Abstract

Dr. Milene Mendes de Oliveira (Frankfurt/Oder & Potsdam)

Communicative practice and culture: The case of virtual intercultural groups

Abstract: Intercultural communication often takes place in fleeting contexts in which speakers have limited common ground (Clark, 1996) and even more so in virtual settings. This talk is based on the findings of a study that showcases practices identified in the context of an intercultural intervention: a collaborative game aiming at the development of intercultural competence (Bolten 2015). The game was played by seventy higher-education students from different countries who used English as a lingua franca (ELF) in Zoom interactions over a series of five virtual encounters, resulting in more than fifty hours of video-recorded data. These groups which came together for the purpose of the game are regarded as transient ELF groups (Mortensen, 2017; Pitzl, 2018), and their emerging sharedness is the analytical focal point of the study. This emerging sharedness is of interest to the discipline of intercultural communication, where it can be described as the emergence of a team culture (Conti et al., 2022). The analysis combined the sociolinguistic focus on ‘practice’ and the ethnomethodological focus on ‘actions’ (Blommaert, 2019) and also took into account the conversation-analytic study of transience (Hazel, 2017) and interactional histories (Schmidt & Deppermann, 2023). The identified practices—e.g., self-deprecating comments and endorsement displays among others—feature as empirical evidence for the emerging “groupness” (Blommaert, 2019) in some of the analyzed teams. The findings will be followed by a discussion on how sociolinguistics and ethnomethodology can offer complementary tools for the analysis of intercultural communication in transient settings.

References:

Bolten, J. (2012). Interkulturelle Kompetenz (5th edition). Erfurt: Landeszentrum für politische Bildung Thüringen.

Bolten, J. (2015). Megacities. Ein Planspiel für virtuelle Lernumgebungen. Jena www.intercultural-campus.org; accessed on 15.4.2022.

Conti, L., Oliveira, M. M., & Nietzel, B. (2022). A Genuine 'Miteinander': On Becoming a Team in an International Virtual Simulation Game. Interculture journal: Online-Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Studien, 21(36), 189–208. https://www.interculture-journal.com/index.php/icj/article/view/449.

Hazel, S. (2017). Mapping the langscape—developing multilingual norms in a transient project community. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 27(3), 308-325.

Mortensen, J. (2017). Transient multilingual communities as a field of investigation: Challenges and opportunities. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 27(3), 271-288.

Pitzl, M. L. (2018). Transient international groups (TIGs): Exploring the group and development dimension of ELF. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca, 7(1), 25–58. https://doi.org/10.1515/jelf-2018-0002.

Schmidt, A., & Deppermann, A. (2023). On the emergence of routines: An Interactional micro-history of rehearsing a scene. Human Studies, 1-30.