Academic virtual exchanges provide opportunities to meet with increasing demands on higher education establishments to internationalize (O’Dowd, 2016; Helm, 2016). The present study considers an example of internationalization for home students at Bordeaux University, France, who participated in the Erasmus + Virtual Exchange programme from 2019-21. Erasmus virtual exchange enables students to participate in study mobility programmes without having to physically travel abroad to engage in intercultural communicative situations. The Erasmus Virtual Exchange programme (EVE), which focused on the theme of Cultural Encounters, marks the new ‘critical’ turn in intercultural exchange (O’Dowd, 2016; Helm, 2016). In this context, French speaking Chemistry Masters students interacted in English on this topic via weekly 2-hour webinars with other non-native English-speaking students from other participating universities in Europe and the Mediterranean region. Virtual exchange therefore offered the students the opportunity to go beyond English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in relation to Chemistry, and to use the transversal skills that EVE can offer for the workplace, including ‘soft skills’ and intercultural competence (Nye, 2004; Martin & Nakayama, 2015). Consequently, the study addresses how virtual exchanges incite wider language and pedagogical perspectives for students at Bordeaux University. The methods used to address the research question were the qualitative analysis of the students’ reflective journals, questionnaire feedback on the programme and focus groups with both students and staff involved. The study reveals new challenges for educators preparing future graduates for a complex multi-lingual and multi-cultural learning environment where English is the current lingua franca. The study also shows that students described virtual exchange as more authentic than the interactions they had previously experienced within the ESP classroom because they were not able to revert to their L1 and because of the transformative features of the EVE course (Nolet, 2015).