Nadezhda S. Rudenko

The success of cross-cultural online communication in an academic environment is defined by the degree of student involvement in such an interaction. The authors’ experience testifies that a number of objective, language, and psychological factors may decrease the activeness of these interactions, and as a result learning may not be effective for students in these types of cross-cultural interactions. Among such factors the current article investigates the influence of a communicator’s speech peculiarities on a recipient’s willingness to maintain interaction in native-to-nonnative, written online communication in the English language. The study was aimed at verifying a hypothesis about the influence of Russian communicants’ speech characteristics on American communicants’ willingness to maintain conversations. The research method chosen was content analysis. Thematic chats involving Russian and American students participating in the Global Understanding course were analyzed. The results of the content analysis allowed us to distinguish certain Russian communicants’ written speech characteristics, such as the prevalence of language and grammar mistakes, the degree of vocabulary richness, and the use of complex sentences. Significant correlations were discovered between the American communicants’ willingness to maintain conversations and the number of mistakes, indicators of lexical richness and scarcity in Russian communicants’ utterances. Language and speech mistakes as well as the quantity of words in the utterances of micro themes had the highest number of significant correlations with indicators of the willingness to maintain conversations. The first factor, language and speech mistakes, decreased the willingness to maintain conversations, whereas the second factor, the number of words in Russian students’ utterances, increased such willingness.