Ecological Approach to Online Intercultural Exchange Between Korean and English Speakers

The study examines an online intercultural exchange between Korean college students and American college students and attempts to understand the nature of Korean and English speakers’ interactions by analyzing their interactional patterns and topics discussed through the lens of an ecological approach. Particularly, the current study aims to discover how the macro-levels of social contexts influence micro-level of individual’s online interactions. Analyzing the online writings written by the Korean and English speakers, the study identifies four frequently discussed topics, referred to as culture-, language-, career-, and personal-related episodes. Korean and English speakers had different interests that were manifested in their writings. The four topics seemed to be influenced by the social and cultural contexts. These topics were internally connected to one another, while representing the social and cultural contexts. The findings of the study suggest that an individual learner’s learning process cannot be understood solely within a local ecology but rather it should be approached within the process of the local and global contexts. Multiple factors simultaneously influence an individual’s learning process.