Learning by doing: Promoting language teacher competencies for networked teaching and learning

One of the opportunities to engage (future) language teachers in the use of ICT for interactive and collaborative language learning is by having them actively participate in ICT-enabled networked learning environments. This participation can take place at the level of task development, the level of task completion and the level of task evaluation. In the European NIFLAR project (Networked Interaction in Foreign Language Acquisition and Research) student teachers acquire competencies for online language teaching by participating in networked tasks for intercultural communicative competence, at these three levels: (1) they develop tasks for intercultural communicative competence by video-web communication and virtual worlds; (2) they participate in the tasks as native speaker interlocutors communicating with foreign language learners; and (3) they carry out action research on the task effects on communication, intercultural competence, language proficiency and added value of the ICT tools.