Tracing the development of intercultural competence in telecollaborative interaction: An analysis of evaluative language in eTandem exchanges

Abstract

Numerous studies have been conducted into telecollaborative eTandem exchanges and their potential to foster the development of participants’ intercultural competence. These studies have included content analyses of learner interaction, end-of-project questionnaires, interviews and attitudinal surveys. However, studies that analyse the development of intercultural competence in telecollaboration through a linguistically grounded approach are still scarce. To address this gap in the literature, in this chapter we analyse how forty American and Spanish university students used evaluative language in their samples of attitudinal objectives (Byram, 1997) taking Vinagre and Corral’s (2017) data and findings as a starting point for this analysis. Preliminary results show that the participants used similar evaluative tokens both in their interaction and attitudinal objectives, which could be understood as a strategy to converge by adapting to their partners’ communicative practices