What is First Culture (C1)

Following the discourse-semantic subsystem of engagement within the appraisal framework, this chapter investigates the extent to which participants of a telecollaborative exchange project between the Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain) and the University of Bath (UK) engaged with their partners' and their own ideas. Participants engaged in two different online cultural discussions which were qualitatively processed and broken up into T-units. This information was subsequently processed quantitatively considering all the tokens that frame engagement. The scrutiny of this data elucidates the extent to which the learners in the two online cultural discussions acquired new knowledge by acknowledging the others' ideas and by providing evidence to support their own statements. The results reveal the presence of expansive and contractive strategies, both of which are recurrent in academic reasoning. Students used more expansive than contractive statements, which can be interpreted as their willingness to adopt a different perspective from their own.