Regular exposure to oral language in all its variety develops learners’ listening, production and mediation skills, as they discover the lexical, grammatical, phonetic, multimodal and intercultural components of language practices. This article sets out to explore an ecological corpus of interactions, explaining the aims and procedures used by speakers in their private or professional interactions and reflecting on skills that learners continue to develop as they are exposed to these uses. We will detail our use of Clapi-FLE in two very different university courses and share the benefits of this corpus with students who have worked on the theme of cooking. The aim of the article is twofold: to show that this resource lends itself to multiple contexts of use and language levels; and to encourage changes in teaching practices, both in French as a Foreign Language and in Dialogue Interpreting, by contributing to the debate on two of the descriptors of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, namely ‘interaction’ and ‘mediation’.