TY - JOUR
T1 - Metapragmatic comments in web-based intercultural peer evaluation
AU - Liu, Ping
AU - You, Xiaoye
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements: This study has been supported by the project (16BYY193) “The socio-cognitive approach to metapragmatic utterances in BELF interactions,” funded by the National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Sciences, P.R. China. We would like to express our gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers and Professor Istvan Kecskes for their constructive feedback on early versions of the article. We also want to thank the late Professor Chao Zheng and students participating in the exchange for allowing us to use the data.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Peer evaluation (PE) of student writings is increasingly conducted online these days, creating unique opportunities for intercultural communication. Adopting a socio-cognitive approach and drawing on data from an online exchange program between Chinese and American university students, the study examines how revision-oriented metapragmatic comments (MPCs) are used to adjust the salience of specific contextual factors in three dimensions: information (including socio-cultural, language, and writing knowledge), situational context, and interpersonal relations. The MPCs are found to have substantiated a host of pragmatic strategies, such as patterned moves, foregrounding or backgrounding information, evidentiality markers, dispreferred second turns, and highlighting group identity. Enhancing or degrading the salience of contextual factors, the MPCs facilitate the construction of a common ground between the Chinese and American students in terms of knowledge and personal affiliation. The use of revision-oriented MPCs in PE manifests the collaborative, mutually supportive nature of web-based intercultural communication.
AB - Peer evaluation (PE) of student writings is increasingly conducted online these days, creating unique opportunities for intercultural communication. Adopting a socio-cognitive approach and drawing on data from an online exchange program between Chinese and American university students, the study examines how revision-oriented metapragmatic comments (MPCs) are used to adjust the salience of specific contextual factors in three dimensions: information (including socio-cultural, language, and writing knowledge), situational context, and interpersonal relations. The MPCs are found to have substantiated a host of pragmatic strategies, such as patterned moves, foregrounding or backgrounding information, evidentiality markers, dispreferred second turns, and highlighting group identity. Enhancing or degrading the salience of contextual factors, the MPCs facilitate the construction of a common ground between the Chinese and American students in terms of knowledge and personal affiliation. The use of revision-oriented MPCs in PE manifests the collaborative, mutually supportive nature of web-based intercultural communication.
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U2 - 10.1515/ip-2019-0003
DO - 10.1515/ip-2019-0003
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85062271789
VL - 16
SP - 57
EP - 83
JO - Intercultural Pragmatics
JF - Intercultural Pragmatics
SN - 1612-295X
IS - 1
ER -