I just attended the session on "E-politeness strategies and the Development of Interculturality". Participants in the virtual strand may not be able to hear the entire presentation, as the presenter was not cabled up all the time.
Having done politeness research, but not in CMC environments, I was very interested to hear this presentation. Meei-Ling Liaw used a very interesting methodology to identify politeness strategies, which I have to look up (Bretag 2006: keyword / phrases approach).
I actually cannot remember the specifics of her results now, but a few questions came to my mind later - the main one being: In finding reasons for the results, how do you delineate
- cultural influences (the people communicating online in this instance were Taiwanese students and U.S. American pre-service teachers). Culture is a mindfield anyway for any politeness research!
- interlanguage and English as lingua Franca: While the Taiwanese students were communicating in what is essentially a foreign language for them, the U.S. students were communicating in their native language. However, English was also used as a lingua franca between them
- the specific affordances of the CMC environment
I would be really interested to do politeness research in a CMC environment, specifically focusing on interlanguage. Does anybody know previous studies in this area?
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Hi, I also attended that session and I wondered whether evaluating student interaction by looking at politeness strategies was the way to go. Whenever I do an intercultural CMC project I ask the question, what was it that produced the most favorable results in terms of amount of interaction and level of production of the students? She wasn´t clear, or perhaps, her results weren´t convincing, as to whether the more politeness strategies used meant more interaction or better interaction. Anyway, it was interesting and thought provoking in terms of research question and methodology.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to your final comment/question, are you thinking that the amount of politeness or the use of politeness strategies could be correlated with an increase in language learning which you might measure in terms of linguistic (sintactic and lexical, perhaps) complexity? Sounds like you have a good research question to begin with! It would be an interesting approach and I don´t think I´ve seen it before.
-Emily Gillen, U of Calgary