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only presuming how their partners thought about their school lunch but also asking them whether or not her presumption was correct. These two strategies of making presumption and asking for confirmation were what she learnt from Daphne’s comments. Therefore, it was possible for learners more willing to adopt different ways and the new skills they acquired from other teammates if they had high motivation for the intercultural communication.
To sum up, the researcher observed that both the learning styles and familiarity with the intercultural tasks was related with the three students’ behaviors in the intercultural communication. According to Chao (2001), if learners’ previous
experience can support the new concept or challenge they meet in the learning tasks, their existing understanding can connected to the new learning. They may feel more interested in interacting with international partners when the learning environment is consistent with their learning preference or the learning content is what they are familiar with.
The students’ intercultural communicative competence and their perception of using Internet and multimedia applications
In addition to having various reactions to the online international communication content, the three students had different perceptions about Internet use and multimedia resources. Their ideas about how to use Internet and multimedia also affected their intercultural communication development. For example, Daphne developed the
long-term intercultural communication with her teachers in England with her mother’s encouragement. The process of developing intercultural friendship through email exchange with her British teacher made her understand that developing close
relationship on Internet was built on the frequent conversation with mutual trust and long-term sharing of daily experience. Therefore, in order to develop close
relationships with the international partners, Daphne spent lots of time writing as
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many details about her life as she could in the blog comments and her multimedia works with high degree of affective involvement.
Compared with Daphne’s enthusiasm about sharing lots of information with people, Brian used Internet for entertainment. Brian’s perception of using Internet was also related with his early experience. When Brian was little, his brother taught him how to search online games, funny pictures and video on the Internet and shared the web links with friends with emails. Since then, he preferred to use Internet to find some multimedia games or videos and exchange the multimedia resources with his family and friends. He did not like text-based communication with people on the Internet. Therefore, in the intercultural project, although Brian could respond to the international partners’ questions fast and shared his personal thoughts, he did not like to spend much time writing comments, which he thought was not necessary. Instead, he focused more on exchanging useful links with the international partners. For example, he developed frequent interaction with the Italian teacher, Andrea who was willing to share many web links with Brian. For Brian, the interaction with Andrea was similar with how he used to interact with his family and friend. However, because he had already had deep-rooted habits of using Internet as the tool for online games, funny videos and games, he did not take the opportunity of interacting with
international partners seriously to develop more intercultural communication competences.
Teresa perception of Internet usage was she learnt in the computer class:
searching for useful information by using different Internet applications such as Google maps. Because Teresa seldom used the Internet at home, she had not had any online communication before this project and this was first time for her to
communicate with people on the blog. Therefore, for Teresa, the Internet was more like a tool for acquiring knowledge, not for personal communication or emotional
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sharing. Although at Phase 1 she was interested in the project because it was quite different from the English learning courses she had taken in the past, soon she became frustrated because she did not know how to maintain the conversation through blog comments, which was an important skill required for this project. It showed that Teresa’s perception of Internet use did not help her to totally fit in the blog
communication. However, as Teresa observed more and more other local students’
instances of interacting with international partners, the change of her perception of Internet use could be seen in her multimedia works in which Teresa gradually
developed some social practices and she shared more about her own life experiences.
It showed that learners’ perception of Internet use would change as they observed how other people interact in an Internet environment and created their own intercultural communication experience. Besides, because of the experience of watching her father, who was a video designer, edit videos at home, she had the impression that interesting photos and videos could tell a good story. Thus, as she was getting familiar with the online multimedia resources in the intercultural project, she could utilize these resources to share her school life with the international partners since she thought the pictures or animations could explain more about her life than text messages.
According to the analysis of the three students’ Internet use and how they acquired intercultural communication abilities, it illustrated that the users’ previous experiences and perceptions of using Internet played an important role in how their intercultural communicative competence developed, just as Throne proposed:
Internet communication tools are not neutral media. Rather, individual and collective experience is shown to influence the ways students engage in Internet-mediated communication with consequential outcomes for both the processes and products of language development (Throne, 2003, p1).
The statement showed that students’ Internet habits made them have various attitudes toward the Internet and toward the roles they play in the Internet
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communication learning. Thus, it made sense that three students with different ideas about Internet developed different communicative genres while producing their messages on the blog.
Besides, parents’ influence on learners’ Internet use was also obvious. Although all of the three students were first exposed to the Internet activities or multimedia applications at home, Daphne’s motivation and performance for intercultural
communication was better than the other two students. The key difference might have been parental mediation. Some studies (Chan & Shen, 2004；Lee & Chae, 2007；Yen et al., 2007) indicated that the more effective family guidance parents offered, the more frequently the children would be involved in online communication for
educational purposes. Teresa and Brian did not get much parental guidance when they considered Internet the tool only for specific information or entertainment information.
As for Daphne, she obviously gained more support of using the Internet as
communication tools from her mother. She paid attention to Daphne’s learning and also played a critical role in assisting her to get involved in intercultural
communication with her English teachers on the Internet. It illustrates that family guidance for children’s Internet use can improve their web-based intercultural communication development.