Affordances of a Chinese–Brazilian telecollaboration for English-as-a-foreign-language learners: Voices from the Global South

Abstract

As a well-recognized pedagogical approach, telecollaboration has gained worldwide popularity in language education, especially in North American and European countries. Although studies on telecollaboration have shown the great potential of this approach for developing students’ multiple and transversal abilities, evidence of communication failure and other challenges involved in telecollaboration projects with partners from Global South contexts remains underexplored. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring the multiple affordances of a Chinese–Brazilian telecollaboration and how they are perceived by English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners in a Chinese university who participated in an 8-week project with their Brazilian counterparts. Drawing on reflections, interaction logs, and teacher–student communication, this study identifies four categories of affordances in the sociocultural, linguistic, affective, and technical dimensions and shows that learners perceive them through dichotomous lenses: encouragement versus frustration, opportunities versus obstacles, and learning versus lingering. In addition, the findings illustrate how authentic intercultural interaction can build confidence, expand cultural awareness, and foster learner agency, while also generating anxiety, surface-level participation, and limited linguistic scaffolding. These insights highlight the need for intentional pedagogical design to balance affordances and mitigate constraints in English-as-a-lingua-franca telecollaboration.