Blurb:

Distance education offers the possibility to continue their studies to adults with other family or work commitments. However, learning foreign languages is a complex matter when there is no possibility of real interaction. One of the problems that students of the UNED encounter, in the case of our courses, is the difficulty to improve production and oral interaction in a foreign language, despite all our focus being directed to the peculiarities of this form of learning. The oral aspect has been greatly improved nowadays in distance courses with the use of CDs and audiovisual material, which are part of our virtual courses. Assessing comprehension and oral production can also be carried out by platforms designed for that purpose. However, all these mechanisms are rather static and passive from the point of view of the student. To the difficulties for the improvement of oral language skills must be added the complexity of the acquisition of transversal and specific competences related to Professional English and highlighted by Bologna’s Guidelines. This article presents the results of a case study based on Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication (SCMC) in a teaching innovation project. The objective was to ensure that our students interacted orally with people of other nationalities using the only language they had in common, English, in order to create tourist routes between different areas of the world with which they were working directly. As a result, the data obtained shows an improvement in the marks achieved by the students in their exams after taking part in these collaborative exchanges. Five years later, the participants were contacted again in order to gather their perceptions about how this experience had influenced the level of oral competence that they display on their own working environments.