CTIS Research Seminar - Exploring Communicative Practice and ‘Groupness’ in a Virtual Intercultural Intervention (Dr Milene Mendes de Oliveira, Newcastle University)
| Dates: | 6 February 2025 |
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| Times: | 14:00 - 15:30 |
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| What is it: | Talk |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Speaker: | Dr Milene Mendes de Oliveira |
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Dr Milene will deliver an online talk, which is organised in a hybrid format. Please register for online participation here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAlfuCtrjIrH9OekN7fkoGmxRdY2Rn78Yc4.
Abstract: Intercultural communication often takes place in fleeting contexts in which speakers have limited common ground (Clark, 1996). This lack of common ground may even be aggravated in virtual settings. This talk is based on the findings of a study dealing with an intercultural intervention: a collaborative game aiming at developing intercultural competence (Bolten 2015). The game was played by seventy-five higher-education students from different countries who used English as a lingua franca (ELF) in Zoom interactions over a series of five virtual encounters, resulting in more than fifty hours of video-recorded data. These groups which came together for the purpose of the game are regarded as transient ELF groups (Mortensen, 2017; Pitzl, 2018), and their emerging sharedness is the analytical focal point of the study. This emerging sharedness is of interest to the discipline of intercultural communication, where it can be described as the emergence of a team culture (Conti et al., 2022). The analyses combined the sociolinguistic focus on ‘practice’ and the ethnomethodological focus on ‘actions’ (Blommaert, 2019) and also took into account the conversation-analytic perspective on transience (Hazel, 2017) and interactional histories (Schmidt & Deppermann, 2023). The identified practices—e.g., self-deprecating comments and endorsement displays, among others—feature as empirical evidence for the emerging “groupness” (Blommaert, 2019) in some of the analyzed teams. The findings will be followed by a discussion on how sociolinguistics and ethnomethodology can offer complementary tools for analyzing intercultural communication in transient settings.
Speaker
Dr Milene Mendes de Oliveira
Role: Lecturer in Applied Linguistics
Organisation: Newcastle University
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
A214
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
