Negotiating Local Norms in Online Communication

Abstract

This chapter investigates norms of English usage in a community of novice students on a net-based MA programme. They communicated in academic seminars using textchat. They were found to develop their own norms for using reduced forms to speed up communication. Their teachers, who in the Vietnamese and Bangladeshi native cultures of the students should have been given great respect, did not have much influence on the norm-setting process, and even were addressed very informally in the discussions. The author argues that this is an affordance of net-based education that the discourse community sets its own norms of English usage, despite the members' lack of experience.