Community building and translingual practice in an international eGroups telecollaboration

This article reports on an international eGroups telecollaboration involving two groups of tertiary learners in universities located in Germany and New Zealand. Their target languages English and German played a "joint curricular role" (García, 2009) in their collaborative inquiry into contemporary global issues. Data from three selected synchronous interactions were examined for this study to understand how one group of learners developed and sustained cohesive relations as part of building a learner community. The exploratory research seeks to understand how these learners built a sense of community to sustain their interactions and negotiation of meaning and ways in which they utilized their linguistic repertoires to do so