| Summary: | Based on a 3-month experiment involving sixty Japanese learners of French as a Foreign Language and nine French teacher trainees engaged in mostly asynchronous Internet-based communication, this paper describes how French and Japanese project coordinators managed to sustain continuous communication on both parts and to provide opportunities for intercultural learning. The culture gap, notably with regards to the learning culture, was a real challenge: this paper shows how some of the pitfalls were avoided and attempts to draw a model for the approach the coordinators adopted. Following a theoretical framework emphasizing the challenges of intercultural communication and online collaboration, three major dimensions of online communication are then presented, focusing on the role played by the project coordinators: the enforcement of continuous participation, reciprocal student presentation of concrete cultural aspects, and the management of the relationship between both groups.
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