Fostering language teachers’ intercultural awareness towards linguistic diversity and inclusion in education through COIL

Dr Abraham Cerveró Carrascosa is a lecturer in TEFL and Applied Linguistics and coordinator of the IMDAE research group at Florida Universitària in València, Spain. He completed his International PhD in Language and Literature Teaching (University of València) in 2022. He was a secondary school teacher for more than ten years, during that time he served as head of the Languages Department and became involved in different Erasmus and Comenius projects. Since 2017, his research interests have focused on active methods in Higher Education and, particularly, virtual exchanges (VEs) as he has engaged in several of them with universities across Europe, America and Asia. He has contributed to numerous international conferences and has published extensively on the impact VEs and MOOCs on pre-service English teacher education. He received the BESST Award at the EARLI SIG writing 2018 conference.

Ms Zoe Gazeley is the Course Director for BA English and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at Coventry University. She has taught various forms of English as a Foreign Language including Business English, English for Young Learners, English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and ESOL for a number of years, in Mexico City, Moscow, Japan, China and Saudi Arabia as well as at UK colleges and universities. Zoe is also a Cambridge accredited CELTA trainer and teaches on the TEFL modules at both UG and PG level and a PhD candidate at Coventry University, where she is exploring the need for an ESAP (English for Specific Academic Purposes) pedagogy and materials development for International Fashion students. Alongside this she has been working on a number of COIL projects including the Erasmus+ funded iKudu project between universities in Europe and South Africa. Her research on COIL projects began back in 2012 when she worked on the MexCo project as part of her MA dissertation which explored intercultural Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) in language exchanges. She has also been a recipient of the Digital Fluency and Innovation award at the Coventry University Excellence awards for her work on the British Council SPARK project in Hong Kong.