Why Asynchronous Computer-Mediated Communication (ACMC) Is a Powerful Tool for Language Learning (original) (raw)
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Language and interaction in online asynchronous communication in university level English courses
2015
Interaction involves people communicating and reacting to each other. This process is key to the study of discourse, but it is not easy to study systematically how interaction takes place in a specific communicative event, or how it is typically performed over a series of repeated communicative events. However, with a written record of the interaction, it becomes possible to study the process in some detail. This thesis investigates interaction through asynchronous written discussion forums in a computer-mediated learning environment. In particular, this study investigates pragmatic aspects of the communicative event which the asynchronous online discussions comprise. The first case study examines response patterns to messages by looking at the content of initial messages and responses, in order to determine the extent to which characteristics of the messages themselves or other situational factors affect the interaction. The second study examines in what ways participants use a range of discourse devices, including formulaic politeness, humour and supportive feedback as community building strategies in the interaction. The third study investigates the role of the subject line of messages in the interaction, for example by examining how participants choose different types of subject lines for different types of messages. The fourth study examines to what extent features serving a deictic function are drawn on in the interaction and then compares the findings to both oral conversation and formal academic discourse. The overall findings show a complex communicative situation shaped by the medium itself, type of activity, the academic discipline and topic of discussion and by the social and cultural aspects of tertiary education in an online learning environment. In addition, the findings may also provide evidence of learning.
Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2022
Effective employment of information and communication technology (ICT) in foreign language teaching and learning has become imperative as a means to support second language development when traditional face-to-face instruction and interaction is not possible. Using a design-based research approach and a theoretical framework that integrates authentic learning and online communities of practice principles, this paper examines the nature and extent of students’ contributions to computer mediated communication (CMC) tools provided in an online Italian as a foreign language learning environment. This paper describes the context of the intervention strategy, the methodology used, and presents an analysis of themes emerging from the data relating to the use of multiple discussion forums to support interaction and collaboration within the online community of foreign language learners. The findings suggest that there was a substantial development in the way students used different discussio...
Forums and chats to learn languages: functions, types and uses
Rosario Hernández & Paul Rankin (ed.), Higher Education and Second Language Learning. Promoting Self-Directed Learning in New Technological and Educational Contexts; p. 135-158.
This chapter explores language classroom uses of two of the most popular, interactive and simple genres on the Internet: the forum and the chat. First, I review the most relevant literature in areas such as computer-mediated communication discourse analysis (within linguistics), online language teaching and learning or e-learning (in education) and the use of virtual learning platforms (in technology), that usually includes forums and chats. Second, I propose a typology of forums and chats for the language classroom: differentiating general practices, covering a whole course, from specific ones that take place within a week or are related to just one item on the syllabus. I also differentiate between open topic-based forums and chats, on one hand, and more controlled or closed ones, on the other. Finally, I also comment on several ways to link a forum or a chat to other resources and classroom practices. For each of these practices, I set out the learning objectives, the instructions used, the roles taken on by the learners and the teacher or the language they generate (register, kind of interaction, etc.). A number of real-life samples from different contexts are provided and analysed. Daniel Cassany is a Discourse Analysis researcher at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona). He has a degree in Catalan Philology and a PhD in Educational Sciences. He is the author of 12 books and over 80 articles on written communication and language teaching. 1. Online written interaction Nowadays, we spend so much of our time reading and writing email messages, posts on social network timelines, chats, forum messages, text messages and other on the spot writing (Whatsapp, Line). This type of interactive writing is usually quite short, quite spontaneous and ubiquitous, and we use it in all sorts of tasks and situations, in personal and job-related matters. We prefer it to the emerging technology of voice analysis and synthesis (Siri), which is not yet widely accepted. In higher education, we also use these forms of writing as a learning tool and a management and planning tool, with students and with the teaching staff, in language courses just as in any other courses.
A Description of Asynchronous Online Discussions in Higher Education
This study provides a preliminary characterisation of asynchronous online discussions as a learning tool in higher education (Garrison 2003; Ho & Swan 2007). Our materials consist of the written record of 16 online discussions, totalling circa 165,000 words, from a one-semester course on general English-Spanish-English translation. The participants are second-year students from different nationalities, mostly Spanish, using Spanish and less frequently Galician as lingua francas. We start by describing the various situational factors surrounding the events (including the role of the discussions in the course, the variety of participants and the nature of their relationship), which may explain some highly recurrent language and organisational features encountered in the resulting texts. Secondly, using Antconc, we carry out an exploratory analysis of the lexical and collocational patterns of the exchanges. The findings reveal a very strong interactive component (Herring 1999, Condon & Čech 2010), with two dominant functions, the creation of affiliation and the prevention of conflict. The analysis shows a widespread use of praise, hedging and other forms of politeness in the posts, and, more generally, a clear concern for the interests of other participants in the discussion and an effort to acknowledge their voices. In the paper, we also look into the evolution of the exchanges over the time-span of the course by focusing on one case study. The analysis reveals the progressive crystallisation of the genre in the student's interventions, a process which involves a clear evolution from a rather tentative kind of post, mostly monologic, informational and author-centred, to a progressively longer post with a more complex structure, and especially a heightened awareness of the dialogic and multi-party nature of the exchanges (Herring 1996). The results of the study may have considerable pedagogical interest. We believe that computer-mediated communication (CMC), including asynchronous online discussion forums, is bound to play an increasingly significant role in the future of higher education.
Discourse Patterns in the E-Distance Learning Forums
2012
This research investigated discourse patterns in online discussion forums, a asynchronous type of computer-mediated communication. 110 messages were collected from the online discussion forums designed specifically for an English course taken by the e-distance learning program students at MARA University of Technology, Malaysia. The online forum allows students in this program to communicate with their fellow classmates, lecturers and other e-distance learning students. The content of the messages were mainly about classes, exams, documentations, assignments to be submitted and rarely about everyday life. The messages sent by the students when communicating with their classmates and lecturers were analyzed based on Muysken typology of code-mixing. It was revealed three main codes; Malay, Arabic and English were used by the participants in the online forum. This study hopes to provide useful information about language patterns and styles of writing among the students in the discussion forums which can be helpful for classroom practitioners. In addition, the result of this research will be of value for the development of studies in the area of computer-mediated communication
The asynchronous webmediated discussion as a learning genre
conferencing systems are also increasingly being used in ordinary higher education courses, either as a result of the call for 'flexible learning' or as a pedagogical supplement to face-to-face teaching. It is therefore important to understand the processes which are involved in these new ways of using writing as a pedagogical tool, and what factors contribute to a high learning potential. The use of information and communication technology in education has always been closely tied to different views of knowledge and learning, as has also been the case with the research in the field. Koschman (1996) points out four paradigms in the short history of educational technology. The first use of computers in education, Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI), was built on behavioristic view of learning as passive reception of predefined knowledge. The learning tasks were analyzed and divided into small parts, and software was developed to support the learning of specific subgoals. Effe...
2017
Negotiated interaction could be one crucial factor which can facilitate the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) learners to achieve their goals both academic and professional domains in the future. This study, therefore, aims to examine two major aspects: the negotiation for meaning strategies that ESP students used in the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) interaction as well as to explore the ESP students’ perceptions toward using the CMC, whether it leads to their Macro and Micro skills perceptions or not. The data were collected from 25 Business Writing students who are Thai, majoring in English. The study was conducted by using Facebook (FB) group and FB messenger as a CMC medium for the communication; therefore, the comments from pictogram postings and chat logs from FB messenger interactions were used as the main sources in the data analysis process. The Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) proposed by Herring (1996) was employed in the data analysis. Furthermore, c...
Computers & Education, 2014
The growth of asynchronous online discussion (AOD) in primary, secondary, undergraduate, and post-graduate contexts and courses has resulted in a growing body of literature that provides valuable insights into the issues surrounding the use of online writing, online discussion, and distance and blended learning in formal education worldwide. This phenomenological critical literature review provides an overview of research focused on forum use and AOD published from 2008 to 2012. Papers were chosen based on a selection process suggested by Wu et al. (2012), where nine of the most influential e-learning education and educational review journals were searched according to year, 2008–2012, and the following keywords: forum, threaded discussion, and threaded chat. Three teachers/educational researchers, each with at least five years of experience using forum and AOD in university contexts, further filtered the corpus through following a detailed inclusion/exclusion procedure, which resulted in a refined corpus of 43 journal papers. Quantitative analyses of results reveal most AOD research in educational contexts from 2008 to 2012 was carried out through or on Learning Management Systems (LMS) platforms in university settings, within computer and education classes, with blended learning dominating distance learning contexts. Most research settings were based in Asia and Europe, while the three countries with the most AOD publications were Singapore, Taiwan, and the U.S. In addition, the journals dominating the field were Computers & Education, followed by Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, and Australasian Journal of Educational Technology. The refined corpus was also analysed qualitatively via phenomenological method ( Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009), in order to identify and contextualize meaningful statements and themes. Discussion focuses on the existence of a dominant research paradigm that we divide into four investigative impulses and discuss: argumentative, comparative, relational, and analytical. Specific representative examples of each investigative impulse are thoroughly discussed and critiqued, and as a result, should be of significant value to all stakeholders, including researchers, instructors, and students, involved in forum and AOD use in educational contexts globally.
Connecting to learn, learning to connect: Thinking together in asynchronous forum discussion
This article combines a sociocultural model of classroom talk with a linguistically-oriented model (systemic functional linguistics) to explore what characterizes effective asynchronous online discussion in higher education (HE). While the benefits of discussion are commonly accepted in face-to-face learning, engaging students in effective asynchronous discussion can often be 'hit or miss', due in part to the shift to interacting asynchronously. This hybrid mode of spoken-like/written-like communication demands skills which are rarely made explicit, often with the assumption that students (and lecturers) are proficient. The combined framework presented here enabled macro-and micro-understandings of discussion forums through an array of resources in the SFL model and the talk type descriptors to map linguistic features of knowledge constructing talk in an Australian postgraduate HE context. The notion of 'listening' (or attending to others) is proposed as a crucial condition for whether discussion progresses beyond simply 'posting'. Consequently, this article provides much needed insight into the murky space of asynchronous discussion forums.