Linguistic Markers of Intercultural Competence in Student Blogs (original) (raw)
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Language and Intercultural Communication, 2009
Telecollaboration is an approach to intercultural learning that uses Internet technology as a tool to facilitate intercultural communication between classes of learners in different countries. The question of what language learners can gain from telecollaboration is fundamental in putting the case forward for its place in a language course. This paper looks at what learner diaries can tell us about learners' gains, in terms of intercultural competence, from participation in telecollaboration projects. It also explores the potential of quantitative corpusprocessing tools as a supporting tool for qualitative analysis of narrative diaries.
2020
This paper is a report on a three-month telecollaboration between two groups of students studying in ISEAH of Sbeitla in Tunisia and SPSU, Atlanta, GA, in the USA. By bringing together students from two culturally and linguistically different environments, the telecollaboration aims at helping them communicate interculturally and raise their intercultural awareness and understanding. By means of a blog, students exchanged, discussed, and compared information about their cultures in the form of stories of which they are the main characters. The telecollaboration was evaluated by means of a questionnaire inquiring about students’ satisfaction with the use of the blog, the knowledge they gained of the foreign culture, their attitudes toward it, and the intercultural communicative skills acquired. The findings revealed participants’ satisfaction with the use of the blog as a means of communication and intercultural learning. It was also found out that students’ development of intercultu...
This paper presents a case study in which the implications of using social media as part of English as a second language learning are explored. More specifically two principle questions are embraced: how does the institutional setting of a shared blog co-determine the framing of the activity by the students? And what does this framing of the activity imply for the textual interaction and linguistic repertoires that the students use? The empirical material comprise of community documentation of a blog that was created in an international collaboration between two upper secondary classes in Sweden and Thailand. The study is grounded in a sociocultural perspective and the analysis of the blog postings was informed using the conceptual distinctions of frame analysis. The findings show that the students' linguistic repertoires draw on both the language that is taught in school with rather cultured formulations corresponding to their imagined expectations of fulfilling a school task, but also to their out-of-school codemixing vernacular and jargon which are prevalent in social media. The challenge for education is how to embrace social networking sites without diminishing students' digital vernacular yet encourage and inspire their parlance in ways that enhance second language learning that may be less present in their digital vernacular but useful in other communicative contexts.
Blog Posts and Traditional Assignments by First- and Second-Language Writers
Language Learning & Technology, 2017
This study investigates differences in the language and discourse characteristics of course blogs and traditional academic submissions produced in English by native (L1) and advanced second language (L2) writers. One hundred and fifty two texts generated by 38 graduate students within the context of the same Master’s level course were analysed using Coh-Metrix indices at the surface code, textbase and situation model levels. The two text types differed in their lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, use of cohesion and agency. Overall, the traditional course assignments were more formal, lexically sophisticated and syntactically complex, while the blog posts contained more semantic and situational redundancy, resulting in higher readability, and communicated a clearer sense of agency. There were also reliable differences between the textual artefacts generated by the L1 and L2 writers, one of which was a more traditional impersonal academic style of the L2 texts. Although no ...
Multilingual Upbringing as Portrayed in the Blogosphere: On Parent-Bloggers’ Profile
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This article presents the results of an online survey completed by an international group of parents who write about their multilingual upbringing experience on personal blogs. As the first stage in a multi-case study that aims at characterizing multilingual parenting styles and strategies, the web questionnaire was designed to build the profile of the participants based on their demographic and linguistic background, their blogging practices, and their family’s linguistic situation. The literature review discusses the prevalence of multilingual child rearing and endorses parent-blogging both as a genre and as a potential research data source. The methodology, on the other hand, introduces the participants, as well as the survey design procedure. Results derive from the identification of salient themes, summarized in two preliminary categories: parents’ views on being bi-/multilingual and parental insights on multilingual upbringing strategies. The descriptive-interpretive analysis ...
Discovering intercultural communication: From language users to language use
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Kim, H., & Penry Williams, C. (2021). Discovering intercultural communication: From language users to language use. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76595-8 This textbook provides a succinct, contemporary introduction to intercultural communication with a focus on actual language use. With English as a lingua franca and Communicative Accommodation Theory as the underpinning concepts, it explores communication, language use, and culture in action. Each chapter includes discourse extracts so that students can apply what they have learned to real text examples, and supplementary instructor materials including suggestions for discussion points and activities are hosted on springer.com. The book will be key reading for students taking modules on Intercultural Communication or Language, Culture and Communication as part of a degree in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, or English Language both at undergraduate and postgraduate level.
Linguacultural identity paths in the blog Me4Change
2019
The debate on migration, identity and power has been thriving over the last decades. It is now a priority not only in the context of current television programmes and talk shows but also across different genres and social media, among which a pivotal role is played by websites and blogs. In the latter, the issues of identity, power, contact and belonging come into play more than in any other domain, pushing us towards ‘translanguaging’ ethnographies and ‘superdiversity’ (Blommaert and Rampton 2011), as well as to new forms of discourse which result from a process of complex adaptation (Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008). The aim of this paper is to gain some insights into the use of language as a means of identity expression on the part of migrants belonging to different lingua-cultural backgrounds. More specifically, we propose some excerpts taken from the website and blog Me4Change as expression of transnational uses of English as a Lingua Franca (Seidlhofer 2003, 2011) at both ling...
Blog posts and essay-style assignments by first- and second-language writers
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This study investigates differences in the language and discourse characteristics of course blogs and traditional academic submissions produced in English by native (L1) and advanced second language (L2) writers. One hundred and fifty two texts generated by 38 graduate students within the context of the same Master's level course were analysed using Coh-Metrix indices at the surface code, textbase and situation model levels. The two text types differed in their lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, use of cohesion and agency. Overall, the traditional course assignments were more formal, lexically sophisticated and syntactically complex, while the blog posts contained more semantic and situational redundancy, resulting in higher readability, and communicated a clearer sense of agency. There were also reliable differences between the textual artefacts generated by the L1 and L2 writers, one of which was a more traditional impersonal academic style of the L2 texts. Although...
Higher Education Pedagogies, 2019
Since the early 2000s, the numbers studying Modern Foreign Languages at university has declined, although there is a strong body of evidence that language capabilities are valued and in demand by employers, operating in global markets and working with international partners. A significant element in the Higher Education MFL curriculum to these challenges is to adopt innovative and engaging approaches to teaching, including the use of technology to develop the range and confidence of students' language skills and prepare them for formative and summative assessment. This paper, drawing on theoretical perspectives of social learning, peer collaboration and curriculum design, considers the role of blogging in developing language capability, engaging students with real life non-academic forms of reflective writing and addressing the interrelatedness of language skills, cultural awareness and personal growth. It discusses the challenges of embedding new assessment methods in the curriculum and potential implications for practice in and beyond Modern Languages learning and teaching.