Barbara E. Hanna

Learning Language and Culture Via Public Internet Discussion Forums

Public Internet discussion forums offer opportunities for intercultural interaction in many languages on a vast range of topics, butare often overlooked by language educators in favour of purpose-built exchanges between learners. The book investigates this untapped pedagogical potential.

Eating a home: food, imaginary selves and Study Abroad testimonials

ABSTRACT Discourses around Study Abroad (SA) consistently portray a transformational experience for participants who return home forever changed. This article investigates how such change is inscribed in texts addressed to Australian tertiary students considering SA. Acknowledging the significant role of the non-study component of SA in triggering change, this paper focuses on the non-academic domain of food, recurrent in the corpus, 102 SA testimonials from returnees from French-speaking environments of Canada, France and Switzerland, posted on an Australian Group of Eight university website. It investigates the templates provided to shape the imaginary of the readers as to their ideal selves and to legitimize and ascribe value to particular foods and related practices. Are students guided towards the perpetuation of their habits, or in these ‘foreign fields’, is there an opportunity to shift habitus, with food contributing to the reconstructed self? Drawing on Bourdieu and on theories of motivation and of the ideal self, the article proposes a reading that resolves the tension between the integrative use of food, and the future exploitation of the SA experience as a mark of distinction.

Towards Intercultural Discussion: Getting Off on the Right Foot(ing)

With the proliferation of discussion facilitated by Internet forums, one might imagine that, notwithstanding the problems encountered by some learners, intercultural communication now has fertile ground within which to flourish. Closer inspection, however, reveals that cordial intercultural exchanges are far from widespread in this genre. This suggests that, despite the apparent ease of contact, there remain significant obstacles to such exchanges.

Forums for Learning: Language, Culture and Identity

The course described in Chapter 9 is one example of the integration of Internet discussion forums into the teaching of language and culture. In this case, a pre-existing course on argumentation in French was renovated to include what is, for many forum users, an everyday genre of argumentation. Participation in public discussion forums was used as a means to work towards the course objectives (linguistic and intercultural). The media websites chosen aligned themselves not only with the aims of the course, but also with the linguistic competence of the majority of the students. And while the conventions of forum participation had to be the subject of preparatory work, the students were able to comply with them. In this way, performing the genre posed an achievable challenge.

Public Discussion Forums as a Tool for Language Learning

The communicative possibilities of the Internet have been eagerly seized upon by those who deal in the teaching of communication, including language teachers. As a result, there are currently vast numbers of language learners engaged in email exchanges with learners in other countries, while teachers from around the world organize discussion activities between their geographically distanced classes. As yet, however, comparatively little pedagogical use has been made of the learning opportunities offered by public Internet discussion.

Face Off: Identity in Online Debate

Our preceding discussion of genre raises the question of the identities that language learners are able to assert in online discussion. For some learners, adopting a speaking position appropriate to the genre may involve investing oneself in an L2 identity — an identity in the second/foreign language — that is unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or indeed unimaginable.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Learners’ Participation Strategies

Once upon a time there were four learners of French and their names were Fleurie, Laura, Eleanor and David. They hopped onto the Internet from Britain and the US and clicked their way across Le Monde (more precisely its online discussion pages). Fleurie and Eleanor, who were good little students, looked for penpals in order to improve their French, whilst Laura and David were much more concerned by vigorous debates about racism and cultural imperialism. In fact, David didn’t even manage to write in French. Yet of the four, Laura and David were those who were warmly welcomed to stay and contribute, whilst Fleurie and Eleanor left, apparently discouraged.

Debate or Conversation? French and British Public Internet Discussion

Having explored beliefs about culture’s manifestations online let us pursue the question of cultural and generic convention and their interactions with each other and with technology through the particular example of the mass-media public discussion forums introduced in Chapter 1. We present two snapshots of the forums, at particular points in their evolution to show, firstly, variation across cultures (this chapter) and variation over time, which does not, however, result in the erasure of cross-cultural difference (the following chapter).

Plus ca change ...: Are Online Cultural Differences Fading Over Time?

Cultures and the practices through which they manifest themselves are not static, but under constant renegotiation. Thus genres are not immutable; they continue to evolve. In the case of Internet discussion it could even be argued that, as a relatively new mode of interaction, it is somewhat more susceptible to change than more traditional forms of communication.

Culture and Online Communication

Approaching the year 2000, a chorus of complaints arose about the lack of research on intercultural CMC. Jarvenpaa and Leidner’s (1998) lament that ‘[w]hile there is a wealth of research on computer-mediated communication and research on cross-cultural communication, there is a paucity of research on cross-cultural computer-mediated communication’ was echoed by Hart (1998); Kim, Hearn, Hatcher, and Weber (1999, p. 144); Ess (2001, p. 9); St Amant (2002, p. 212); and in Herring’s (2001a) evaluation that ‘there has been little scholarship that evaluates critically the effects of computer networking on the world’s cultures’ (p. viii).