Proceedings of the - British Association for Applied Linguistics

The Impact of Applied Linguistics: Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of BAAL
University of the West of England
Data
The dataset for the analysis is a set of asynchronous online exchanges and
synchronous chat sessions that have taken place on the site over several
years with successive groups of participants. We analysed forum data from
7 years of archived material on the Moodle site and carried out semistructured
end-of-course interviews with 15 of the Glasgow-based
participants, including both English native speakers and non-native
speakers.
Evidence of ICC in forum data
The textual evidence from the native and non-native speaker forum
interactions provides evidence of developing ICC over the course of an
academic session. This emerges in a number of ways (all examples from
forum data, our italics):
i. Topics framed with reference to students’ own observations:
“I have noticed that the way in which foreign languages are taught in
schools differs greatly…”
ii. Participants providing a gloss for culture-specific terms, or offering a
contrast with a better-known cultural analogue:
“Hi, I’m from Glasgow and growing up we went ‘guising’ which just
meant that we dressed up in various costumes and roamed the
neighbourhood knocking on doors. I don’t think it’s the same as the
American ‘trick or treating’ as there was never a retaliation for not
being given sweets.”
iii. Participants reflecting on the reception of their contributions and
apologising for potentially obscure postings:
“Sorry, just realised I made reference to someone who may not be
universally known!!”
Evidence of ICC in interview data
As described by participants, there are various benefits of online
intercultural exchange. These include (all examples from interview data):
6