The role of telecollaboration as a primer in EFL team teaching exchanges

This paper reports on results from a telecollaborative project in English language teacher education involving universities in southern Germany and Sweden. Student teachers were tasked with preparing for a team-teaching exchange in a Swedish primary / lower secondary school using Zoom as a telecollaborative platform in advance of the physical exchange. The paper focuses on the role of telecollaboration in fostering and developing notions of intercultural competence as defined by UNESCO (2013) and digital literacy in the EFL classroom based on Dudley, Hockly and Pegrum (2022), at primary and lower secondary levels. Both the German and Swedish teachers were in the second and third terms respectively of a state-sector teacher training degree programme. 12 student teachers from Germany (primary and lower secondary) and 12 Swedish secondary teachers met initially in Zoom to acquaint themselves with each other and discuss similarities and differences in English teaching intheir respective school systems prior to the physical exchange in Sweden. Results from a Google forms questionnaire distributed at various points before, during and after the exchange point towards the value of telecollaboration in ‘priming’ student teachers with the requisite intercultural perspectives in order to derive maximal benefit from international teaching exchanges.