Linguistic perspectives on the development of intercultural competence in telecollaboration

It is widely reported (e.g. Belz & Muller-Hartmann, 2002, Kern, 1996; Kinginger, in press; Warschauer & Kern, 2000) that the goals of telecollaborative language study are the development of foreign language (FL) lingusic competence and the facilitation of intercultural competence (e.g. Bausch, Christ, Krumm, 1997; Bredella Delanoy, 1999; Bryam, 1997; Harden & Witte, 2000). Whereas evaluations of the impact of telecollaboration of FL linguistic competence have been based on structural descriptions of learner discourse from the earliest days of research in this field (e.g. Beauvois, 1992; Chun, 1994; Kelm, 1992; Kern, 1995; Pelletieri, 2000; Sotillo, 2000; Warschauer, 1996), discussions of intercultural competence in the same configuration have been characterized primarily in alinguistic terms. These have included analyst-sensitive content analyses of learner interaction in telecollaboration, post-semester interviews with learners who have participated in telecollaborative projects, and attitudinal surveys of these same learners (e.g. Fischer, 1998; Furstenberg, Levet, English, Maillet, 2001; Lomicka, 2001; Muller-Hartmann, 1999; von der Emde, Schneider, Kotter, 2001; Warschauer, 1998; see, however, Belz, 2001; Belz & Muller-Hartmann, 2003). In general, the fields of foreign language learning and teaching (FLL&T) have neither advocated nor presented linguistically critical interpretations of the development of intercultural competence in telecollaboration. In this paper, I present a detailed case study of the development of intercultural competence (or lack thereof) in a German-American e-mail partnership by examining the electronic interaction produced in this exchange within the framework of appraisal theory (e.g. Eggins Slade, 1997; Martin, 2000; White, 1998), a Hallidayian-inspired linguistic approach to the investigation of evaluative language.