Telecollaborative Projects for Teaching English for Professional and Academic Purposes

Implementing the project-based approach in telecollaborative environments seems to be helpful in the foreign language classroom. This research aims to analyze the perception of students on the need to communicate internationally and follows the classification of the most usual communicative situations proposed by Lehman and DuFrene (2013). For this purpose, an experiment was conducted with students from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) and Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (KPI) during the spring term in the school year 2020/21. Students from both universities worked virtually in mixed international teams on projects to create blogs on the topic 'Sustainable development today'. Our results showed that students from both institutions increased their confidence in communicating in professional and academic contexts through the completion of this project. Participants improved their communicative competence in international online environments, and this virtual exchange experience helped them develop their digital and intercultural skills, among others. The value of this research is the implementation of telecollaborative project work in the foreign language classroom in order to help students communicate in a global context about technical issues, such as sustainability.