Perspectives on virtual intercultural communication in the Irish-based technology sector A corpus-based analysis of linguistic clusters

This mixed-methods study investigates English-medium oral online intercultural communication within the Irish-based international technology sector. The initial phase of the research consisted of a survey investigating participants’ (N=113) experiences of virtual communication. Following the survey, to linguistically investigate such interactions, the International Virtual Team Corpus (IVT Corpus) was created. This corpus consists of approximately 80,000 words of transcribed speech gathered from 30 web-based recordings of meetings, which include both Irish and international colleagues speaking in English. This paper reports on some of the relevant quantitative and qualitative survey results, uncovering both preconceptions and embodied experiences of international virtual meetings. Following this, it presents corpus-based results of signifcant frequent and keyword clusters that provide a window into the discourse patterns of international virtual team meetings in this sector. Some tentative implications and applications for work-based virtual communication are explored in the closing discussion.