Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Trouble with Cyberpragmatics

2017; IGI Global; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.4018/ijcallt.2017010104

2155-7098

Marina Orsini-Jones, Elwyn Lloyd, Michael Cribb, Fiona Lee, Gwenola Bescond, Amine Ennagadi, Brenda Ivonne García,

Discourse Analysis in Language Studies

This paper reports on MexCo (Mexico-Coventry), an ongoing online intercultural learning project underpinned by action research. Its aim is to embed internationalisation into the curriculum of the institutions involved in order to promote citizenship competences, online intercultural communicative competence in particular, among both students and staff. The integration of telecollaboration into the curriculum has highlighted problematic aspects of the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC), such as cyberpragmatics (Yus, 2011). Cyberpragmatics is intended here as the skill of understanding others' intended meanings in computer-mediated communication. It is suggested that cyberpragmatics in online intercultural learning exchanges is a ‘Threshold Concept' (TC) (Meyer & Land, 2005, p. 375), i.e. a key concept that is troublesome to understand as it is challenging to the identity of the learner, but which could open new learning horizons to the students who do manage to grasp it.