Discourse moves and intercultural communicative competence in telecollaborative chats

Abstract

With a shift toward understanding the goals of foreign language learning as development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC; Thorne, 2010), telecollaborative interaction with geographically distant partners has been seen both as a pedagogical tool that can play a significant role in promoting intercultural negotiation abilities and attitudes and as a felicitous context for assessing these abilities. Addressing the assessment task through a linguistically-grounded investigation of telecollaborative chats, this exploratory study aims to demonstrate how abstract aspects of ICC can be operationalized as deployment of particular discourse structuring and linguistic resources. Drawing on the systemic-functional approach to discourse analysis (Eggins & Slade, 1997) and Byram’s (1997) framework of ICC, this study examines written synchronous chats created throughout a 7-week telecollaborative activity by advanced American learners of German at a private US University and by German University students, future FL teachers. The quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate what precise discursive moves and language resources that realize them characterize ICC and at the same time enable it. Implications of the use of the methodological framework for further research of ICC in telecollaborative discourse, as well as some applications of the findings to pedagogy, conclude the study.