Students' reflections on communication in Polish-Chinese tandems

The study presents an analysis of Polish students’ written commentaries on their oral interactions with their Chinese project partners. Students from two universities, in Poland and in China, communicated online, mainly in English, for a period of 10 weeks. In their weekly reports they commented on what they learnt and on the communication acts themselves. The analysis of their reports and the final evaluation provides insights into their perception of linguistic and intercultural exchanges. The corpora built from the students’ commentaries made it possible to observe their awareness of discourse phenomena such as knowledge management. Other analysed qualities of student discourse such as coherence, novum versus datum, mode, tenor, level of formality of the language used, demonstrate the ways in which the students constructed meaning in the discourse and to what extent it influenced their understanding of the world. Through the participation in the course task aimed at developing intercultural, pedagogical, linguistic and technical competences, the Polish students had an opportunity to either verify or confirm their perception of China and the Chinese.