In the context of Virtual Exchange (VE) it is often assumed that participants will be naturally prepared to interact online successfully with their international partners. However, there is ample evidence in the literature to suggest that VE participants are usually unaware of effective communicative strategies in synchronous and asynchronous online communicative contexts. Through action research, this article investigates how teachers can provide scaffolding for both these communicative modalities in online intercultural environments. It reports on a qualitative content analysis of conversational and self-reported data from a corpus of three VEs that were collected and triangulated in order to identify when, in what areas, and in what ways students could benefit from pedagogical mentoring. The article then presents key mentoring stages and strategies that were identified and provides insight into the type of scaffolding that VE teachers can provide their students to help them achieve successful (a)synchronous online intercultural interaction.

What is it? Virtual exchange is an umbrella term used to refer to the engagement of groups of learners in online language and intercultural interaction and collaboration with partners from other cultural contexts or geographical locations as an integrated part of course work, and under the guidance of educators and/or expert facilitators (O’Dowd, 2018).

This thesis was written and is framed in a context of educational change and global challenge marked by historic events such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the conflict in Ukraine and the environmental crisis among others. As asserted in the 2022 UN's annual 'Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Report': "Today, we stand on the precipice of a critical moment. Either we fail to deliver on our commitments to support the world's most vulnerable or together we turbo-charge our efforts to rescue the SDGs and deliver meaningful progress for people and the planet by 2030" (UN, 2022, p. 4). For this reason, the pedagogical activities proposed here take on special relevance due to their suitability for the development of intercultural (Byram, 2008), global (OECD, 2018), and ecological (Dobson, 2000 citizenship competences that favour sustainable and peaceful coexistence. As stated by the OECD (2018): "Developing a global and intercultural outlook is a process -a lifelong process-that education can shape" (p.5). It is following this idea of using education as a shaping power for preparing students to seize the opportunities and face the challenges that the present context poses that this doctoral thesis is born.