Intercultural Telecollaboration between Students categorised ‘Allophone’: Engaging with Otherness through Shared Sameness

In this presentation, we’ll share insights from a telecollaboration project conducted during the 2024–2025 school year. It involved two classes of newly arrived students: a Teaching Unit for Newly Arrived Allophone Students (UPE2A) in the Paris region (France), and a Reception and Schooling System for Allophone and Assimilated Students (DASPA) in Liège (Belgium).
Our focus on learners categorised ‘allophone’ stems from our experience working with diverse groups of individuals learning the language of their host country—such as adult migrants and refugee students. These learners are often viewed as “uneducated” or “unskilled” in terms of language proficiency, general knowledge, and academic culture, and are thus frequently marginalized by mainstream teachers and students.
Through this telecollaboration, we sought to explore the concepts of the Other and the Same as two aspects of identity. The students involved—non-native French speakers—mostly came from the same countries, were of similar age, and were educated in French in two different Francophone contexts.
In our presentation, we will first outline the theoretical framework that informed the project, including critical literacies (Freire, 1970), digital literacy (Caw et al., 2021), and work on plurilingualism (Castellotti, 2010, 2017) and interculturality (Abdallah-Pretceille, 1999). We will then detail the various stages of the project, including the preparatory work completed by students prior to the telecollaboration sessions.
The study corpus includes students’ pre-telecollaboration materials, interviews with learners, the teachers, and recordings of the telecollaboration sessions. Based on this plurisemiotic discursive material, we will share initial findings about how openness to the Other can be fostered by reinforcing confidence in the Self.
We’re especially interested in how their attitudes evolved over time: did they begin to reveal themselves more fully—through their multilingual repertoires, intercultural competencies, and interpersonal skills—within a growing relationship of trust? Before, during, and after the telecollaboration sessions, did the perceived ‘familiarity’ of their peers help to overcome concerns related to supposed heterotopias (Foucault, 1966)? What multilingual practices and communicative strategies enabled these “oppressed” learners (Freire, 1968/2021) to gain agency through contact with the Other—who, in many ways, was also the Same (Alais, 2022)?
These findings, emerging from micro-level data analysis (personal work and interpersonal exchanges), aim to spark a broader discussion about how school system and curricula for students categorised ‘allophone’ might be reimagined and reconstructed.