Academic English language teachers’ roles in a virtual and hybrid exchange project

This article offers an analysis of the roles and their respective knowledge types, and competences, which characterize a higher educational English language teacher working in a virtual and hybrid exchange project – CLAVIER. The project in question is a language and intercultural exchange which connects three core partners – Universite Clermont Auvergne (France), Warwick University (UK) and Jagiellonian University (Poland). This study explores the collaboration tasks completed by the French and Polish partners over a period of six years between 2014 and 2020. Set against the backdrop of the challenges faced by contemporary education such as the rapidly progressing digital revolution, the pivoting to online learning caused by global challenges of the recent times, and the pressure on internationalization of higher education, this autoethnographic analysis of the project activities reveals new functions and requirements to academic teachers of English from the point of view of their personal cultural and intercultural experience. One of the conclusions of this study is that the English language teaching profession is moving away from the role in which teachers acted as mere language instructors or language input providers. Instead, contemporary and future language teachers are likely to be required to focus more on those tasks which facilitate meaningful communication, to be concerned with setting up and managing educational activities in offline and online spaces and will need to encourage reflection on local and global community involvement. The article separates concepts of virtual exchange as referring to the engagement of groups of learners in online intercultural interactions and collaboration projects with partners from other cultural contexts or geographical locations as an integrated part of their educational programmes, and hybrid exchange, which adds to virtual exchange incorporation of offline interactions and physical mobility of students. Thus this research contributes to the solution of the problem of changing the viewpoint to second language teacher’s knowledge and competences by suggesting an alternative, more comprehensive framework which takes into account what is likely to become an increasingly common educational reality – virtual and hybrid teaching.