Previous studies have pointed out the need to consider carefully how digital tools are presented in schools to ensure their use meets authentic needs for today's knowledge society. This implies that learning tasks should be planned so students' practice with technological and digital resources such as videoconferencing and text chats resembles potential communicative situations they may face outside the classroom. Along these lines, this article analyses a 44-minute Skype videoconferencing session involving two small groups of middle school students who are studying English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The data come from a wider-scale telecollaborative project between two classes, one in Sweden and another in Spain, in which the students had to collaborate on a public awareness raising initiative regarding the Syrian refugee crisis. Applying a multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA) approach, the study aims to 'unpack' the complexity of the multiple resources used by the participants during the interaction. In particular, the article focuses on how the learners use multiple resources to creatively mediate their communication and to resolve problems that emerge during their interaction in the foreign language. The findings of the analysis can help identify key foci for task design in similar online foreign language learning settings.

The present research is devoted to the concept ‘patria’ (homeland) analysis in the Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias’s novel El señor presidente (Mister President). The verbalizations of the studied concept in the novel are counted and their linguistic context is analysed. The totalitarian society described by the writer is not fully fictional. The dictatorship of Estrada Cabrera, though unnamed in the novel, is depicted. The linguistic realization of the studied concept is based on two groups of antithesis. The perception of homeland by real patriots, who are now considered the traitors of their homeland, and that of the people, who conform to the current conditions, but it is obvious that they are the ones who are ready to betray. The second antithesis is the fear of the president and calling the president the honoured citizen, the father and the defender of the homeland. The analysis of the linguistic means used to verbalize the concept ‘homeland’ in the studied novel shows that the said concept can be used by a totalitarian society as a tool of manipulation. Further analysis of the concept ‘homeland’ in other literary works by the authors writing in Spanish and belonging to different Hispanic countries will reveal the linguistic differences of the national variants of Spanish.

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