Rio de Janeiro to Claremont: Promoting Intercultural Competence Through Student-driven Online Intercultural Exchanges

This article describes the process by which the authors created a Virtual Learning Community for cultural and linguistic exchange between college students of Portuguese in the United States and undergraduate and graduate students of English in Brazil. In addition to describing the way the so-called tandem model for telecollaboration was adapted to students' academic contexts and motivations, the article addresses the process, challenges, and some of the outcomes of the project's pilot using qualitative data collected before, during, and after the program. A possibility raised by this pilot is that as cultural ambassadors of the United States assisting in the teaching of English as a foreign language in sixty-nine countries, Fulbright English teaching assistants are potential partners for similar exchanges involving both commonly and less commonly taught languages in the United States.