This paper will present and discuss the linguistic challenges that Argentinian university students of history and Danish university students of Spanish met during the course of a telecollaboration project based on synchronous communication in Skype. The purpose of this discussion is to identify linguistic pitfalls and the solutions adopted by both native and non-native participants in order to keep the conversations going in spite of misunderstandings, vocabulary limitations and other breaches in communication. The purpose of the discussion is to detect areas of strategic competence that need to be addressed in class, particularly for the benefit of the non-native speakers. [For the complete volume, see ED571330.]