Computer-Mediated Communication as Experienced by Korean Women Students in US Higher Education

Abstract Having grown up in an age of rapidly developing electronic communication technology, today's students come to higher education with high levels of comfort and familiarity with computer-mediated communication (CMC, hereafter). The students' level of comfort with CMC, coupled with CMC's promises of enabling supplemental class discussion as well as reaching students at a distance, has encouraged more educators to incorporate CMC as part of their instruction. Also, classrooms in US higher education are becoming more diverse with students coming from many different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In this context, this qualitative study describes experiences of international students in a large US Midwestern university as they participate in class discussion through CMC as a part of their course requirements. Seven Korean female students participated in the study, talking about their experiences of communication in cyberspace (CMC) in English through several in-depth interviews per participant. An...