REQUISITOS DE CUSTODIA DE DATOS
PARTE A: ESPECIFICACIONES TÉCNICAS
In the last two studies (Study III and Study IV), the students are engaged in intercultural exchange interaction based on content based discussions. The difference between the students stands out as the driving force for the dis- cussions, creating a dynamic environment. For the students, the web-based setting offers a diverse language learning environment. In the two studies, English is not the mother tongue for any of the students at the Swedish university and the interaction takes place in English as the lingua franca, which is commonly the case on the web (Seidlhofer, Breiteneder, & Pitzl, 2006). The texts and postings are all in English apart from some of the poems in Study III, where the original Swedish poems are given together with English translations. Concerning language differences, the issue of how to deal with translations and negotiating meaning is frequently identi- fied by the students.
The blog environment in Study III caters for inviting to commentary and to descriptions of events. The web-based activities are driven by the assignments of interpreting poetry and how discussion themes are brought up. Disciplinary background and cultural belonging is topicalized in the interaction in the two intercultural exchange studies. The analysis of the postings demonstrates how the students position themselves by mention- ing their disciplinary and cultural background to the peers. It is as much the collaborative efforts as the specific backgrounds of the participants that are important for negotiating meaning of poems. For these students, trying to make sense of others’ perspectives is a complex matter connected equally to single conditions in the poems as well as to an array of intertwining cultural aspects brought forth in the postings. For Study III, which takes place in a limited period of time of less than two weeks when the students are engaged in the reflective discussion of poems, the students display pro- gress in referring to both cultural aspects as well as negotiating meaning of the themes in the poems, such as man’s connection to nature, selection of paths of life and issues concerning death. The analysis shows that students are capable of giving valid response to each other when analyzing complex topics jointly.
INTERCULTURAL EXCHANGES AS PART OF
A PEDAGOGICAL DESIGN
In the last two studies (Study III and Study IV), the students are engaged in intercultural exchange interaction based on content based discussions. The difference between the students stands out as the driving force for the dis- cussions, creating a dynamic environment. For the students, the web-based setting offers a diverse language learning environment. In the two studies, English is not the mother tongue for any of the students at the Swedish university and the interaction takes place in English as the lingua franca, which is commonly the case on the web (Seidlhofer, Breiteneder, & Pitzl, 2006). The texts and postings are all in English apart from some of the poems in Study III, where the original Swedish poems are given together with English translations. Concerning language differences, the issue of how to deal with translations and negotiating meaning is frequently identi- fied by the students.
The blog environment in Study III caters for inviting to commentary and to descriptions of events. The web-based activities are driven by the assignments of interpreting poetry and how discussion themes are brought up. Disciplinary background and cultural belonging is topicalized in the interaction in the two intercultural exchange studies. The analysis of the postings demonstrates how the students position themselves by mention- ing their disciplinary and cultural background to the peers. It is as much the collaborative efforts as the specific backgrounds of the participants that are important for negotiating meaning of poems. For these students, trying to make sense of others’ perspectives is a complex matter connected equally to single conditions in the poems as well as to an array of intertwining cultural aspects brought forth in the postings. For Study III, which takes place in a limited period of time of less than two weeks when the students are engaged in the reflective discussion of poems, the students display pro- gress in referring to both cultural aspects as well as negotiating meaning of the themes in the poems, such as man’s connection to nature, selection of paths of life and issues concerning death. The analysis shows that students are capable of giving valid response to each other when analyzing complex topics jointly.
Collaborating in the form of an intercultural peer review exchange in a wiki, as shown in Study IV, allows students to be part of a process of com- menting peer partners’ texts. The data shows that the students gradually embrace skills of interpreting events from other cultures by communicat- ing online. It is also stressed by Helm and Guth (2010) that critical cultural, literacy and language awareness are important aspects of learning to master expressions of other cultures than one’s own. In the interviews, the stu- dents report that they enhance their own process of understanding dimen- sions of feedback when engaging in the intercultural peer review exchange from someone from another country, with another language background and disciplinary field. The variation in peer review, receiving feedback from and giving feedback to different people, brings diversity to text revision. Even though not all comments are regarded as useful by the students, they find it valuable to see how their texts are received by native English speak- ing peers as well as their own non-native English speaking peers. In a web- based environment, the planning of the pedagogical peer review setting is an essential component in order to give a significant number of rich com- ments backed up by argumentative motivation. Careful preparation prior to peer reviewing is also something that is underlined in existing research (e.g., Arnold, Docate, & Kost, 2009; Chang, 2012; Guardardo & Shi, 2007; Min, 2006). Through the intercultural exchange, the students work on their commenting and communication skills. One aspect is how the feedback is enacted, embracing norms from the collaborating peer groups. The out- comes show that the students found it vital to consider how to approach and deal with ways of giving peer response to persons with different back- grounds.
The results (Study IV) display examples corresponding to the frame- work of Intercultural Communicative Competence (Byram, 1997) as devel- oped to embrace online contexts (e.g., Dooly, 2011, Elola & Oskoz, 2008, Liaw, 2006) and also the areas of new online literacies and language learning (Helm & Guth, 2010). The students participate in the online environment where they interpret events, relate them to their own culture and critically evaluate the interaction. These observations can be understood in terms of Rogoff (1995) that learning implies growing into a certain type of partici- pation pattern.