Telecollaboration in a secondary school context: Negotiation of meaning in English as a lingua franca/Spanish tandem interactions

In this article we present our research into the negotiation of meaning in two interactions involving the same 16-year old Spanish and German students based in schools in Spain and German respectively. The interactions involved two language constellations, that is, English as a lingua franca and a Spanish tandem. Our research was carried out within the Telecollaboration for Intercultural Language Acquisition project (TILA). Our qualitative analysis of the interactions demonstrates that telecollaboration offers many opportunities for comprehension and learning. We have not found conclusive evidence to support the hypothesis that negotiation of meaning is very different in the two types of language constellation.