Using Telecollaboration to Mitigate Intercultural Misunderstandings: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Sino-American College Students Virtual Exchange

Abstract

In the context of globalized foreign language education, cross-cultural virtual exchange has become an increasingly indispensable part of Chinese universities, but misunderstandings still arise easily in online intercultural communication. This study explores how such misunderstandings were negotiated in structured virtual exchanges between Chinese learners of English and American students. This analysis utilized Bryam’s model of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) together with Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA). Over the course of the project, participants interacted through Zoom meetings, Padlet discussions, and email exchanges and they were allowed to choose culturally relevant topics to discuss. Iterative NVivo coding of attitudinal, knowledge-based, and skill-related dimensions identified recurrent misunderstanding patterns, while AntConc corpus analysis mapped linguistic ambiguities. The findings show that misunderstandings were rarely resolved through verbal explanation alone. Instead, participants drew on multiple resources, including written comments, visual materials, emojis, tone, and other paralinguistic cues, to clarify meaning and reconsider initial assumptions. The different platforms also played different roles: asynchronous spaces supported fuller explanation and reflection, while synchronous interaction enabled immediate questioning and repair. Taken together, the study suggests that multimodal telecollaboration can create conditions for learners to work through misunderstandings and to develop ICC in a gradual and interactional way. The study also offers practical implications for the design of online intercultural exchange in higher education.