Artifacts and cultures-of-use in intercultural communication

By S. Thorne. Language Learning & Technology, 2003

604 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article develops a conceptual framework for understanding how intercultural communication, mediated by cultural artifacts (i.e., Internet communication tools), creates compelling, problematic, and surprising conditions for additional language learning. Three case studies of computer-mediated intercultural engagement draw together correlations between discursive orientation, communicative modality, communicative activity, and emergent interpersonal dynamics. These factors contribute to varying qualities and quantities of participation in the intercultural partnerships. Case one, "Clashing Frames of Expectation Differing Cultures-of-Use," suggests that the cultures-of-use of Internet communication tools, their perceived existence and on-going construction as distinctive cultural artifacts, differs interculturally just as communicative genre, pragmatics, and institutional context would be expected to differ interculturally. Case two, "Intercultural Communication as Hyperpersonal Engagement," illustrates pragmatic and linguistic development as an outcome of intercultural relationship building. The final case study, "The Wrong Tool for the Right Job?," describes a recent generational shift in communication tool preference wherein an ostensibly ubiquitous tool, e-mail, is shown to be unsuitable for mediating age peer relationships. Taken together, these case studies demonstrate that Internet communication tools are not neutral media. Rather, individual and collective experience is shown to influence the ways students engage in Internet-mediated communication with consequential outcomes for both the processes and products of language development. For some social classes and in highly privileged geographical regions, we have entered into a period of rapid and efficient global communication practices mediating an array of interpersonal, discursivematerial, and cultural activities. Despite the robust connections between the increasing digitization of everyday communicative practice and issues such as globalization and homogenization, Internet-mediated intercultural educational activities remain demonstrably polymorphous. Reasons for this are many. Educational cultures and objectives vary across nation state boundaries (Belz, 2002) as well as across educational institutions within the US. Moreover, within the same university but across courses or time periods, student populations shift, pedagogical goals are reassessed, and micro-interactional phenomena illustrate their own "accentuality" (Volosinov, 1973), even when the task, as it were, is supposed to remain consistent across participants and time (Coughlan & Duff, 1994). The focus of this article is yet another dimension of human heterogeneity -- the cultural embeddedness of Internet communication tools and the consequences of this embedding for communicative activity. Three case studies will be presented which illustrate some of the possibilities and problems associated with foreign language intercultural interaction mediated by Internet communication tools. I argue that Internet communication tools, like all human artifacts, are cultural tools (for an extension of this argument to the natural environment and the social construction of nature, see Braun & Castree, 1998; Harvey, 1996; Williams, 1980). Specifically, I show that e-mail, instant messenger, and forms of synchronous chat, are deeply affected by the cultures-of-use, or to borrow a biological term -- phenotypic characteristics, evolving from the manner in which these tools mediate everyday communicative practice. To unpack this somewhat, most of the American students in the case studies have extensive Internet experience that catalyzes specific forms (and expectations) of communication. In turn, the resulting

Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/414e42bada3172dfde9c75a87338ec5e592014d5

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Citations in the corpus

A Social Tool: Why and How ESOL Students Use Facebook. (2012, methodology): “When using Facebook, each of the participants was unknowingly using different cultural artifacts, as Facebook is embedded in different individual cultures-ofuse (Thorne, 2003).”
Intercultural communicative competence and online exchanges: a systematic review (2018, background): “Hauck (2010) further argues that MCC, the ‘cultures-of-use’ of the tools used (Thorne, 2003), and gains in intercultural competence (Byram, 1997) are the least interrelated, if not interdependent.”
The Routledge handbook of English language teaching (2018, background): “(e.g. the national culture or the school itself as a CDS).”
Engaging Study Abroad Students in Intercultural Learning Through Blogging and Ethnographic Interviews (2012, background): “The comments confi rm those reported in previous studies of CMC indicating that the accessibility of networking becomes essential for network-based learning and further affects students’ motivation (Thorne, 2003; Ware, 2005).”
Intercultural Competence and Cultural Learning through Telecollaboration. (2012, background): “Researchers have pointed out the beneficial use of telecollaborative and other computermediated projects for acquiring greater language skills as well as intercultural competence (Belz & Müller-Hartmann, 2002; Belz & Thorne, 2006; Blake, 2008; Furstenberg, Levet, English, & Maillet, 2001; Gonglewski”
Understanding telecollaboration through an analysis of intercultural discourse (2010, background): “The forums in this online intercultural learning environment therefore served as a timely ‘third space’ for the two groups of students across the Pacific Ocean (Kramsch, 1993; Thorne, 2003).”
Cultural diversity online: student engagement with learning technologies (2007, background): “Thorne suggests that the use (“cultures-of-use”) of online communication tools “differs interculturally just as communicative genre, pragmatics, and institutional context would be expected to differ interculturally” ( Thorne, 2003”
Collaborative writing among second language learners in academic web-based projects (2012, methodology): “This figure illustrates the unfamiliar and evolving nature of Web-based word processing and students' use of this space and shows how the tools communicators use and the way they use them often co-evolve (Thorne, 2003).”
Discourse Options and the Development of Pragmatic Competence by Classroom Learners of German: The Case of Address Forms (2003, methodology): “She reasons that both of these computer-mediated affordances, that is, ‘‘that which is offered by the linguistic environment and perceived by the learner’’ (van Lier, 1996, p. 12), may contribute to the development of awareness and appropriate use of L2 address forms (see also Belz & Kinginger, 2002”
Blogging: Promoting Learner Autonomy and Intercultural Competence through Study Abroad (2011, result): “The comments confirms those reported in previous studies of CMC indicating that the accessibility of the Internet becomes essential for network-based learning and further affects students’ motivation (Thorne, 2003; Ware, 2005).”
Intercultural Questioning, Discovery and Tension in Internet-mediated Language Learning Partnerships (2005, background): “…on the work of Walther (1992, 1996), Herring (1996) and other communication theorists (e.g. Hancock & Dunham, 2001; Sullivan et al ., 2004) in their investigations of the development of IC or awareness among ‘zero history’ keypals in telecollaborative exchanges (see, however, Thorne, 2003).”
Second Language Use, Socialization, and Learning in Internet Interest Communities and Online Gaming (2009, methodology): “Drawing from cultural historical activity theory (e.g., Engeström, 1987; Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006; Nardi, 1996), Thorne (2003, 2005, 2009) applied a variation of this argument to processes of Internet tool socialization and have described research illustrating that technologies mediate…”
The Relationship between Second Language Acquisition Theory and Computer-Assisted Language Learning. (2009, background): “It follows that pedagogy should be designed in a way that keeps the communication flowing without fatal breakdowns caused by conflicting activity systems among participants (Russell, 2001; Thorne, 2003).”
Linguistic perspectives on the development of intercultural competence in telecollaboration (2003, background): “…72, for the case of Jackie; Belz & Müller-Hartmann, 2003, pp. 75-84, for telecollaborative teachers; Furstenberg et al. 2001, p. 57; Kinginger, in press, for the case of Anita; Müller-Hartmann, 1999, p. 75, for the case of culture-specific irony; Thorne, 2003, this issue, for the case of Kirsten.)”
Telecollaboration as an approach to developing intercultural communication competence (2019, background): “Early projects demonstrated how learners improved in their use of appropriate forms of second person address and formal or informal registers, through online exchanges (Belz, 2006; Thorne, 2003).”