Abstract
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.
About the authors
Ping Liu, Ph.D. is Professor of The Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, and Professor of English for International Business at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, P. R. China. She has published one monograph and several articles in Journal of Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Pragmatics and Society, Pragmatics and Cognition, and East Asian Pragmatics. Her research interests include metapragmatics, interpersonal pragmatics, and Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF).
Xiaoye You, Ph.D. is Liberal Arts Professor of English and Asian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University and Yunshan Chair Professor at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. Specialized in multilingual writing, comparative rhetoric, and World Englishes, he has published three monographs on teaching writing in transnational contexts: Writing in the Devil’s Tongue: A History of English Composition in China; Cosmopolitan English and Transliteracy; Inventing the World Grant University: Chinese International Students’ Mobilities, Literacies, and Identities.
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.
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