Second Life as tool to enhance language learners’ intercultural communicative competence.

Within the European project NIFLAR Second Life has been used during three different pilots to provide foreign language students with a tool to be able to communicate synchronously with native speakers in the target language. For all three pilots tasks were designed following a set of design principles that aims at maximizing authentic social interaction and intercultural awareness, making sure that the affordances of the virtual environment being used were taken advantage of. In this article we present the task design principles that have been followed together with an overview of the tasks developed and a summary of the results obtained from interactions between Dutch students of Spanish and Spanish teacher trainees in Second Life.