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With recent technological advancements, COIL has become an increasingly popular model of international exchange in higher education. This approach promotes virtual international collaboration, fosters foreign language/content learning, and enhances intercultural awareness via the pedagogical principles of co-developed learning/teaching practices, shared learning outcomes, and deep collaboration. This webinar showcases how COIL can be applied to internationalise teacher education through a postgraduate course jointly organised by a Hong Kong/UK university. It reports on the COIL experiences of two cohorts of MA(TESOL) students (n=83/69) in a core module, English Language Teaching Methodology, offered by two universities, one in Hong Kong and the other in the UK. The COIL initiative sought to broaden the multilingual student-teachers’ repertoire of TESOL methodological practices, strengthen their multicultural competencies and sharpen their collaboration skills. With micro-teaching as the shared goal, they engage in collaborative lesson planning and material design, peer feedback, video annotation and joint reflections through various synchronous/asynchronous activities.

Adopting an action research framework, the teacher-educators sought ways to leverage the student-teachers’ COIL experiences in two cycles (12 weeks each). Data were collected via web-based interactions in spoken and written forms, artefacts of the student-teachers’ work (lesson plans/teaching materials), video-recorded teaching practice, questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, reflective (video) essays, and observational notes. The findings reveal the participants’ notable pedagogic gains and personal growth despite several challenges. The paper highlights the strategies that were found to work to good effect in heightening their multicultural awareness, fostering professional exchanges and peer learning in the target language, and honing their communication/collaboration skills. It concludes by discussing how COIL activities can be strategically devised and implemented using a task-based approach, how learner empowerment can be advocated, and how combining synchronous/asynchronous methods can enhance multicultural awareness.

This talk introduces the Critically Engaged Literacy Workshop (CELW) as a decolonial research methodology and pedagogical approach that fosters critical awareness, anti-racist engagement, and transformative action. While applied linguistics increasingly recognizes the need for activist scholarship, there remains a gap in decolonial methodologies that guide research and pedagogy. CELW addresses this gap by providing a collaborative, participatory space where marginalized voices are centered through multilingual and multimodal narratives, fostering both reflection and action. Drawing on participatory action research and generative design tools, CELW goes beyond interpretation to facilitate agency, resistance to hegemonic structures, and social change. Through engaged interactions among researchers, educators, and communities, CELW promotes critical consciousness of language, power, and inequality while enabling meaningful activism. This talk will explore CELW’s theoretical foundations, its potential for disrupting colonial ideologies in English language education, and its implications for fostering more equitable, socially just learning environments.