Designing for cross-cultural group chat
Open Access
- Author:
- Li, Na
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- September 08, 2014
- Committee Members:
- Mary Beth Rosson, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Mary Beth Rosson, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
John Millar Carroll, Committee Member
Andrea H Tapia, Committee Member
Mary Beth Oliver, Special Member - Keywords:
- cross cultural communication
synchronous annotation
language proficiency - Abstract:
- Cross-cultural communication is taking place everywhere as the world is getting flat. Research conducted across many disciplines (e.g. education, psycholinguistics, sociology, HCI and CSCW) shows that language fluency plays an important role in communication. Non-native speakers have been suffering from communication problems caused by language fluency issues both in face-to-face (FTF) communication and distributed online communication (Gonzalez, 2003; Neeley, Hinds, & Cramton, 2009). Building upon past studies, I investigated the communication process and outcomes in online cross-cultural group chat, with a particular focus on issues related to language fluency. Based on findings from this work, I proposed and designed a lightweight tool supporting secondary conversation stream. I evaluated and confirmed with a comparison study that group satisfaction and perceived control of the conversation are enhanced for the participants who used the tool. I also discovered new patterns of annotation use and design implications for group chat tools to support cross-cultural communication.