Looking back and ahead: reporting and reflecting on GAZUFES

Authors

Dr. Asuman Aşık
Gazi University in Ankara, Türkiye
Dr. Kyria Finardi
Federal University of Espirito Santo (UFES), Brazil

Synopsis

Virtual exchange (VE) between different English language teaching (ELT) contexts can afford opportunities to develop intercultural communicative competence (ICC) while also offering a window to reflect on different realities in terms of ELT. To this end, two ELT programmes integrated a VE project into their syllabi to provide pre-service teachers with opportunities to experience VE with reflection and development of ICC. The present account aims to describe and reflect on the GAZUFES (Gazi University and UFES University) VE project that involved pre-service teachers, tutors, and teacher trainers in a university in Brazil and another in Türkiye. GAZUFES was in turn part of the large-scale Erasmus+ KA3 Policy Experimentation European Virtual Innovation and Support Networks for Teachers (VALIANT) project. The exchange had some positive outcomes, but the sudden return to in-person classes at the end of the pandemic in the Brazilian university negatively affected the integration of GAZUFES into the Brazilian curriculum and the number of participants from Brazil. Despite the unequal number of students involved in the project, those who participated were very motivated and engaged in reflective and stimulating interactions.

Author Biographies

Dr. Asuman Aşık, Gazi University in Ankara, Türkiye

Dr Asuman Aşık is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Language Teaching at Gazi University in Ankara, Türkiye. Her main research topics include teacher training, technology and language teaching, teaching English to young learners and curriculum and materials development, corpora and language teaching, CALL and e-learning. She has worked as a researcher in two Erasmus+ projects called SBATEYL (A Web and School based Professional Development Project for Foreign Language Teachers of Young Learners) and ILTERG (International Language Teacher Education Research Group). She has published several research articles nationally and internationally in refereed journals, books and book chapters. Dr Aşık has been involved in several VE projects.

Dr. Kyria Finardi, Federal University of Espirito Santo (UFES), Brazil

Dr Kyria Finardi (https://www.kyriafinardi.com/) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages, Culture and Education (DLCE) and a researcher in the post-graduate program of Education (PPGE) of the Federal University of Espirito Santo (UFES), Brazil. She is a member of the Internationalization Board of UFES and created and coordinated the Language Division of the International Office of UFES between 2012-2020. Professor Finardi was the President of the Brazilian Association of Applied Linguistics (ALAB) 2018-2019, is the co-founder and co-coordinator of the Ibero-America Association of Applied Linguistics (AIALA) and the vice-president of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) where she convenes a research network on the role of VE together with Professor Marina Orsini-Jones: https://aila.info/research/list-of-rens/english-as-a-medium-of-education-multilingualism-and-the-sdgs-equity-diversity-and-inclusion/

Black title text on a white background, with a blue image of the countries.

Volume

Discussing Global Citizenship through Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) - Virtual Exchange (VE) in Language Learning and Teaching: Symposium Proceedings

Pages

20-26

Published

October 16, 2023

Series

Conference Proceedings
Copyright (c) 2023 Coventry Open Press

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

(Ed.). (2023). Looking back and ahead: reporting and reflecting on GAZUFES. In Discussing Global Citizenship through Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) - Virtual Exchange (VE) in Language Learning and Teaching: Symposium Proceedings (pp. 20-26). Coventry Open Press. https://monographs.coventry.ac.uk/index.php/covop/catalog/book/1/chapter/2