Construing virtual intercultural experiences: A transitivity analysis of pronominal use in students’ reflective journals

In this paper, we explore how intercultural virtual experiences can be construed at the level of students’ language use. We aim to explain how participants in a virtual intercultural project belonging to diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds (Canada, Italy and Hong Kong S.A.R.) linguistically enact their personal intercultural experiences when they reflect on them in writing using English as a lingua franca. Drawing on the Transitivity framework in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), we investigate the experiential meanings of pronouns in a corpus of 60 student Reflective Journals and we explain how beliefs, identities, values, curiosity, expectations, similarities and differences of the writers, their partners and their collective self are construed at the level of lexico-grammar.