International participation and discursive choices in the digital genre of the travel blog comment

Abstract

Current ways of informal globalized communication involve digital genres facilitating increasingly dialogical, immediate interactions. One representative example is found in blogs, where users’ interaction is enabled through the genre of the comment to a previous post. In a corpus of 15 entries from 5 travel blogs, 318 comments have been analysed to study international participation in the blogosphere by different English users, native and non-native speakers. First, the quantity and length of their contributions are studied to consider the possible impact of their linguacultural background in ELF digital communication. Second, a discursive data-driven analysis of travel blog comments is provided, highlighting its most salient features, in order to better comprehend this specific digital discourse and to favour international successful participation in such a web-mediated environment.