ABSTRACT
International online interaction raises issues of language, culture, and the negotiation of common understandings about collaborative tasks. As one of the first events among members of virtual teams, self-introduction is important in terms of first impressions. Faculty preparing writers in and for international collaboration around writing find themselves entangled in new kinds of questions about online interaction and its contexts. An international cross-cultural research perspective that draws on insights from current pedagogy and practices in the teaching of English writing to second-language learners can be exemplified by studies such as those of S. Daoud and A. Wong and adapted to an online context. There is at least one other area of research that must be highlighted: research on the level and version of English that is to be chosen for online collaboration. Corpus analysis was conducted with WMATRIX, an online corpus analysis tool that supports keyword in context concordancing, and semantic and part-of-speech tagging.
