This study investigates the intercultural development with young learners from Sweden and New Zealand, when using written telecollaboration as a tool. Telecollaboration; is a tool used for online collaboration, it provides for a possibility of connecting students from across the globe and can function as a supplement to traditional teaching. The exchange, took place over a couple of months, connecting two remote and quite unknown corners of the world, from the students’ perspective. Students shared cultural topics with their peers through the course of two emails each, as well as, creating an overall multimodal presentation of their school. The telecollaborative exchange was done in the quest to develop the students social and self-awareness regarding culture through authentic meetings. The data collected is in the form of mind-maps, multi-choice surveys and unstructured observations. Visible themes, found during the project, is unpacked and analysed in accordance with Byram’s (1997) theoretical model of ICC. These themes are also compared with findings of previous research on telecollaboration in educational settings. The results of the study revealed that a development of the young learners’ intercultural understanding was partially achieved. Furthermore, implications met, was the limitation of time as well as the range of technology available.

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To learn a language successfully, one needs to incorporate terms which are used commonly by native speakers but cannot be found in dictionaries. Words like uh-huh, oops, ouch, and brrr, are some examples of these terms. These expressions, commonly categorized under such linguistic labels as interjections (Ameka, 1992), alternants (Poyatos, 2002), and response cries (Goffman,1981), are what Dr. Lynn Henrichsen (1993) and Rebecca Oyer (1999) termed Unorthodox Oral Expressions (UOEs). These utterances are considered unorthodox because many of them are not formal or standard English words. Because of that, “we do not consider them part of the productive system of English,” so English dictionaries and textbooks rarely include these words (Luthy, 1983, p.19). Also, they are used mostly in informal speech rather than in formal written English. Hence, non-native English learners usually don’t have the opportunity to learn these informal utterances in English classes (Chittaladakorn, 2011; Oyer, 1999).Though unorthodox, these expressions are important for English language learners (ELL) to learn so that they will be able to carry out more natural and native-like conversations and understand what these utterances mean when native speakers use them. Because UOEs are so under-taught and there are so few teaching UOEs, there is a great need for a UOE dictionary that includes not only pronunciation and meaning, but also the syntactic features and semantic and pragmatic functions of these expressions. This project includes the creation of an online UOE dictionary to fill that need in English language acquisition.