The second online academic seminar of the Fall Semester of 2021-2022 will be given by Assoc. Prof. Müge Satar. The title of her talk is "Is virtual exchange (online intercultural exchange) the new normal for internationalisation in higher education?: Opportunities and challenges." The seminar will be held in English.

Online intercultural (virtual) exchange can offer higher-education students internationalisation at home opportunities through multicultural, multilingual, and multimodal experiences. In principle, all students can engage in international learning via virtual exchange regardless of whether they can take part in physical mobility. In this presentation, I will start with this idea and introduce a curriculum-embedded multimodal virtual exchange model for future language teachers in the UK. Drawing on data generated through synchronous and asynchronous multimodal interactions (using Padlet posts, Google slides, and Zoom), I will explore participants' multimodal self-representations using social semiotics. I will demonstrate the variety in participants' semiotic skills and question the extent to which virtual exchange can cater for equality, diversity, and inclusion.

Short bio:

Dr. Satar is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Newcastle University, UK. She is interested in communicative and pedagogical aspects of multimodal interaction for online language learning and teaching, focusing on social presence, meaning-making, instruction-giving, and translanguaging. Dr. Satar is the co-editor of the Journal of Virtual Exchange and has publications in leading journals in the field such as Language Learning and Technology, ReCALL, and System. She is the Principal Investigator (coordinator) of the ENACT project co-funded by the European Union. Dr. Satar joined the Applied Linguistics and Communication team at Newcastle University in December 2016. Prior to that, she worked as a Lecturer at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul teaching academic English and TESOL courses. She has also taught English as a foreign language and Turkish as a foreign language at both secondary school level and in adult education in Turkey and in the UK, at King's College, London. Her research interests include Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), in particular Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) and online language learning and teaching.

Please click here to register for the seminar.