This article investigates data from digital (chat and Skype) interactions between Australian and Dutch students who worked on a task with reversed expert-learner participant roles. The task was designed in such a way that the Australian native speakers of English were the (cultural) learners and the Dutch non-native speakers the experts. The aim of the study was to observe the influence of these reversed roles on participant behaviors and task performance. The data showed that in their role as cultural experts, the non-native speakers used the same task-appropriate communicative strategies as the native speakers in their language expert role, although they still fulfilled an apprentice role in the language domain. The paper concludes that the native – non-native speaker dichotomy does not do justice to the complex, emerging participant roles and identities that become interactionally salient in educational encounters and that in task design and educational practice, the situated identities of the participants should indeed be taken into account.

Van der Zwaard, R. & Bannink, A. (2018). Reversal of participant roles in NS-NNS synchronous telecollaboration. CALICO, 35(2), 162-181.