Virtual exchange, or telecollaboration, is a well‐known pedagogical approach in foreign language education that involves engaging classes in online intercultural collaboration projects with international partners as an integrated part of their educational programmes. This article focuses on the role of the teacher as pedagogical mentor in virtual exchange and examines the impact of the strategies and techniques that teachers use in their classes to support students’ learning during their online intercultural projects. The article begins with a proposed categorization of pedagogical mentoring reported in the literature to date. It then reports on the outcomes of a virtual exchange project carried out by three classes of initial English teacher education in Israel, Spain, and Sweden that involved two types of pedagogical mentoring. Qualitative content analysis enabled the identification of the impact of mentoring that took place before the exchange and also revealed insights into what students learned when their own online interactions were integrated into class work. The article concludes by discussing the limitations and challenges of different types of pedagogical mentoring in virtual exchange and by outlining a list of recommendations for carrying out pedagogical mentoring in such projects.

中文翻译：

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教学指导在虚拟交换中的作用

虚拟交流或远程协作是外语教育中的一种著名教学方法，它涉及与国际合作伙伴一起参加在线跨文化合作项目，作为其教育计划的一部分。本文重点介绍教师在虚拟交流中作为教学指导者的作用，并研究教师在课堂上使用的策略和技术对学生进行在线跨文化项目学习提供支持的影响。本文从迄今为止在文献中报告的教学指导的建议分类开始。然后，它报告了由以色列，西班牙和瑞典的三门初始英语教师教育班进行的虚拟交流项目的成果，该项目涉及两种类型的教学指导。通过定性内容分析，可以确定在交流之前进行指导的影响，并且还可以洞察学生将自己的在线互动整合到课堂工作中后学到的知识。本文的结尾是讨论虚拟交流中不同类型的教学指导的局限性和挑战，并概述了在此类项目中进行教学指导的一系列建议。