Exploring the fluid online identities of language teachers and adolescent language learners

Due to demographic changes, there is a growing number of adolescent students who learn in classrooms in which their teacher and peers come from cultural and linguistic backgrounds that are different from theirs. In these diverse classrooms, teachers need to be able to facilitate language learning spaces that are welcoming for all children, regardless of their backgrounds. Considering this need, the purpose of this study is to examine how 11 teachers, acting as language mentors of 11 high school English learners, demonstrated intercultural communication and cultural responsiveness during their participation in a 10-week telecollaboration project. To this end, online interactions and the teacher mentors’ weekly reflection journals were analyzed. From these analyses, three highly productive relationships were selected and their interactions were analyzed to better understand teachers’ approaches to intercultural communication and cultural responsiveness and the role that the identities of teachers and students displayed in both processes. The study findings show that teachers who displayed an online identity as friends or as joint learners offered student mentees the opportunity to lead the conversation, to be recognized as they wanted to be recognized online, and to participate in learning tasks that reflected and engaged them. This study highlights the different needs of adolescent English learners, the complexity of their identities, and the importance of English teachers’ dispositions to be humble and open to learn about both.