Join us for a lecture by Carl Blyth, Associate Professor of French at the University of Texas, Austin. He is interested in cross-cultural and intercultural online interaction. Currently, he is examining online discussions between French and American college students taken from Cultura, an on-going telecollaboration between MIT and various French universities. The general goal of his study is to demonstrate how miscommunication arises in cross-cultural discussions between French and American interlocutors who are largely unaware that their different cultures possess divergent “stance scripts,” that is, culture-specific ways of expressing an opinion. The ultimate goal of this kind of pragmatic research is to identify the elements of conversational behaviors that index cultural ways of thinking and performing.