Abstract
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been seen as offering a way to sensitize language learners to heteroglossia in all its forms: varieties of linguistic codes and styles, varieties of opinions and ideological points of view, diversity of semiotic meaning-making modalities—all of which are difficult to instantiate through one single teacher in a classroom. Thus, CMC has been touted as an ideal pedagogic solution to an age-old problem: How to put foreign language learners in dialogue with genuine native speakers to experience this heteroglossia? CMC, however, does not always deliver what it promises. Drawing upon an ethnographic analysis of in-classroom observations, online discourse, and learner reflections, this chapter attempts to conceptualize and describe a manner of online language that is neither the multivoicedness that Bakhtin called heteroglossia nor the authoritative discourse he presented as its antithesis, but echoings and mirrorings that turn learners back on themselves.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Walther defines hyperpersonal communication as communication that is “more socially desirable than we tend to experience in parallel FtF [face-to-face] interaction” (Walther 1996, p. 17).
- 3.
Throughout this chapter, we use the term “heteroglossic learning” in order to refer to intercultural language learning that substantially benefits from the conditions of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia as outlined in Sect. 9.3.1 1: learners’ L2 knowledge gained through conscious practice and reflexive awareness of (1) cognition as embodied, (2) language as constitutive of reality, (3) learners themselves as maturing in a context of competing ideologies, and (4) the irreducibility of differences between Self and Other in dialogue.
- 4.
For more on Le français en (première) ligne, see the project website: http://w3.u-grenoble3.fr/fle-1-ligne/index.html (in French).
- 5.
Since 2002, a number of affiliated researchers from French, Australian, Spanish, Japanese, and American institutional contexts have participated in the collection and analysis of data for various aims. Publications include a study of the mixed role of tutor/teachers in telecollaborative lessons (Dejean-Thircuir and Mangenot 2006), an examination of the micro- and meso-level constraints and degrees of freedom available to learners and tutors (Develotte 2008), an analysis of the participatory structures influencing the character of online verbal interaction (Mangenot 2008), and the conceptual development of the suite of socio-affective, pedagogical, and multimedia competences required of tutors online (Guichon 2009). Data appearing in this chapter were collected in Berkeley by the lead author (Malinowski) as well as the project’s principal investigator at the Berkeley site, the French class instructor, and four undergraduate research apprentices; analysis derives significantly from Malinowski (2011).
- 6.
As a short homework assignment near the end of their online tutorials, students were required to respond to the following prompt: “Draw ‘Tuesdays’ with your tutors. The drawing should be a depiction of your personal experience of these interactions. What do you see? Who’s there in the computer lab (your partner, your tutors)? What’s the lab like? How do you feel? What do you think about? This is an assignment that’s personal, subjective, affective. You can include images or words in order to talk about your associations, your emotions. You’re not obliged to be artists! Have fun with it!” Our analysis of these drawings is informed in a general sense by the tradition of visual analysis in the ethnographic tradition (e.g., Berger 1973; Collier and Collier 1986; Pink 2007) and specifically during final project interviews with respect to the notion of “transduction” of meaning across communicative modes (Kress 2003; Nelson 2006), as students in pairs verbally narrated their own visual representations.
- 7.
In her interview, Ann recounted, “it was just really cool to be able to talk to someone and communicate with someone and have someone, like, (1.5) look you in the eye (laughing) … it was just impossible for me in France to even (1) think about that so it was really cool.”
- 8.
Ann had said, “I think a lotta times, like, just because I’m kind of ingrained ingrained with the whole idea of, like, (1) how the French male is (.5), like, kinda removed, not talking that much, and not looking that much. (.5) Like it—sometimes I did kinda forget that I was talking to a French male. ’Cause it was just so, like it’s so foreign to me, to do that (.5) that…I did kind of have to remember, like, this person is in another country; it’s not just another French student that I’m talking to, who’s in like Chicago or something.”
- 9.
Corroborating this, her partner Eduardo pointed to the fact that he had included the phrase “interférence du bruit” (noise interference) among the eight summative phrases he wrote on his drawing.
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Malinowski, D., Kramsch, C. (2014). The Ambiguous World of Heteroglossic Computer-Mediated Language Learning. In: Blackledge, A., Creese, A. (eds) Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy. Educational Linguistics, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7856-6_9
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