DISCUSSION

Language is a central pillar of culture and subcultures within the dominant culture. It is a central pillar even within what may otherwise be considered the same national or historical culture. It is enough to read the famous words of George Bernard Shaw in Pygmalion "An Englishman has only to open his mouth, in order to have another Englishman despise him." to realize how even dialects create a cross-cultural event. This is a conclusion supported by research (Abrams & Hogg, 1987). Along those lines of brilliant eloquence, this study presents another aspect of cross-cultural communication, the Vive la Difference, according to which gender too is a central cultural difference.

As sociolinguistics claim, men and women apply language, and communication in general, to such a differing social objectives that cross-gender communications can be sometimes best seen as nothing less than cross-cultural miscom-munications among people with differing cultural backgrounds (Tannen, 1994). Examining a derivative of this sociolinguistic viewpoint, this study hypothesized that even in the gender neutral ICT environment of online course discussions with their asynchronous and topic focused orientation, cross-gender communication would show some aspects of a cross-cultural communication. These hypotheses were partially supported, but, the pattern in the data was strong enough to significantly allow the correct identification of the gender of the student participating in the online course discussion.