Abstract
Following the discourse-semantic subsystem of engagement within the appraisal framework, this chapter investigates the extent to which participants of a telecollaborative exchange project between the Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain) and the University of Bath (UK) engaged with their partners' and their own ideas. Participants engaged in two different online cultural discussions which were qualitatively processed and broken up into T-units. This information was subsequently processed quantitatively considering all the tokens that frame engagement. The scrutiny of this data elucidates the extent to which the learners in the two online cultural discussions acquired new knowledge by acknowledging the others' ideas and by providing evidence to support their own statements. The results reveal the presence of expansive and contractive strategies, both of which are recurrent in academic reasoning. Students used more expansive than contractive statements, which can be interpreted as their willingness to adopt a different perspective from their own.
TopIntroduction
In today’s globalized world much of the interaction takes place online (Helm & Guth, 2010), which means that it can occur at any time and any place provided that there is an Internet connection. Online communication can also be multimodal in the sense that it can be synchronous or asynchronous, written or verbal, and so on. In line with this, in the Companion Volume (2020) of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) online conversations and discussions are seen as a multimodal phenomenon. This exposure to L2 online communities can also lead to “significant intercultural learning and enhanced global awareness” (Godwin-Jones, 2021, p. 13) through telecollaborative projects. As a matter of fact, taking the sociocultural approach perspective into account, telecollaboration is “seen to offer not only opportunities to negotiate transactional meaning and develop linguistic competence but also to foster intercultural communicative competence (as defined by Byram 1997)” (Helm, 2017, p. 3). Given its importance, the Council of Europe has devoted a whole volume to plurilingual and intercultural education, that is, the Guide for the Development and Implementation of Curricula for Plurilingual and Intercultural education (Beacco et al., 2016). Here, it is claimed that this type of education promotes the development of intercultural abilities and personal development as it encourages language learners “to respect and accept diversity of languages and cultures in a multilingual and multicultural society” (Beacco et al., 2016, p. 15). In addition to this, there is an increasing body of research analyzing language learners’ discourse not only to examine what they say, but also the ways in which they say it (Oskoz & Gimeno-Sanz, 2020). For the above-mentioned reasons, this study follows an approach grounded on linguistic analysis. Taking the discourse-semantic subsystem of Engagement within the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005) as a starting point, this chapter analyzes how language learners engaged with their telecollaborative partners’ ideas and their own views regarding their first culture (C1), their second culture (C2), and the topic (T) being discussed depending on the languages (L1 or L2) employed in these online discussions. In particular, this study addresses the linguistic choices that language learners make while developing their intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in a real context, that is, in an intercultural telecollaborative encounter that uses the MeWe platform as the channel for communication.
To summarize, the conceptual framework of the study is threefold, i.e., communication exchanges through a telecollaborative project, analysis of those linguistic exchanges by applying the Engagement subsystem of the Appraisal Theory to elucidate how learners behave when discussing cultural issues with their counterparts and, lastly, an analysis of their cultural stances.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Second Culture (C2): It is the culture where the individual’s L2 is spoken.
Engagement: In this chapter it refers to a subsystem of the Appraisal framework which includes all the discourse markers that show the speaker’s position towards different perspectives, and therefore how he/she engages with those alternative voices.
Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC): Communication between geographically distant individuals or groups mediated by computers. It can be either asynchronous (ACMC) or synchronous (SCMC). The former implies that communication takes place at different times, while in the latter it occurs simultaneously.
Second Language (L2): It is a different language from the L1 and it is usually learnt later either as a foreign language or as a second language spoken in the individual’s country.
First Language (L1): Usually it is the language that the individual has learnt first and speaks the best. It is also an alternative for the term ‘native language’ which, once again, makes reference to the unrealistic native speaker model.
Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC): The complex of abilities needed to interact effectively and adequately in an intercultural encounter. In this chapter Byram’s (1997 , 2021 ) definition is the one adopted.
First Culture (C1): Usually it is the culture where the individual has grown up, and therefore of which he/she knows the social and linguistic norms.