Engagement and Attitude in Telecollaboration: Topic and Cultural Background Effects

This study examines the linguistic resources by which foreign language (L2) learners express their ideological positions in online discussions taking place in a telecollaborative encounter during one semester. More specifically, the study attempts to decipher how L2 learners discuss and argue their points of view regarding their first culture, their second culture, and the topic in general, depending on the issue under discussion (immigration and nationalism or patriotism) and to the country where the learners were based (US or Spain). Twenty-four learners, organized into six groups, each with two students from the US and two from Spain, participated in three online forums. For the analysis, learners' postings were subjected to quantitative and qualitative content analysis applying two discourse-semantic subsystems of the Appraisal framework, Engagement--the linguistic resources used to reflect the writer's position and willingness to recognize alternative positions--and Attitude--the linguistic resources used to indicate positive or negative assessment of people, places, things, and states of affairs. This study concludes that there were clear differences in the discursive styles between both sets of learners and topics. Overall, for instance, the learners employed more monoglossic statements when discussing nationalism or patriotism rather than immigration and Spain-based learners made more use of judgment markers than their US-based counterparts did.