From involvement to engagement in online communication: promoting intercultural competence in foreign language education

Abstract

In this qualitative case study of two groups of advanced level foreign language university students linked in an international telecollaborative exchange, I critically examine the viability of asynchronous computer-mediated communication for promoting engagement in intercultural learning. Working from a sociocultural perspective, the study considers how notions of communicative competence and intercultural competence are recast in communication that takes place in the virtual environment. This study draws on three areas of research—intercultural communication, sociolinguistics, and critical literacy studies—and takes as its foundational premise the belief that technology mediates social discourses and ongoing dialogue in contexts that are situated historically, culturally, and politically. The study asks how computer-mediated communication might promote the kinds of attitudes, knowledge, and skills associated with the development of intercultural competence. First, by using ethnographic methods of research to collect data in both classrooms in Germany and in the United States, I examine the perspectives of participants at both sites through in-depth interviews, observations, and questionnaires. I then analyze the entirety of their online writing with linguistically grounded analytic tools to capture (a) how students display conversational involvement through topic management, turn-taking, and contextualization cues such as personal deixis, modality, and formulaic language; and (b) how students demonstrate intercultural engagement through their linguistically marked acts and stances. The findings show that the majority of the students participated above course expectations in the online writing component, but few linguistic features of interpersonal interaction marked their participation. Time pressures and institutional constraints influenced their communicative choices in such a way that miscommunication often led to the closing down of interpersonal contact. Thus, student writing was marked by what I call “missed communication,” or missed opportunities for developing intercultural competence in the online context. These findings suggest that telecollaboration does not easily support the development of intercultural competence. The study concludes that when considering the value of online communication for promoting intercultural competence, researchers and educators should pay particular attention to how students co-construct meaning through their linguistic choices, as well as to how they co-construe the context for interpreting meaning in ways that are historically and culturally informed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 41 citations exist upstream.