The purpose of this study was to understand the nature of the discourse students used in their relationships in an intercultural virtual learning community. The students were undergraduates from the Global Leadership Center at Ohio University in the United States and from an English Department in a university in Thailand. The study described the discourse the students used in their relationships in their course computer-mediated communication and examined how their discourse was similar or different according to their cultural backgrounds and other factors. The study also explored how the students used technology in their relationships.
Students from the course were chosen for this study based on their feeling a sense of community in the course, their continued communication with each other past course completion, and observation data. Three teams were studied in-depth, with a total of seven American and six Thai students.
Questions for this study included:
1. What was the nature of the discourse used in relationships between students in an intercultural virtual learning community?
2. Did the nature of the discourse used in relationships between students in an intercultural virtual learning community differ between students from different cultures? and if so, how? What other factors in addition to culture might have influenced the students’ discourse?
3. What strategies did the students engage in to use technology to form and maintain relationships?
Discourse analysis was the primary research methodology used for this study and was supplemented with interview and observation data. Following the guidelines outlined by Herring (2004), concepts of intercultural virtual relationships and language characterizing those concepts were identified in the literature. These concepts and language characteristics provided a preliminary basis for the analysis of the students’ computer-mediated communication, using qualitative software for coding. A final coding scheme emerged.
Analysis indicated that all students and teams demonstrated consideration in their communication. The three main areas of consideration found were interest in teammate and culture, support for teammates, and communicating with the teammates’ language in mind. Different teams and different students conveyed consideration in a variety of ways. The Thai and American students exhibited more similarities in their discourse than differences. Culture may have played a role in the differences, but many other potential influences were found. Strategies not previously discussed in the literature for forming relationships through technology are discussed, and teaching implications are given.