Intercultural Communication in Virtual Environment
Abstract
In this paper we explore and describe aspects of intercultural communication in an Internet based virtual environment. In spite of a massive Anglo-American dominance, the Internet share of non-English language use and of participants from non-English speaking countries is steadily increasing (cf Flydal). Our study is based on observing spontaneous text-based communication in a potentially multilingual and multicultural setting, the Active Worlds multi-user VR system. The paper examines a number of features of this communication, such as length of contributions, languages used, origins of participants, types of introductions, topics, vocabulary and communication management.
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References
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Authors
Jens Allwood
Jens Allwood is active as a researcher and professor emeritus in projects at the University of Gothenburg. He is professor of communication studies at Strömstad Academy and part owner of the company Communication Development. He is director of the Marston Hill Intercultural Center for Quality of Life, chairman of the board of the Immigrant Institute and editor in chief of the Journal of Intercultural Communication. He has worked as a researcher and teacher in linguistics, specializing in semantics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, multimodal communication, and intercultural communication. He has coordinated and participated in a large number of national and international research projects in semantics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, studies of spoken language, multimodal communication, intercultural communication and development of research, and research education. He has more than 250 publications. At the University of Gothenburg, he has been the chairman of the department of linguistics and director of the interdisciplinary center SCCIIL (semantics, cognition, communication, information, interaction, language)
Copyright (c) 2000 Jens Allwood , Ralph Schroeder
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