Communicative language in the virtual world

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Begoña Montero Fleta
Carmen Perez-Sabater
Penny MacDonald
Garcia Carbonell
Andrea Conchado-Peiro

Abstract

Emerging communication practices in digitally mediated professional settings have changed the paradigm of current workforce requirements. This paper presents the results of a survey on the way people communicate virtually in the workplace and the specific needs that have been detected concerning virtual communication practices. The survey itself was carried out within the context of CoMoViWo, a European Erasmus Project which involves the participation of five European countries. Specifically, the current study carries out a contrastive analysis of the results of the needs analysis of Spanish and Finnish users of digital communication tools. The data obtained from the study highlights the differences found with regard to the communicative strategies preferred by the virtual workers of both countries. Although they all need to communicate formally on most online tools, Spanish workers prefer more informal registers in emails and social networking than Finnish
virtual workers. Also, Spanish speakers manifest a greater need than the Finnish interviewees for improving strategies involving greetings, virtual presentations and negotiating. On the other hand, Finnish speakers perceive they only need to develop strategies in managing and/or hosting virtual group interactions. The study has implications, and should contribute to the development of learning modules to train future employees to communicate successfully in an increasingly globalized world that is engaged daily in virtual communication.
Keywords: Workplace language, virtual communication, English, cross-cultural study.

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How to Cite
Montero Fleta, B., Perez-Sabater, C., MacDonald, P., Carbonell, G., & Conchado-Peiro, A. (2017). Communicative language in the virtual world. New Trends and Issues Proceedings on Humanities and Social Sciences, 3(1), 127–134. https://doi.org/10.18844/prosoc.v3i1.1759
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Author Biography

Begoña Montero Fleta, Universitat Politècnica de Valènia

>Begoña Montero-Fleta, PhD., is an Associate Professor of English for Computer Science at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Spain).  Her areas of interests are the application of new technologies to language learning, language assessment and the linguistic characteristics of scientific discourse. As well as textbooks and material design for academic purposes, her publications and international conference presentations have addressed classroom innovations and comparative discourse analysis.