learners in online intercultural interactions and collaborative projects with partners from other cultural contexts or geographic locations (O’Dowd, 2018). Nonetheless, these intercultural exchanges may differ from each other in relation to the task design, type of interactions between students and instructors, and the use of different kinds of digital technologies.

The exploratory research presented in this chapter was conducted in the virtual exchange context of the teletandem network (http://www.teletandembrasil.org/), in which pairs of speakers of different languages work collaboratively through synchronous communication tools on the Internet to learn and practice each other's language (Telles & Vassallo, 2006; Telles, 2009; Leone & Telles, 2016). This study analyzes the role of global competence/global citizenship¹ and emotional intelligence (EI) in a virtual linguistic and cultural exchange in teletandem between Brazilian and U.S. university students. The EI construct (Goleman, 2001; Zeidner et al., 2009) is applied to a study with 92 participants (48 students from Brazil and 44 from the United States) in discussions about rainforests and the challenges faced by Indigenous populations.

This research focuses on the roles of EI in cross-cultural relationships and in the formation of global citizens, focusing on the following research question: What kind of emotions did the tasks raise and how were they connected to students' development of global competence? It is important to highlight that the observation of a range of feelings in the participants’ interactions emerged from another study conducted with the same group of students in which they engaged with the global issue of climate change and the protection of the world's forests (Viana da Silva & Salomão, 2022)².

Through data collected in individual and collaborative tasks, this study aimed to identify the feelings expressed by the students that could contribute to the articulation of their roles as global citizens. This work is based on the concept of global competence (Boix Mansilla & Jackson, 2011) and on the possible motivations for students to act in favor of a social cause, considering Goleman’s (2001) model of emotional competences.

Although there were some linguistic patterns in the language production during the tasks, this study does not evaluate the language acquisition of participants during the virtual exchange. The interactions were not recorded, neither by voice nor by video, and the written tasks are not enough to trace definitive conclusions about the language acquisition process. Therefore, the main focus of this research is on the global competence and the emotional intelligence aspects, which are analyzed through the data from the pre-tasks and the collaborative tasks. This is an exploratory study as it emerged from another set of data analysis mentioned previously (see Viana da Silva & Salomão, 2022). As such, it points to future studies to be conducted on global competence and EI. The following sections provide some of the theoretical background: (1) the teletandem context, (2) the framework of global competence, and (3) the construct of emotional intelligence.