Telecollaboration : Identity, Gender and Differences

1. Telecollaboration: Identity, Gender and Differences Leila Dacosta UniversidadeEstadualPaulista Universidade de Miami

2. Ongoing Doctoral Research; • Part of the Teletandem Brasil Project –UNESP SP www.teletandembrasil.org • Qualitative research, guided by the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis and Sociocultural Theory.

3. Questions that guide the research How and to what extent: • 1.The dynamics of same/different gender partnerships in the context of American and Brazilian Universities; • 2.Divergent and Convergent Gender Ideologies and discourses; present themselves and affect the teaching/learning/ of the telecollaborators from Brazil and the United States.

4. Objectives Analyze the oral interactions of same/different gender and country partnerships according to: • Style, • Intertextuality and negotiation of difference (cooperation and alterity), • Social actors (power relationships), • Political Construction or Social Goods (image and face), • Different Worlds (typical narratives of a social group), • Divergent and Convergent Gender Ideologies and Discourses .

5. Methodology • Participants: 34 college students from two universities: one American and a Brazilian; • Ten sessions were video recorded in the Fall of 2011; • There are 8 same gender partnerships : four feminine/feminine and four masculine/masculine; • There are 8 different gender partnerships: four have the combination: Brazilian (f)/American (m) and four Brazilian (m)/American (f).

6. Questionnaires The participants answered two questionnaires: • 1. The first questionnaire was about Gender Ideology and Discourses. • 2. The second one was about transcultural aspects of the partnerships, preferred topics of conversation, preferences regarding the partners’ gender , comments, impressions and session evaluation.

7. Preliminary Results • Among the 17 participants from the American university, 16 speak Spanish: 15 are bilinguals and 1 speaks Spanish as a second language. • In this context, there is an imbalance of power. On one hand a good amount of communication takes place between Spanish and Portuguese Speakers. On the other hand, when learning the target language (Portuguese and English) the bilinguals that learn Portuguese have an advantage over their partners because of the Spanish/Portuguese similarities. • Another source of imbalance is that the American university students belong to a regular class with grades, the class is more structured and the Brazilian university students do not have grades. The participants attend the sessions in the lab and get a certificate.

8. Preliminary Results • 28 participants answered the question about their partner’s gender. 15 prefer to interact with the same gender, 7 do not have any preferences and six prefer the opposite gender; • For the same and different gender partnerships the preferred topics are different; • The masculine/masculine partnerships were not argumentative, different from Jeong and Davidson-Shivers’ study from 2003.They were careful in the first sessions and later had positive results as far as collaboration and learning.

9. Fairclough Definitions Major types of text meaning: • Action – Genres – doing things with language; • Representation – Discourses – language and the sociocultural and historical aspects of a social group; • Identification - Personal Styles - judgement – authority.

10. American and Brazilian on CAPOEIRA • B- I have never seen capoeira live. I do not think we have here in my city. I have seen it on TV. • A- No? Why not? • B- I have no idea. • A - Is it really popular over there? • B- Actually, not very much. Not too many people play it. • A- Is it something that every kind of people do? • B -Ah, no, not really. It is more famous in Bahia. In São Paulo it is not that common. WHO chooses these topics? • A- The professor. • B- A complicated topic! Capoeira. And it is not very interesting! • A-I think it is more popular here, isn’t it?

11. Teaching/Learning Implications This project has important implications for future teaching and learning in transcultural virtual contexts: • It will inform researchers, mediators and telecollaborators about the negotiation and interaction of subjetivities, sociocultural background, actions performed during an online exchange, gender and gender ideologies. It will also contribute to aspects of cooperation/alterity, face, power relations, conversational styles and the negotiation of differences and singularities.

12. Referências • BRAMMERTZ, H. Aprendizagem autônoma de línguas em Tandem:desenvolvimento de um conceito. In: DELLILE;HEINZ,K. E CHICHORRO, A. (Eds). Aprendizagem de línguas em Tandem. Lisboa: Colibri, 2002. • FAIRCLOUGH, N. Analysing Discourse: textual analysis for social research.New York: Routledge, 2003. • GEE, J.P. How to do discourse analysis. New York: Routledge, 2011 • JEONG, A. E DAVIDSON-SHIVERS, G. Gender Interaction in online debate: look who is arguing with whom. American Edlucational Research. Chicago April 21-25, 2003. • KRAMSCH, C. . Language and Culture. Oxford New York: Oxford Universitly Press, 1998. • TELLES, JOÃO A. TELETANDEM:Um contexto virtual, autônomo e colaborativo para aprendizagem de línguas estrangeiras no século XXI. Campinas , SP: Pontes Editores, 2009. • ___________ Teletandem and Performativity. (2013 forthcoming).