Article In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Perspectives on virtual intercultural communication in the Irish-based technology sector

A corpus-based analysis of linguistic clusters

ORCID logo | University of Limerick
ORCID logo | University of Limerick

This mixed-methods study investigates English-medium oral online intercultural communication within the Irish-based international technology sector. The initial phase of the research consisted of a survey investigating participants’ (N = 113) experiences of virtual communication. Following the survey, to linguistically investigate such interactions, the International Virtual Team Corpus (IVT Corpus) was created. This corpus consists of approximately 80,000 words of transcribed speech gathered from 30 web-based recordings of meetings, which include both Irish and international colleagues speaking in English. This paper reports on some of the relevant quantitative and qualitative survey results, uncovering both preconceptions and embodied experiences of international virtual meetings. Following this, it presents corpus-based results of significant frequency and keyword clusters that provide a window into the discourse patterns of international virtual team meetings in this sector. Some tentative implications and applications for work-based virtual communication are explored in the closing discussion.

Keywords: engineering technology discourse, intercultural communication, online communication, spoken business discourse, virtual team meetings
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research
    • 2.1International spoken business discourse
    • 2.2Empirical spoken discourse studies
    • 2.3International Virtual Team (IVT) communication
  • 3.Study design
  • 4.The survey
    • 4.1Survey methodology
    • 4.2Participant profiles
    • 4.3Results and discussion
      • 4.3.1General characteristics and participation in IVT meetings
      • 4.3.2Successful and unsuccessful interactions in IVT meetings
  • 5.The IVT Corpus
    • 5.1Methodology
    • 5.2Results
      • 5.2.13-word frequency clusters in the IVT Corpus
      • 5.2.22-word key clusters: IVT Corpus terminology
      • 5.2.34-word key clusters: Articulated turn-taking, nominations, and thanks
  • 6.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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