Evolutionary Tracking of Communicative Strategy Transfer in University Students through Context-Immersive Virtual Intercultural Projects

Immersive virtual-reality hubs now allow geographically dispersed students to co-create artefacts while negotiating meaning across cultural boundaries, yet little is known about how the communicative strategies forged in such spaces survive contextual shifts. This twelve-week longitudinal study modelled the day-to-day evolution of 120 undergraduates strategy repertoires while they solved authentic engineering challenges inside a multilingual VR studio. Continuous speech-to-text logs, gaze streams, and gesture telemetry were segmented into 14 strategy categories and represented as first-order Markov chains whose transition matrices were recalculated every 60 minutes of task time. A novel Transfer Intensity Index (TII), the entropy-weighted cumulative probability that a strategy successfully reappears in a contextally dissimilar episode, was fitted with latent-growth curves. Results reveal a three-stage trajectory, adaptation (weeks 1-3), consolidation (weeks 4-7), expansion (weeks 8-12), during which mean TII increased from 0.184 (SD = 0.052) to 0.697 (SD = 0.061). Cognitive flexibility and ethnocultural empathy jointly explained 47 % of inter-individual variance in final TII. Model fit indices (CFI = 0.982; RMSEA = 0.028) support the robustness of the evolutionary account. The findings offer evidence-based design parameters, cycle pacing, feedback timing, and learner grouping, for future VR-assisted intercultural curricula.