Pre-sessional English language courses: University telecollaboration as a driver of Global North / South student-contact for engineers

This paper discusses the potential offered by telecollaborative links between universities in the Global North and the Global South. It draws on data from the English for Academic Study Telecollaboration (EAST) project, an online pre-sessional partnership between Science, Engineering and Technology students at the University of Glasgow and at the Islamic University of Gaza. This is an ongoing project, now in its sixth year, which has attempted to follow a critical pedagogies agenda, and is examined here from a Freirean perspective. It looks for evidence of transformative outcomes for the students involved and analyses the extent to which a 5-week online collaboration can work to empower the most vulnerable of stakeholders, and to challenge received attitudes and practices. The paper concludes that pre-sessional English language telecollaboration that juxtaposes areas of peace and conflict can offer particular opportunities for the dialogue that, in Freire’s view (1996: 69) leads, through action and reflection, to ‘naming’ - and thereby potentially changing - the world.