A Design for Intercultural Exchange – An Analysis of Engineering Students’ Interaction with English Majors in a Poetry Blog

Book chapter, 2011

Web based writing platforms allowing for exchanges across the world are increasingly being used in education. These recent forms of textual practice are highly related to conditions offered by the technology, allowing users, who previously were primarily consumers, to become producers of text. This chapter investigates student interaction over a blog in an intercultural student exchange between native speakers and nonnative speakers of English in higher education analysing and interpreting poetry. The groups of students involved in this study belong not only to different academic disciplines, but also differ in terms of nationality and language background. In the blog posts, the students’ cultural voices are heard, offering a meeting between very contrasting groups. Scrutinising the student postings, the threaded discussions show ways that students thematise content and meaning in the poems. The results show that there are a number of features at play in an intercultural environment where language and translation issues are prominent parts of the student discussions, offering extended perspectives to the students’ initial views. Collaborative efforts in such a diverse environment are important when negotiating meaning and extending students’ understanding of poetry.