Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) for Intercultural Communication: A Qualitative Study of International Students in the Republic of Korea

Abstract

For international students visiting the Republic of Korea (henceforth Korea), new social and cultural settings offer linguistic opportunities and challenges. This chapter explores the linguistic opportunities and challenges of a cohort of international students at a Korean university using qualitative analysis of surveys, discussion groups and semi-structured interviews. It then investigates how mobile instant messaging (MIM) supported their intercultural communication during a short stay. First, the chapter examines how direct interactions reveal linguistic, sociolinguistic, nonlinguistic and paralinguistic misunderstandings. Next, it examines how MIM provides international students with an informal digital space for improvising with the Korean language. It explains how improvised language development via MIM eased social and cultural challenges between international and Korean speakers. Moreover, it describes these international students’ solutions for intercultural communication by blending direct interaction and MIM. Finally, it reveals how a blending of direct interaction with MIM offers new informal language development opportunities. These opportunities inform the pedagogical-learning aims of the Mobile Learning Evaluation Framework according to students’ perspectives, their needs and desires (Murphy A Farley H, Development of a framework for evaluating the impact and sustainability of mobile learning initiatives in higher education. In: Brown M, Hartnett M, Stewart T (eds), Future challenges, sustainable futures. Proceedings ascilite Wellington 2012, pp 678–680).