Taking care of their positive online face? Reasons and strategy development
This paper examines a peer virtual exchange project between students at the University of Cyprus and the University of Latvia. The main purpose of this project is to develop intercultural awareness. Through telecollaborative tasks, students are asked to interact in a common discussion space around elements related to their cultural values. The aim of this paper is to discuss students’ strategies for these online exchanges. The hypothesis this paper seeks to examine is that students do not express themselves freely in the discussion forums in order to protect their personal and national image. We are thus interested in the public self-image of the students, known as ‘face’. Our findings iden…
Online Intercultural Dialogue: “Failed” Communication in a Telecollaboration Project
Over the past two decades, the development of computer-mediated communication technologies has modified human communication. Increasingly, representatives from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds are disposed to a constant negotiation of meanings. The main purpose of this study is to carry out a linguistically grounded analysis of the intercultural dialogue during online asynchronous written exchanges between Latvian and Cypriot students.Based on the politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1987), which implies that all adult members of society are endowed with two universal aspects: “positive face” and “negative face”, and using the methods of content analysis and discourse analysi…