The Effect of Contextual Knowledge on EFL Learners' Participation in Cross-Cultural Communication

This study examined the role of contextual knowledge in cross-cultural communication between non-native speakers on an interactive web with a bulletin board system through which college students of English at Japanese and Korean universities interacted with each other discussing the topics of local and global issues. The study investigated the influence of students' relative contextual knowledge on active participation in interactions and discussed the results focusing on the use of discourse strategies for meaning negotiation. The study argues that in interactions even between non-native speakers with limited proficiency, contextual knowledge in the topic under discussion affects the degree to which they accommodate to each other during communication and suggests that the focus of teaching English as a foreign language also should be given to what kind of contextual knowledge students need to obtain and how to express it rather than what level of proficiency in English they need to acquire.