Revisiting the concept of community to foster its applicability to telecollaboration

Abstract

The aim of this article is to discuss the concept of community in multimodal contexts of telecollaborative projects, specifically the one named teletandem. Discourse communities (DC) are groupings of individuals who get together in order to achieve their communicative purposes through genres (SWALES, 1990). Although the concept has been extensively discussed in academic settings, there seems to be a lack of studies involving the theme and its importance for telecollaboration. One attempt in doing so is Silva’s (2012) account of the teletandem community, in which she investigates students who participate in the project Teletandem Brasil Foreign Languages for All (Teletandem Brasil: Língua Estrangeira para Todos). Our starting point is her criteria for defining such a community and our analysis derives from our intense observation of teletandem practice. The results indicate that members of communities that are occasionally gathered in telecollaboration contexts tend to be governed by local and external rules, form complex organizations and share genres to achieve their goals.