“Let’s Meet Wherever You Are @ Home”: How Utopian Is It to Create a Global Virtual Collaborative Learning Environment for Foreign-Language Students?

Abstract

: Acquiring a target language is painfully slow. To really learn a foreign language, it is often agreed that immersion programs are far better than taking a course within the four walls of a classroom. Yet this is not an option that everyone can enjoy. The goal of this article is to encourage colleagues to create with me an interdisciplinary platform offering a virtual collaborative learning environment based on social constructivist approaches, in order to facilitate interaction and co-operation among students and instructors on a global scale. Furthermore, I wish to interrogate the extent to which such a project constitutes a utopian linguistic and cultural translation. The platform would have the objective of facilitating virtual encounters that could be beneficial for everyone: are we creating a virtual “ non-place ” (utopia) that is actually a new form of place? This virtual collaborative environment could also be interdisciplinary and intercultural. Because of its inherent multicultural interactions, finally, a global virtual environment could make learners identify areas of agreement and disagreement in order to seek con-sensus and cross-cultural understanding as both sets of participants are “ translated ” into a virtual topos.