Virtual Exchange between Japan and Finland: Discourse practices of self-presentation in students’ online introductions

Virtual Exchange is a form of internationalization at home in higher education that makes it possible for students from different countries to interact and to collaborate online (O'Dowd 2018). This paper focuses on a Virtual Exchange project between a Japanese and a Finnish university in autumn 2018. The participants (N = 18) were studying English as their main subject. The main theme of the project was the comparison of the use of English in the two countries. The students worked in small Japanese-Finnish groups for the collaborative task completion, which included asynchronous (SNS) and synchronous (video-mediated) interactions.

The present study draws on the students' contributions to the first task: a self-introduction in two closed Facebook groups. In addition to a brief text in a post, the participants were asked to share a visual image of their choice, which illustrates the relationship to a certain aspect of their culture. Data was collected by taking screenshots of the students' self-introductory posts, with the consent of the participants.

Using multimodal discourse analysis, the paper explores to what extent and how the students drew on the visual image to construct their identities in the self-introductory Facebook posts. Participation in social media discourse is intertwined with identity construction and self-presentation (Georgalou 2017) and thus is a means of impression management. The findings of the present study show evidence of alignment in multimodal identity construction within each group.

References 

Georgalou, M. (2017). Discourse and Identity on Facebook. London: Bloomsbury.

O'Dowd, R. (2018). From telecollaboration to virtual exchange: State-of-the-art and the role of UNICollaboration in moving forward. Journal of Virtual Exchange, 1, 1-23