Intercultural Virtual Exchanges (IVE) have been on the rise in recent years with notable benefits including the integration of cultural and linguistic aspects in second language learning (Dooly & O’Dowd, 2018). The role of pragmatics in teacher-training in online environments has garnered attention as pre-service teacher training programmes aim to integrate IVEs into their curricula. However, challenges may occur due to miscommunication (O’Dowd & Ritter, 2006). To combat these potential miscommunication episodes, a data-driven pedagogical intervention approach has been recommended (Cunningham & Vyatkina, 2012). While speech acts such as requesting behaviour have been well-researched, there is less evidence in how language for politeness (Alonso-Marks & Bayonas, 2023) has been used to overcome issues in IVEs between second language learners. Therefore, we aim to fill this gap by investigating five miscommunication episodes of pre-service English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) teachers related to politeness strategies to understand how this can be taught in future teacher training programmes. An IVE with pre-service teachers at French and Dutch universities was carried out in Fall 2022. Pre-service teachers completed three tasks on three different online platforms (Flipgrid, Moodle and Big Blue Button) with the present study focusing on data from the third task of giving feedback on an IVE task for their future classrooms. Video interactions were recorded, transcribed and coded in ELAN to examine participants’ use of linguistics markers for expressing politeness strategies when in communication breakdowns. This led us to our research question of what linguistic markers of politeness are used by ELF IVE pre-service teachers. Our preliminary results suggest pre-service teachers from the Netherlands express concerns of being overtly ‘direct’ with their French counterparts when providing feedback utilising modal verbs. Our findings outline how these strategies can be integrated in teacher training programmes via exposing learners to linguistic markers of politeness prior to IVE collaborative tasks.