Online domains of language use: Second language learners’ experiences of virtual community and foreignness

要旨

This paper examines the use of CMC in both Japanese and English dominated domains by Australian learners of Japanese.The natural, social online communication of 12 Australian university students with 18 of their Japanese contacts was collected for a period of up to four years, resulting in a corpus of approximately 2,000 instances of blogs, e-mails, SNS interactions, chat conversations, game profiles, and mobile phone communications.To supplement this data, interviews were conducted to further explore participants' Internet communication and L2 use.These interviews, paired with evidence from the corpus of collected data, are analysed using Sealey and Carter's (2004) social realism framework in order to explore questions of language selection, identity construction and nationality, as well as what it means to be a foreigner online.In the introduction to her influential book, Life on the Screen, Turkle (1995) defined identity in a computer-mediated environment as multiple, fluid, and constituted in interaction via technology.Yet a decade later, Hewling ( 2005) argued that CMC research has often taken a narrow, nationality-based view Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou Online Domains of Language Use Language Learning & Technology 93of culture, and suggests instead that identity or identities be viewed as a site of ongoing negotiation.Such negotiation, Hewling states, is visible online in the form of CMC discourse.Thus, analysis of L2 learners' online language use across a variety of domains may provide greater insight into the nature of constructing identity via an L2 online, in particular, in terms of ethnicity, nationality, and nativeness/foreignness, and the effects of communicating in certain domains on opportunities for language learning and use. Past Research on CMCMiller and Slater (2000) criticize the first generation of Internet literature for viewing the Internet as a gigantic, placeless cyberspace.Much of this early research on CMC tended to view the Internet as a monolithic space that was somehow "more egalitarian, democratic, and liberating than face-to-face interactions" (Sproull and Kiesler, 1986;McGuire, Kiesler, & Siegel, 1987;Dubrovsky, Kiesler, & Sethna, 1991; cited in Watt, Lea, & Spears, 2002, p. 63).Simon even described the Internet as having an "inherent support of democracy" (2002, p. 101).Hanna and de Nooy categorize such views as subscribing to the borderless world (2004, p. 259) perception of Internet communication, in which the Internet is deemed to remove cultural difference.Of course, these perspectives have had an important impact on research in the areas of L2 use and acquisition also.Past research on L2 use and acquisition points to a variety of benefits of the online environment.A reduction in anxiety in comparison to face-to-face speech and greater opportunities for language production have been claimed as some of the most important implications of CMC for L2 learners.Itakura and Nakajima (2001) found that the use of CMC assisted language learners in gaining an authentic audience, provided them with the flexibility to compose e-mails at their leisure, gave them a record of communication, fostered independent learning and provided opportunities for the negotiation of meaning, which can lead to language learning.Yoshimura and Miyazoe-Wong (2005) also found that communication with NSs via CMC could help students to amend stereotypes, and Kano ( 2004) claims that such interactions can expose learners to language variation in the form of popular grammar, slang, and regional dialects.

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