Developing 'Third Space' Interculturality Using Computer-Mediated Communication

The ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) is a way of re-imagining the traditional teacher-student hierarchical relationship. This practitioner research study uses computer-mediated discourse analysis (Herring, 1996) to investigate the potential of email to facilitate such ‘third space’ communication. It is based on 279 emails exchanged between 10 international ESL students and their lecturer at an Australian university in 2002. The framework for the analysis is the sociolinguistics/pragmatics model of ‘positive politeness’ (Brown & Levinson, 1987). The study examines the linguistic features of positive politeness evident in the two-way email exchanges and posits that ‘claim common ground’ and ‘share intimate information’ are characteristics that indicate movement towards a transcendent third space relationship.