EVE-SFI (Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange - Spain, France, Ireland) is a higher-education virtual exchange (VE) that involves collaboration among students from three universities in those countries. Its primary aim is to develop the oral interaction skills of foreign language undergraduates. Over six weeks, student pairs interact via videoconferencing to carry out two tasks that are identical for all students and a third task that is different for students from Spain-France (Group 1) and Spain-Ireland (Group 2). The interactions, based on suggested discussion questions, take place in either English as a lingua franca (Spain-France) or bilingually in English and Spanish (Spain-Ireland). As a final task, students submit a self reflection to assess what they have learned during the VE (Vinagre, Wigham & Giralt, 2020). Our study discusses the extent to which students’ interactions reflect their immersion in VE since this factor is crucial for learning to occur. following Tausczik & Pennebaker (2010), we analyse the students’ use of affect and emotion words as a measure of the degree of participants’ immersion (p. 32). Since students must establish close relationships to collaborate on the tasks, we also analyse the presence of social words and anxiety since these reflect and affect the quality of a relationship (Leshed, Hancock, Cosley, McLeod &, Gay, 2007). Following a mixed methods approach, we used Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC), a text analysis software, to link word usage with personality traits and social behavior. Preliminary findings showed that, for the two tasks that are identical, all variables decreased with the exception of social words that increased. For the third task, although results differ in the two groups depending on the variable, social words also increased. These findings suggest that, despite task impact, establishing and maintaining close relationships is essential for effective task completion.