Orientations to Interculturality in a Task Enhanced Virtual Exchange Setting: A Multimodal Conversation Analysis Study

Abstract

Virtual exchange practices are steadily gaining importance in the academic world. These practices are echoed in foreign language pedagogy along with its merits to interculturality. Through virtual exchange, foreign language learners have had the opportunity to interact with people in their target language and expose to intercultural communication. However, because the majority of the studies have primarily relied on retrospective data, the actual interaction in virtual exchange, which requires closer analysis, remains a gap. In addition, while there is an overemphasis on emerged cultural differences in intercultural communication studies, few studies have investigated the cultural similarities in these interactions. To address these gaps in both fields, the emic perspective of conversation analysis methodology is applied to a task-enhanced virtual exchange setting. It is aimed to document the emergence of interculturality in this video-mediated interaction and how the participants orient to this with which resources while engaging in a series of (intercultural) tasks. The data includes 10 hours of screen recordings of one virtual exchange partner (VEPs) paired as Tunisian – Turkish. The qualitative analyses revealed that the participants display orientations to interculturality. These orientations are mostly displayed through utterances of similarity and/or difference. The findings contribute to growing literature on intercultural communication by (a) maintaining the view that interculturality is a dynamic notion in a virtual exchange setting, too and (b) challenging the overemphasis in these studies related to the cultural differences by documenting mutually constructed cultural similarities. Drawing on the findings, implications are provided for virtual exchange and intercultural education.