Intercultural exchanges in the blogosphere

This paper reports on a semester-long blog project in which a group of US third-year university students studying Chinese as a foreign language collaborated with a group of Chinese native speakers enrolled in a university in Taiwan. Specifically, this study investigated the language learners’ reactions to learning the Chinese language and culture through blogging, and examined the presence of intercultural competence in blog exchanges using Byram’s (2000) intercultural competence guidelines. Data included blog entries, pre and post-blogging surveys, and informal discussions with the participants. The results showed that: (1) the language learners had a positive experience in the blog project with many Chinese language and culture gains, and (2) the Taiwan and the US groups’ instances of intercultural competence fell within different categories in Byram’s (2000) guidelines, with the Taiwan group reflecting their role as Chinese culture experts and the US group reflecting their role as culture learners of Chinese.