Intercultural virtual communication and novice learners: Attitudes, perception, and beliefs

Understanding Attitude in Intercultural Virtual Communication focuses on attitude, the “willingness to explore, learn and participate in online networks, collaborate with others, share ideas, knowledge, media and contribute to the collective construction of knowledge” (Helm & Guth, 2010, p. 81) in telecollaborative encounters. Recent studies have suggested that, to ensure successful virtual collaboration, interpersonal factors such as identity, rapport and trust are essential and the development of these factors relies heavily on the attitudinal dimension and how participants chose to reflect it in their interaction (Oskoz & Gimeno-Sanz, in press; Vinagre & Corral, 2018; Vinagre & Corral, forthcoming). In telecollaboration, research on the participants’ use of attitudinal resources has been mostly content-based and Byram’s (1997) model of intercultural competence the approach most widely used for analysis. More recently, studies have looked at attitude from a linguistic perspective, and frameworks such as appraisal (Martin & White, 2005) that examine L2 learners’ attitudes and ideological positions have been employed. Despite these efforts, research in this field is still scarce and this volume aims to further explore this topic by gathering contributions in which a variety of approaches and perspectives have been taken to investigate attitude in virtual communication.