Interpersonal meaning in a corpus of students-teachers computer-mediated communication

This study analyzes a corpus of computer-mediated interactions in English, via e-mail and on the e-learning platform Moodle, between undergraduate students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and their teachers at the University of Bologna, between 2012 and 2014. Methodologically, we move along three lines of analysis: Systemic Functional Linguistics, especially interpersonal meaning, as the model of grammar used to identify the discursive features worth analysing; politeness theory, to interpret the linguistic behaviour of students and teachers in terms of power relations and social distance; and corpus linguistics, to systematize the data and identify recurrent patterns. This study falls within an ongoing project on computer-mediated communication (CMC) and undergraduate EFL students (CO-METS: COmputer-MEdiated Teacher-Student interaction), and aims to identify features of interpersonal meaning in academic CMC, such as speech functions, modal verbs, internal/ external modification, mitigation, address forms, and grammatical metaphor. The study also analyzes medium-specific differences in the content and purpose of communication, depending on whether the e-mail or Moodle are used, and the role played by the teacher’s age and level of “digital nativeness”. As students involved in this project belong to 15 different nationalities, patterns of intercultural communication are also considered. The results show that Moodle is comparatively more interactive than the e-mail, due to its capacity to support not only teacher-student communication, but also conversations among peers, not necessarily including the teacher. In fact, a certain level of adjustment seems to occur in the students’ communicative styles depending on how active and “visible” the teacher is on the e-learning platform. Overall, the results suggest the existence of a “European classroom”, with largely common requests, problems and language behaviour across nationalities, and a higher degree of interactivity and collaborative learning on Moodle, where a hybrid, context-specific netiquette, with varying degrees of (in)formality, seems to be emerging.