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While synchronous online telecollaboration has been gaining popularity in foreign language education over the past few decades, both Multimodal Communicative Competence and Intercultural Communicative Competence have become increasingly important as a result of many educational institutions, business establishments, and governmental organizations being forced by the COVID-19 pandemic to switch their means of communication to online video conferencing systems.

Although access to digital communication technology and tools allow more people to be part of intercultural communicative exchanges, it is suspected that a considerable amount of miscommunication is caused by mis- or non-understanding of the variety of modes used in synchronous digital communication due to differences in interlocutors’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds, which can affect verbal and prosodic elements such as speed, pitch, and intonation as well as non-verbal dimensions such as facial expressions, gaze, and gestures together with spatial aspects and the positioning of participants in the video frame.

Existing methods of multimodal analysis of digital communication often deal with monolingual situations. Even in cases of analysis of intercultural communication, at least one of the participating parties use their native language. 

The current study intends to fill the research gap seen in methodological issues concerning the analysis of multimodal, and (specifically) synchronous, digital intercultural communication when a non-native language is used by all participants as a lingua franca. To this end, methodological implications of multimodal analysis of synchronous digital intercultural interactions between Swedish and U.S. participants using Japanese as a lingua franca were explored, highlighting challenges that surfaced during the analysis of the data gathered for a separate study of identity development through online telecollaboration and focusing especially on the problems that may arise when a third language is used as means of communication between non-native speakers.