Abstract:

In recent decades, telecollaboration has become more frequent in different teaching contexts, with regular publication of studies on this type of practice (Dooly & O'Dowd, 2018). Based on the interaction, mediated by digital communication tools, between students from different geographical, cultural and/or linguistic contexts, telecollaboration favors sharing, dialogue and debate, contributing to the consolidation of linguistic, cultural and digital competences and, therefore, being a pedagogical option increasingly valued in the context of foreign language teaching-learning (Dooly, 2017; Schaefer & Heemann, 2021). It is common for these telecollaboration experiences to be associated with the implementation of Project/Problem-based learning, which contributes to the students' greater involvement and commitment and to the strengthening of tranversal skills (Kessler, 2018). On the other hand, these are teaching-learning situations based on the regular use of multiple technological solutions (Deacon, Parkin, & Schneider, 2017).

This paper describes a collaborative learning experience developed (from October 2020 to January 2021) between two French for Specific Purposes classes (25 students), from two undergraduate courses taught in Portuguese higher education institutions. This project, which took place in the first semester of 2020/2021, aimed, above all, to interact with FOS students from different scientific areas (Office Management and Business Communication (OMBC) and Tourism and Culture Management (TCM)), thus favouring interdisciplinarity.

Considering the objectives and programmatic contents of the curricular units involved, students were asked, in mixed groups, to prepare an oral presentation and the respective projection support. To do so, they should present a Portuguese company and a French partner company and prepare the business visit of the latter to the facilities of the former. The OBMC students characterized the selected companies. Both classes defined the program of the business visit: OMBC students defined and presented the work program and TCM students were responsible for the touristic-cultural program and for the characterization of the touristic points of interest.

This article, following the authors' previous work, describes, based on data collected through a questionnaire applied to participants in January 2021, their perceptions about the technical and soft skills developed and presents some tools that students used to perform the work. The analysed data shows that the technical skills most developed by the students are the "use of technical terminology" and "writing short texts related to the areas of study". The transversal competencies that were mentioned by the respondents as being the most developed were "tolerance", "resilience" and "autonomy". The technological solutions that students preferred to communicate and share information were WhatsApp, Zoom and MSTeams. Web pages of companies, airlines and accommodation/restaurant service providers were the most used sources of information by the students. For French text validation, students refer to Linguee and GoogleTranslator as the most relevant.

Keywords:

Collaborative learning, French for Specific Purposes, Digital Competences.