Abstract

The ongoing research introduced in this paper enquires into the reframing of the concept of ‘sustainable tourism’ prompted by the increasing digitalization of reality following the COVID-19 pandemic emergency which has recorded a growing number of participants in situations of intercultural communication interacting online (within the so-called ‘metaverse’) by using their variations of English as a lingua franca (ELF). Such virtual communicative situations are here assumed to strongly affect, modify, and even hybridise the intercultural participants’ typologically different experiential frames for the perception and conceptualization of events. The purpose of the case study is to develop novel digital strategies of multimodal discourse which would offer participants an intense aesthetic experience by allowing the interpretation of typologically-hybrid cognitive and communicative framing processes emerging from these new ELF-mediated online interactions.