Intercultural Cybercommunication: Negotiation of Representations of Languages and Cultures in Multilingual Chatrooms

摘要

The creation of a global citizen, who is able to participate in the public discourse, depends on the development of plurilingual and intercultural communicative competences, supported by a physical and online mobility. The purpose of this paper is to show how the integration of chats within the teaching/learning process of English and Portuguese as foreign languages offers possibilities of developing these competences in university students from Portugal and the USA. The study will focus on the processes of negotiation of representations of languages and cultures in order to analyse the intercultural communicative and plurilingual competences in action. The data are composed of sequences of two multilingual chat sessions which occurred during a school year. In the analysis of the Internet discourse, it will be possible to observe how chatters became competent intercultural cybercommunica-tors through negotiating representations of languages as learning, affective and cultural objects.