Development of language proficiency, intercultural competence and critical digital literacy across the disciplines: Results from the EU-funded project EVOLVE

While the affordances of Virtual Exchange (aka Telecollaboration) for the development of language proficiency, intercultural competence and (critical) digital literacy are relatively well attested for learners in language disciplines and language teacher education, there is little evidence to date for the advancement of such competencies outside these areas in other academic disciplines. Yet, under the growing influence of internationalization and globalization, foreign language proficiency, intercultural competence and critical digital literacy are among the most sought-after attributes with learners across disciplines at all levels of education. In the period from autumn 2018 to spring 2020, the EU-funded project EVOLVE, with the aim to mainstream Virtual Exchange across Higher Education disciplines in Europe and beyond (http://www.evolve-erasmus.eu), has conducted research on the development of the aforesaid competencies with learners from various HE disciplines in multiple countries. The data, consisting of pre and post tests, user portfolios and interviews, complemented in some cases with student artefacts (audio and video recordings, posts to online media), were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively through triangulation of the data from these various sources. The first quantitative results from the pilot phase show significant gains in some competencies (language skills and critical digital literacy) while no significant effect is discernible in others (intercultural competence). Further quantitative and qualitative analysis of the initial data is still in progress at this time of writing. During the conference, we will be presenting the full results of our project which closes in July 2020. In this presentation, we will not only show to which extent development of language proficiency, intercultural competence and critical digital literacy across disciplines is reflected in our data, but also discuss ways in which VE practitioners and researchers can contribute to expanding our data collection further and collaborate with our research team in the immediate future.