Online Teaching and Learning: Sociocultural Perspectives 9781472542007, 9781441159458

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List of Contributors Natasha Anthony is Assistant Professor and Director of the International Language Laboratory at Hudson Valley Community College in New York. She designs and teaches online Russian as well as faculty development courses. Her research focuses on Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and, more specifically, on the use of synchronous and asynchronous oral components in online language courses. Teacher education is also a focal point of her scholarly activities. Dr Anthony has authored articles and book chapters and participated in various national and international conferences and symposia presenting on these topics. Dr Melinda Dooly is Lecturer at the Education Faculty of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain). She teaches English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) methodology and research methodology courses, focusing on telecollaboration in education. Her research addresses teacher preparation and the use of CALL and CMC. She has published widely in these areas and is co-editor of the book series Telecollaboration in Education (Peter Lang). Dr  Dooly’s current research interest is in project-based telecollaborative language learning and very young learners. Adrienne Gonzalez received her Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics at the University of New Mexico. She is currently the Foreign Language Pedagogy and Technology Specialist for the Center for World Languages and Cultures at the University of Denver. Her areas of interest include second language acquisition, CALL, computer-mediated communication and interlanguage pragmatics. Iryna Kozlova has a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics. She has taught a variety of courses in Applied Linguistics at the Old Dominion University and Georgia State University, and at Algonquin College. Her experience teaching Russian includes teaching face-to-face and completely online courses. One of her research interests is CALL, specifically, language learning in synchronous multimodal environments. She is especially interested in online language pedagogy. Her current research focuses on the use and the role of multiple communication channels for student language development. Dr Kozlova has developed several online Russian language courses and has presented at various national and

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international conferences on topics related to second/additional language learning and use. M. N. Lamy is Professor of Distance Language Learning at the UK Open University. She has many years of experience in designing and implementing language courses for online study, involving extensive use of synchronous and asynchronous media including voice-enabled e-tutorials. She has researched extensively in the field of computer-mediated communication for language learning, with a particular interest in real-time group conversations in multimodal settings. She has run training workshops for language educators and for research students and researchers on four continents. Her current research interests include methodologies for the description of online learning conversations, and the co-construction of group cultures by language learners in various online and social networking environments. Dr Andreas Lund is Professor at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo, Norway. Lund has worked in the field of CALL since the mid-1980s; as a teacher, as animator for a series of language and technology workshops for the European Centre of Modern Languages, as project co-ordinator for ICT in correctional education, and as a researcher on language learning and teaching in networked environments. Among his research interests are teaching and learning ESL, collective cognition, human interactions in technology rich environments, sociocultural and activity theoretical perspectives on learning and didactics, and speech communities and communication change. Lund is currently involved in establishing ProTed – a Center of Excellence in Education and the first of its kind in Norway. Lund has published extensively, especially on learning and teaching in technology rich environments. Ruchi Mehta is an instructional designer at San Jose State University, California. Her areas of interest include technology-mediated learning and particularly, online/hybrid learning. She has performed extensive research on discourse in asynchronous environments and presented findings and implications for effective implementation of discussions in online settings. Her dissertation research at the University at Albany, State University of New York focuses on the quality of mathematical discussions in a fully online undergraduate level course. She views technology as a means of accomplishing a purposeful objective, and constantly strives to make technology more accessible, purposeful and educational.

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Carla Meskill is Professor, Department of Educational Theory and Practice at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research and teaching explore new forms of technology use in language education as well as the influences of new technologies on developing language and literacy practices. In tandem, her work explores the nature of electronic literacy and its centrality in teacher professional development. On these and related topics she has published widely Gulnara Sadykova is Associate Professor at the Department of English Philology, Kazan Federal University, Russia. She holds an advanced (Candidate of Science) degree in Comparative Linguistics from the same university. She is also an adjunct online instructor at the Department of Educational Theory and Practice, University at Albany where she recently received her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction. Her research interests include cross-culture/ cross-border distance education, technology-assisted language teaching/ learning, computer-assisted (intercultural) communication and media texts. Denis Samburskiy earned an MS in TESOL and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction at State University of New York at Albany. His research interests include ESL/EFL instruction, cognitive linguistics and CALL. He teaches a course ‘Corpus-Informed Pedagogical Grammar of English’ and runs an evening ESL program for adults at the university. Denis came to the United States as a Fulbright scholar from Russia in 2007, after graduating from Tomsk State University with a degree in Cross-Cultural Communication and EFL pedagogy. Sedef Uzuner Smith is Assistant Professor at Lamar University, Beaumont, TX, where she developed the online Preparation Program for ESL Teacher Certification. Her Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction from the State University of New York at Albany focused on instructional technology and language and literacies. One line of her research focuses on teaching and learning in online and blended environments, and another line of her research examines second language academic literacy from a sociocultural perspective. Smith has published articles and research in the Internet and Higher Education, Studies in Continuing Education, the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Educational Media International and the Journal of English for Academic Purposes. Previously, Smith taught undergraduate and graduate level online courses at various universities in the United States, including the State University of New York at Albany, University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

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Ozan Varli is an instructor at the English Language Center (ELC) at Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey. He is also the Ed-tech co-ordinator of the department and provides IT support for teaching, learning, research and classroom technology by conducting workshops and training sessions for language instructors. He is the web developer and system administrator of ELC Online, a web-based course management system for language learners at Koc University. Varli received his bachelor’s from Hacettepe University and attended several graduate courses in ELT at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. As a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, he earned his MS degree in TESOL and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Istanbul University. His dissertation concentrates on AR (Augmented Reality) applications in language education. His research interests include (but are not limited to) online/distance education, virtual learning environments, mobile learning and emerging technologies in the language classroom. Jason Vickers graduated from the Department of Educational Theory and Practice at the State University of New York, Albany, with a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction. He served as the English as a Second Language Writing Consultant at UAlbany’s Writing Center for 5 years. He has nearly 20 years teaching English Language Learners and Students with Disabilities. He currently teaches masters level courses online including Media in the Language Classroom, Media in Teaching and Learning, Introduction to Distance Education and Integrating Technology across the Curriculum. One of his current projects includes designing online EFL courses for aspiring graduate students abroad. Ms Evon Zundel is the co-ordinator of the blendedschools.net (BSN) Language Institute, a leading provider of live online synchronous language instruction for students throughout the United States. She earned her BS in Secondary Education and Spanish from Kutztown University and her Masters of Science in Education from Wilkes University. She began her educational career in the Bethlehem, NY School District as a classroom Spanish teacher, Technology Integration Specialist and One-to-One Laptop Project Director.

Int ro duc t ion:

Sociocultural Perspectives Carla Meskill

It is through others that we develop into ourselves. Lev Vygotsky (1991, p. 161) As the title of this collection suggests, the chapters herein examine dimensions of online teaching and learning via sociocultural theory. The authors investigate processes and outcomes of online interactions with the aim of accounting for the social and cultural complexities entailed when diverse individuals come together for joint purposes. For this group of studies, these purposes are educational with instructional events and processes taking place in a variety of online venues and in a variety of manners. The questions of how and why the resulting online conversations are socially, linguistically and culturally motivated and manifest are the broad issues that unite these chapters.

Expanding contexts The desire to communicate and its rewards have clearly transformed the internet. What was initially conceived as a network for information exchange has quickly evolved into a global social network. This shift from information archive to a venue for human interaction is not surprising given the essential human drive to commune with others. This drive, after all, has shaped much of civilization and its institutions, particularly education where interactions with others are core to the development of knowledge and understanding. Yet, until recently education

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has been fairly limited to local contexts, classrooms, countries and cultures. Now that a good deal of teaching and learning is migrating to the borderless internet, educational processes complexify in terms of linguistic and cultural dimensions. Indeed, along with these new venues for communication have come entirely new forms of cultural situatedness with ever-evolving community norms and practices (Kramsch & Ware, 2004; Thorne, 2003). The point of departure of this collection is to extend formal conceptualization of research practices for online education that embrace social, linguistic, cultural and ecological dimensions of the online teaching and learning enterprise. It strays from mainstream conceptualization of social constructivism to examine, with specificity and fine granularity, the sociolinguistic and sociocultural dimensions of online education. The drive from such a perspective is to ‘explicate the relationships between human action on the one hand, and the cultural, institutional, and historical situations in which this functioning occurs, on the other’ (Wertsch, del Rio & Alvarez, 1995, p. 11). New forms of human contexts and the communication they engender require new conceptual lenses to reach new theoretical, empirical and practical understandings. A sociocultural approach to understanding teaching and learning in online contexts provides a framework and a set of working assumptions concerning how we learn in the world that are useful in this regard. In their broadest sense, sociocultural approaches can be sufficiently flexible to accommodate novel forms of internet-based practices while adhering to ontological positions that support twenty-first-century digital practices overall; positions that see human phenomena as non-static and ever-evolving; positions that stand in stark contrast to positivist positions that hold forth the tradition of faith in unassailable truths. When it comes to human practices, the former serves as a more productive tool in examining teaching and learning practices online as these continue to evolve. A sociocultural perspective sees all human psychological processes as social in nature, human development (learning) as emerging through social experience and language as the essential tool for development (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000). Human psychological processes are culturally mediated, historically developing and arise from the socially organized activities of everyday life (Vygotsky, 1991). The perspective is in direct contrast to views of human motivations and learning that are strictly cognitivist, or in the head. Rather, sociocultural perspectives see development as in the world phenomena and thus attempt to account for larger historical, contextual elements that shape our mediations with the world and with others. We enact culture through language;

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language and culture emerge from increasingly complex social interactions and vice versa (Beckner et al., 2009). When applied to discourses of teaching and learning, the term social carries three dimensions of direct interest. It describes the influence of the discourses we engage in when we interact. It also describes the socially constructed tools that we use – including physical tools like hand-held digital assistants as well as symbolic tools such as language iconography – to mediate meaning. Finally, social describes the orientations of speakers and writers to one another (Cazden & Beck, 2003). As Hanks (1996) observes, for two or more speakers to establish and maintain mutuality of orientation, ‘it is neither sufficient nor necessary that they “share” the same grammar. What they must share, to a variable degree, is the ability to orient themselves verbally, perceptually, and physically to each other and to their social worlds’ (p. 229). Indeed, a key feature of social orientation is what Bloome labels ‘indeterminancy’: the central motive of co-meaning making in that speakers live and act upon the ‘not knowing’ that is integral to the process (1993). In educational contexts, the manner in which instructors and students orient to one another and establish mutual vantage points has long been of interest from discourse perspectives (Kulick & Schieffelin, 2004) and more recently in terms of interlocutor identities (e.g. Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004). In addition to these three dimensions germane to classroom instruction  – discourse, tools and social orientation – sociocultural perspectives are generally applied employing the following eight assumptions. Each is briefly described and its relevance for online teaching and learning suggested.

Agency of learners The perception that learners have agency is a relatively recent change. For much of human history, learners were viewed as acted upon by those more learned and by an established set of knowledge. Those doing the learning were seen as passive recipients of specific knowledge deemed necessary and handed down by venerable individuals and institutions. In spite of a great deal of counter-evidence, this assumption of learning as absorbing predetermined content continues to prevail in many domains of education policy and practices around the world. Early studies in child development, led primarily by those of Lev Vygotsky, illuminated the rich cognitive predispositions and readiness with which learners come to the world around them and which they actively employ according to

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the sociocultural traditions and structures in which they are raised and with the assistance of those farther along the development trajectory (Vygotsky, 1991). Assuming learners are active agents in their learning becomes particularly important in the context of learning technologies as it contrasts sharply with faulty assumptions concerning the agency of technology per se. That is, rather than teachers and learners, technologies are often viewed as the source of agency in educational processes. A sociocultural perspective contrasts sharply here as it sees technology as a tool in human development, not an agent. In the case of online education, tool-rich venues are environments for human agency to be exercised in the quest for human development. The learners as agentive assumption trains attention on active, observable and reportable uses of discourse in instructional processes. Likewise, the use of other tools, both concrete digital and abstract cognitive, become of interest as the ways in which learners employ these can lead to better understandings of the roles that mediational means can and do play in human development. Finally, the social orientations of learners to other learners, their instructors and the focal content in new online venues are integral to a developing anatomy of online teaching and learning.

Mutuality of individuals and their sociocultural environments The inextricability of actors, their actions and the contexts in which these are manifest has long been a tenet of qualitative, ethnographic research whereby systematic attempts are made to address human activity in situ. This assumption again varies radically from traditional cognitivist views of truths about human development being determinable via controlled, laboratory manipulations. Sociocultural approaches operate on the assumption that what is observed is first and foremost local in its manifestation; that the cultural, historical and synchronic operate as an ensemble, not as discrete events (Bourdieu, 1999). This assumption undergirds Vygotsky’s own research where a major part of his program of research was to determine units of analysis that ‘preserve[s] the essence of the events of interest rather than separating an event into elements that no longer function as does the whole’ (Rogoff, 2008, p. 58). In the study of online interactions for the purpose of teaching and learning, this notion of mutuality shapes the anatomy of the inquiry. Complex online environments populated by widely diverse learners and teachers cannot be considered representative of like activity, nor in isolation from their sociocultural

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contexts. Indeed, early studies of evolving social practices in online venues reveal the potency of the novel environment in shaping new forms of communication (Baron, 2008; Crystal, 2008). A sociocultural orientation requires that while researchers examine microlevel activity of interest, the wider social, cultural and institutional context is considered in the shaping of that activity. As such, the activity examined can serve as a window on how underlying organizational norms and cultural orientations operate. In short, sociocultural contexts, including those beyond the immediate online environment, matter. It is these in tandem with individuals engaging in instructional discourse, employing tools to amplify these discourses and who orient to one another and their environment that comprise the mutuality dimension of sociocultural perspective for online teaching and learning.

Assistance from others In contrast to current cognitivist views of learners as autonomous actors whose states and traits determine their learning successes, a sociocultural view sees the role of more capable others as intrinsic to the potentiality of human development. Indeed, one of Vygotsky’s most salient and oft cited foci in the study of human development is the critical role played by more capable others in learning processes, thus placing educators, supporting adults and peers squarely in the picture. The social, discoursal ‘leg up’ provided by more capable others is a central feature of socioculturally influenced pedagogical practices (Tharp & Gallimore, 1991; Wood, Bruner & Ross, 1976) and is recently being reiterated as the central, crucial feature of human teaching that, in terms of complexity and effectiveness, is far beyond what preprogrammed computer-led instruction can achieve (Meskill, Mossop & Bates, 1999; Neuman & Celano, 2012). In online instructional venues, it is the social and instructional ensemble orchestrated by a talented instructor and participated in by active learners that promotes and supports learning (Meskill & Anthony, 2010; Uzuner Smith & Mehta, this volume). The tasks, prompts, cues, leads, corralling, saturating, and so on that instructors employ provide the structure, motives and supportive context for learners to benefit from interacting with, and thus enjoying the assistance of others in their learning. Sociocultural approaches to online education value and examine closely the anatomy of these assistive and supportive discourses, the tools that support them and the social orientations of participants to their learning environments and what transpires within them.

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Appropriation of social practices From a sociocultural perspective, learning initiates in the social realm as a condition for its appropriation, internalization and ultimate contribution to individual development. What one does with and under the influence of others will subsequently be accomplished independently along with its intrinsic social inheritances. The individual’s tools that regulate what is internalized – language, semiotic matter and physical artefacts – are likewise derived from participation in social realms both broadly and narrowly considered. In short, our learning is the appropriation of the social practices of both the local and wider sociocultural contexts in which we engage (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). While the implications for this assumption in online education are vast, especially given the global diversity of online contexts, one implication that rises to the fore is the opportunity to engage with others using the discourses of given disciplines. Indeed, in conversing disciplinarily with more knowledgeable disciplinary insiders, learners directly experience and in turn appropriate expert ways of knowing and communicating what they know (Gee, 2007). Students get to know firsthand how things get talked about, represented and comprehended given such contexts of inquiry, collaboration and assistance. They have opportunities to become discourse insiders via social appropriation. Teaching and learning of any kind involves engaging new cultural practices. When we move within and between discourse communities, we apprentice to the dominant cultural practices of the current context. Nowhere is this more commonly the case than in global online social environments where widely varying discourse practices and mother tongues come together to develop ways of thinking and knowing that somehow organically accommodate and reflect a cohesive whole.

Internalization via verbalization As we have seen, a sociocultural perspective sees individual development emerging out of social processes which are mediated by verbal means with the unity of thought and language viewed as socially constituted. Further, Vygotsky proposed that our socially mediated experiences are transformed for, and become part of our individual developmental repertoires via our attempts to verbalize our thoughts with others; a process seen as the internalization of socially shaped knowing via mediational means (language). ‘Articulate speech is a means to understand oneself due to the fact that it is returned to its source as object’ (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000, p. 343). In short, it is the socially

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meaningful activity in which learners engage that leads to its very appropriation and internalization. Given the more even playing field of online education whereby all learners have opportunities to articulate their thinking and share this with others, potential internalization via verbalization is vastly promising. Add the vast possibilities of enhancements and amplifications via multimedia digital tools along with the at-hand resources learners can employ in constructing their verbal responses and this particular assumption underlying sociocultural perspectives becomes particularly salient.

Learning as living As Atkinson (2011) rightly points out, learning is ‘the default state of human affairs’ (p. 123). This statement encapsulates a critical and relatively recent insight into human development exemplified in Vygotskian views of human development: the fact of our significant predispositions to learning. The homo eruditis, the learning man, who is biologically predestined to effortful understanding has come to replace the tabla raza conceptions of the human mind as an empty vessel waiting to be filled. And, in contrast to popular beliefs about education institutions as the seat of learning, this view sees humans in a perpetual state of learning while being in and interacting with the world. Indeed, learning is not exotic activity that happens in specialized places under the guidance of education specialists. It is, rather, the primary way we interact with the world; our minds are continually processing, hypothesizing, assuming, accepting, rejecting, and so on. As part of daily life, we not only learn how to do things, but how to think about things through the language and actions of others both locally and in terms of broader cultures, what Baym (2009) refers to as connections between internet life and lifeworld. Given this assumption about human learning, activity undertaken online, in both formal, institutional and informal, non-institutional ways can be viewed as teaching and learning. When we post, share and communicate information and ideas, when we seek out, locate and make use of this information and ideas, we are learning. In examining formal, institutionally sponsored educational processes, the anatomy of instruction and responses to it can be analysed with this ‘other activity’ as a backdrop. Indeed, like excellent f2f classroom teachers, online teachers incorporate their understanding of learners’ recreational, non-institutional digital practices and weave these into the formal instructional activity they design and orchestrate.

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Dynamism of learner identity and development In contrast to a cause–effect, input–output model of human identity and development, a sociocultural take on human learning casts learning processes as in process, as continually moving targets. Learners and their learning are patently not conceived as commodities, nor finished products, nor as definable by binary labels but as socially and psychologically developing throughout the lifespan (Garrett & Baquedano-López, 2002; Norton & McKinney, 2011). Indeed, identity is viewed as comprised of the ever-changing stories we tell about ourselves in the world (Bruner, 2001). In an historical period when change, especially the changing nature of human communication, is so very characteristic of our daily interactional practices, the notion of static learner states and traits seems antithetical to investigations of our evolving practices. As new tools and ways of using them make their way into our daily communications, we, as users, are simultaneously shaping and being shaped by the uses to which we put them. A sociocultural perspective sees these shapings as dynamic, ongoing and thereby attempts to account for participants and participation patterns as just that. The cultural, historical, political and sociocontextual meld to contribute to learners’ continually developing self through socialization and being in the world. Socioculturally motivated inquiry, then, focuses on just how people make meaning when interacting with other members of a social community, particularly how they organize their ‘internal sense of cohesion and membership’ (p. 140) in order to share meanings (Scollon & Scollon, 2001). This membership, also termed ‘affinities’ (Gee, Allen & Clinton, 2001) is critical to the processes and outcomes of successful communication. Such cultural dimensions of online teaching and learning continue to complexify as cross-border educational opportunities expand. Given the assumption that minds are socially, culturally and linguistically shaped, we can see learners from diverse origins coming together online for the purpose of learning operating with their own interpretative toolkits and thereby bringing a range of perspectives to online learning communities.

Primary mediating tool in human development: Language A sociocultural view sees language as the primary tool in mental development. Because language itself is continually shaped and reshaped by myriad social influences (Beckner et al., 2009; Bourdieu, 1999; Vygotsky, 1978), it contributes to dynamic, agentive learning in integral and complex ways. This view aligns with

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shifts in applied linguistics away from language as object to language as dynamic system of human mediation. How meanings get generated, how language gets used as mediational means by humans as they engage in goal-directed activity is of primary interest from a sociocultural perspective (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006; Wertsch et al., 1995). Online communication for the purpose of teaching and learning is almost exclusively dependent on written and spoken language; language in the traditional sense of words and sentences, accompanied by digital extenders and amplifiers of language, features that, in consort with text and aural utterances, are bringing about unique and creative changes to contemporary interactions. Indeed, online communication generally is ‘bringing language back to its conversational, interactive, here-and-now foundations’ (Gee & Hayes, 2011, p. 12).

Examining sociocultural dimensions of online teaching and learning Sociocultural approaches to the study of online learning and teaching take as foundational the communities and discourses that organically arise from human social and instructional practices. Such approaches are distinct from more widely popular approaches that use either the medium and its peculiarities and/or select characteristics of its users as a starting point. Indeed, sociocultural approaches have more in common with anthropological or ethnographic perspectives when it comes to making sense of phenomena. This is often discussed as directly counter to traditional positivistic, scientific designs. Examination of the wholly human activity of teaching and learning in any medium, in any venue, cannot, after all, be likened to research in the hard sciences (Shapiro, 2005) and, as Vygotsky urged by example, we must move from the laboratory model to the field of practice when researching complex human activity. Sociocultural perspectives see online education as complex human interactions. Lave’s conceptualization of what she calls participatory culture is particularly germane in this regard (Lave, 1996). Like f2f classes, online courses can be viewed as temporary, organically induced microcultures where forms of modelling and apprenticeship similar to those in live educational contexts occur. Learners look to their instructors and classmates for norms and models to guide their participation in what they themselves are contributing to shaping. The means for this to happen is the discourse of the evolving community in which and to which all participate in successively determining and approximating. Inquiry thereby tends towards

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genetic or developmental methodologies most often the observation of in-process human interactions with the world and with others. Indeed, Vygotsky was a strong proponent of examining human development in contexts that more closely resemble everyday life. He viewed research methods as most closely resembling detective work, investigative work that takes into account indirect evidence and contextual clues while privileging insightful interpretation. In likening research on human development to the work of expert criminal investigators, Vygotsky saw observations of learning as grounded in codified yet flexible views and variables that were themselves developing theoretical pursuits (Vygotsky, 1991). In the same vein, informed and systematic investigation of online teaching and learning undertakes close analysis of discourse and events through qualitative, ethnographic means. It employs approaches such as the abstraction of salient features, logical graphing/mapping of the anatomy of activity that result in informative patterns and, most centrally, analysis of discourse. Language is the window, be it the writing or speaking students do as evidence of their thinking and knowing. The window is wide enough to take in digital literacy practices broadly conceived as these organically evolve through daily experimentation with new online discourse communities. In sum, sociocultural perspectives see the linguistic, social, cultural, historical aspects of human phenomena as mutually constitutive when observing and describing relationships between individuals and the social structures in which and with which they interact. As such, research approaches are often characterized by the following: ll

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dynamic analyses of activity over time focus on human interactions and how these are mediated analyses of patterns, trends in patterns of interactions analyses tied to specific contexts of activity analyses tied to specific mediational tools and artifacts (Cole, 1995, p. 193)

The collection Online teaching and learning is bringing its own sea changes to education generally and how we investigate new educational process in particular. At this writing, the elements of multimodality, online identities, plurality and globalization, expanding curricular borders, and time on task/learner autonomy may represent the tip of the iceberg. And, while developing understandings of any social context

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are inevitably incomplete (Geertz, 2000), these authors have taken bold steps in tackling the complexities of mediated human learning by examining online teaching and learning practices from a sociocultural perspective. In the chapters that follow, you will find work that takes as its foundations the aforementioned assumptions. In addition, you will find inquiries that focus on the contexts and processes of human learning online, processes that are viewed as squarely part and parcel of the broader world and lifeworlds of learners and teachers. While sharing sociocultural assumptions enumerated previously, authors examine experiences of educators and their students from a range of perspectives while accounting for the online environments  – their tools and resources – that contribute to these experiences. These socially, culturally and historically situated activities are examined through the discourses employed in teaching, learning and reflection.

Diversity/identity online Given the diversity of contemporary learners online  – what they bring linguistically, culturally and developmentally representing different systems of knowing from diverse offline and online cultures – sociocultural positions afford efforts towards accounting for multiple ways of being and understanding. That online environments cast widely diverse learners into active, meaning-making roles is clearly the case. Attending to the complexities of these experiences is taken up in the first grouping of studies. Gulnara Sadykova’s chapter reports a year-long case study that focused on the unique learning experiences of a Chinese graduate student at a US university. Working within a sociocultural framework and employing R. Scollon and S. W. Scollon’s discourse approach to the study of intercultural communication, the study followed this woman’s journey from her monocultural beginning as a Confucian learner to the complex accommodations and shifts in epistemologies that were required of her first in an online course, then later in in-country live classrooms. The study suggests that simultaneous membership in native and host academic discourses might have formative and constructive influences on a students’ growth as a learner and an individual even though it might lead to conflicts of identity and significantly complicate student’s learning experiences. In the chapter that follows, Denis Samburskiy also examines online identity in his study of self-presentation in online course introductions. Samburskiy applies Critical Discourse Analysis to asynchronous text introductions by educators in an international professional development course sequence. Analysis

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reveals a continuum of egocentricity that can inform both the interpretation and construction of online posts in educational contexts generally, and identity-establishing posts in particular in online text-centric communications.

Shifts in practice One of the hallmarks of new technologies has been the catalytic impacts their proliferation has had and continues to have on the epistemologies and practices of educators. Whether it is exploring alternatives to traditional teacher-fronted modes of didacticism, or ramping up structures and guidance to learners assigned larger, more productive tasks with consequences in the world, technologies have served in the rethinking of pedagogical practices, especially online. In his chapter on language educator practices in Second Life (SL), Ozan Varli merges his careful observations of teaching and learning activity in this 3D virtual world with extensive interview data collected from five experienced SL educators. His analyses point to a convergence of SL-specific affordances and the imperatives of early-adopter educators in light of a sociocultural framing of language pedagogy. In his detailed synthesis examining a number of studies on the tasks, tools and activities that comprise teaching and learning with wikis, Andeas Lund examines the broad question of what online collaboration in social networks entails and whether and how such collaborations are additive to educational processes and outcomes. Cumulative research on collaborations for learning identifies prominent challenges for online educators and, by extension, for teacher education. These question the nature, purposes and anatomies of human collaborations for learning and how these potentially transform conceptualizations, practices and policies. Iryna Kozlova and Evon Zundel explore the ways in which instructors view and make use of multimodal channels of communication in their teaching. They interview and examine the practices of five diverse online foreign language instructors to probe the rationale for their instructional design and corresponding moment-by-moment instructional decision making. Their inquiry underscores the power, potential and challenges of multimodalities in online teaching.

Shifts in participation Online education contexts are clearly venues where the participation playing field has evened. Populations that find themselves silenced in f2f classrooms –

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women and minorities in particular  – are finding voice in online contexts where the speaking floor is open to all equally. Likewise, online educators are developing new forms of guidance and scaffolding – involving learners in the discourses of the content area  – that immerse learners in the talk of target disciplines (Baker & Woods, 2004). As we move more educational practices online, these shifts in participation become of particular importance not only to instructional conversations, but to the (re)shaping of disciplinary discourses in a digital world. Sedef Uzuner Smith and Ruchi Mehta’s in-depth analysis of Educationally Valuable Talk (EVT) in a semester-long online course provides direct empirical support for a theory of online teaching and learning as socioculturally motivated. Their study suggests direct linkages between students’ fully participating in carefully orchestrated online conversations and related activities and students’ reports of learning. Shifts to learner-centred approaches in teacher professional development through online collaborations are also taken up in Melinda Dooly’s longitudinal study of a pre-service language educator whose development is made visible via collaborations with others. Tracking forms of professional development interactions, Dooly observes the potentialities of international collaborations for individual teacher professional development. In her examination of shifting online teaching practices, Natasha Anthony probes roles for and influences of humour in online teaching and learning. Instructor and learner perceptions of humour and its place in synchronous audio-conferencing are probed in light of the education literature’s claims about humour’s role in f2f and online teaching and learning processes. Finally, the anatomy of participation in f2f versus online writing centre tutorials for English Learners (ELs) is systematically addressed in Jason Vicker’s chapter. Vickers compares the affordances and constraints of both forums for tutoring that emphasize developing writers over producing products. Conversational analyses reveal differences in how, and how effectively instructional conversations in both venues are managed. The manner in which tutorials are undertaken in each mode is presented and discussed.

Informal online learning Given the sociocultural assumption that living is learning, exploration of non-formal, non-institutional ways of generating, appropriating and making use of knowledge and understandings in online venues becomes an essential

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issue for education broadly as well as for teaching and learning online. Learners are, after all, engaging with others and with information beyond formal classes that they make use of and that influences their development in the subject area. Adrienne Gonzalez examines the ways in which one learner of Spanish develops rapport management skills in that language as he interacts informally with native Spanish speakers in Livemocha, a social networking site specifically purposed for such authentic language learning practice. With a view towards developing a systematic view of online social networking sites as venues for learning, Marie-Noelle Lamy lays out the informal practices of online learners in adjunct social networking spaces established for beyond course socialization. The manner in which functionalities that are specific to social networking were and were not employed is analysed.

Conclusion Contemporary online venues are eminently social contexts with instructional design and processes productively capitalizing on this essential feature. Given the vast array of powerful online tools with which learners can construct their understanding of content with guidance and support from peers and instructors, the venue potentially serves the educational community well. However, while the amount of time a great number of the world’s population spends enacting online lives, and while the number of fully online and blended course offerings has ballooned in the past decade (Taylor, Parker, Lenhart & Patten, 2011), research approaches to online teaching and learning, including productive theoretical perspectives and positions, have struggled to keep pace. With current trends in educational research leaning towards acknowledging and tackling the social complexities of teaching and learning activity (Bransford, Brown & Cocking, 1999), the challenge becomes to undertake the same when it comes to online instruction. Fortunately for the research enterprise, the key window on human teaching and learning processes, language, is oftentimes open to examination and analysis in the form of text, audio and their online visual amplifications. In order to explore the dynamic, evolving worlds of online teaching and learning cultures and communities, a shift in perspective to how players interact within these complex environments is needed, one that foregrounds the local and situated practices of teachers and learners. This collection represents such foregrounding whereby what is observed and analysed are how participants in online instructional events assemble and make use of the possibilities these

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venues afford (Miller & Slater, 2000). Examining the sociocultural dimensions of online learning trains focus on the complexities of context and human activity within it. The context is this case is screens via which instructional activity is realized. It is said that a good theory explains what is known and then some. In turning sociocultural theory to human development in contemporary online venues, the collective work in this volume bears this out.

References Atkinson, D. (2011). A sociocognitive approach to second language acquisition. In D. Atkinson (Ed.), Alternative approaches to second language acquisition (pp. 143–66). New York: Routledge. Baker, J., & Woods, R. H. (2004). Immediacy, cohesiveness, and the online classroom. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 15(2), 133–51. Baron, N. (2008). Always on: language in an online and mobile world. New York: Oxford University Press. Baym, N. (2009). What constitutes quality in research? In A. Markham & N. Baym (Eds), Internet inquiry: conversations about method. New York: Sage. Beckner, C., Blythe, R., Bybee, J. Christiansen, M., Croft, W., Ellis N., Holland, J., Ke, J., Larsen-Freeman, D., & Schonemann, T. (2009). Language as a complex adaptive system: position paper. Language Learning, 59(Supplement 1), 1–27. Bloome, D. (1993). Necessary indeterminancy and the microethnographic study of reading and writing as social process. Journal of Research on Reading, 16(2), 98–111. Bourdieu, P. (1999). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture. London: Sage. Bransford, J., Brown, A., & Cocking, R. (1999). How people learn: brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Bruner, J. (2001). Self-making and world-making. In J. Brockmeier & D. Carbaugh (Eds), Narrative and identity: studies in autobiography, self and culture (pp. 25–37). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cazden, C., & Beck, S. (2003). Classroom discourse. In A. Graesser, M. Gernsbacher & S. Goldman (Eds), Handbook of discourse processes (pp. 165–97). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Cole, M. (1995). Socio-cultural-historical psychology: some general remarks and a proposal for a new kind of cultural-genetic methodology. In J. Wertsch, P. del Rio & A. Alvarez (Eds), Sociocultural studies of mind (pp. 187–214). New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Crystal, D. (2008). Language and the internet. New York: Cambridge University Press. Garrett, P., & Baquedano-Lopez, P. (2002). Language socialization: reproduction and continuity, transformation and change. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, 339–61. Gee, J. (2007). What videogames have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave. Gee, J., Allen, A., & Clinton, K. (2001). Language, class, and identity: teenagers fashioning themselves through language. Linguistics and Education, 12(2), 175–94. Gee, J., & Hayes, E. (2011). Language and learning in a digital age. New York: Routledge. Geertz, C. (2000). Local knowledge: further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Hanks, W. (1996). Language form and communicative practices. In J. Gumperz & S. Levinson (Eds), Rethinking linguistic relativity (pp. 232–70). New York: Cambridge University Press. Kramsch, C., & Ware, P. (2004). Intercultural competence online? What teachers need to know. CARLA Working Papers #24. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Kulick, D., & Schieffelin, B. (2004). Language socialization. In a. Duranti (Ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology (pp. 349–68). Oxford: Blackwell. Lantolf, J., & Thorne, S. (2006). Sociocultural theory and the genesis of second language development. New York: Oxford University Press. Lave, J. (1996). Teaching as learning in practice. Mind, Culture and Activity, 3, 149–64. Meskill, C., & Anthony, N. (2010). Teaching languages online. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Meskill, C., Mossop, J., & Bates, R. (1999). Electronic texts and English as a second language environments. Albany, NY: National Research Centre on English Learning and Achievement. Miller, D., & Slater, D. (2000). The internet: an ethnographic approach. London: Berg Publishers. Neuman, S., & Celano, D. (2012). Giving our children a fighting chance: poverty, literacy, and the development of information capital. New York: Teachers College Press. Norton, B., & McKinney, C. (2011). An identity approach to second language acquisition. In D. Atkinson (Ed.), Alternative approaches to second language acquisition (pp. 73–94). New York: Routledge. Pavlenko, A., & Blackledge, A. (2004). Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Rogoff, B. (2008). Pedagogy and practice: culture and identities (pp. 58–74). Ed. K. Hall, P. Murphy & J. Soler. London: Sage. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2001). Intercultural communication: a discourse approach (Language in society). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Shapiro, I. (2005). The flight from reality in the human sciences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Taylor, P., Parker, K., Lenhart, A., & Patten, E. (2011). The digital revolution in higher education. Pew Charitable Trust Foundation. Retrieved on 1 May 2012 from www. pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2011/PIP-Online-Learning.pdf Tharp, R. G., & Gallimore, R. (1991). The instructional conversation: teaching and learning in social activity. UC Berkeley: Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence. Retrieved from http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5th0939d Thorne, S. (2003). Artifacts and cultures-of-use in intercultural communication. Language Learning Technology, 7, 38–67. Valsiner, J., & van der Veer, R. (2000). The social mind. New York: Cambridge University Press. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. Trans. and ed. M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner & E. Souberman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. — (1991). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wertsch, J., del Rio, P., & Alvarez, A. (Eds) (1995). Sociocultural studies of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, D., Bruner, J., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17, 89–100.

1

Learning in New Online Cultures: East Meets West Gulnara Sadykova

Introduction The growing popularity of cross-border online learning in the United States and around the globe has significantly increased the possibilities of cross-cultural interactions within a single course. Bridging cultures in the context of computer-mediated learning environments could be as complex as the concept of culture itself. Not attempting to do so, however, might prove to be detrimental for successful learning to happen. The dominance of a single culture may result in miscommunication (Reeder, Macfadyen, Roche & Chase, 2004) or missed communication (Ware, 2005), ineffective strategies of communication with the instructor (Biesenbach-Lucas, 2005), dissatisfaction with team work (Thompson & Ku, 2005), high anxiety and stress (Pan, Tsai, Tsai, Tao & Cornell, 2003), and confusion with course requirements and unmet course expectations (Shattuck, 2005). Consequently, US-centric online (and traditional) courses may lead to silencing, isolation and marginalization of students whose background is different from that of the dominant culture. On the other hand, statistical data show a steady increase in the number of international students who study at US universities and colleges and most of these students come from Asian countries (Open Doors, 2011). Studies suggest that international students may show academic engagement and achievements comparable to, or even surpassing accomplishments demonstrated by their US peers (Zhao, Kuh & Carini, 2005). Thus while international students, specifically those studying online, may experience significant challenges when studying in

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a class designed by US instructors for in-home consumption, they are still able to succeed and gain desirable learning outcomes in contexts that may not be particularly sensitive to their cultural background. The questions then arise: what are these students’ learning experiences and how do they manage to survive and thrive in the academic discourse that is significantly different from their native discourse? How do they balance two intersecting discourse systems and what impact may this have on their future studies or work?

Purpose of the study This chapter reports on part of a larger, two-stage study that focused on the learning experiences of international students who took fully online courses in a large US research university. The primary goal of the study was to examine the interplay of host and native cultures in an online learning environment and study its effect on international students’ learning experiences. With this goal in mind, a mixed-method study was undertaken and involved a survey, follow-up online interviews, as well as an in-depth case study. While the survey and follow-ups with selected survey participants provided information on trends and assisted in establishing an initial pool of participants, it was a year-long case study that enabled the research to gain rich data and that, consequently, yielded the most interesting findings. This case study centred on the learning experiences of Cathy, a female international graduate student from China. Cathy held a bachelors degree in international economics and foreign trade from a Shanghai institute. However, she chose to pursue a new career in the field of education and therefore enrolled into a masters program in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) in a large US university. Her first encounter with the US academic discourse happened online as she started taking a fully online course while continuing to living in Shanghai. After a semester studying online, she moved to the United States to take on-campus courses, and thus she was able to reflect on her prior online experiences from the new perspective of a US-based student. While studying on campus, Cathy found herself immersed in the host culture but she also anticipated her impending return to her native country. All these learning experiences made her case interesting from a research point of view as they bore essential characteristics of the US academic discourse as compared to the discourse of Chinese classrooms and highlighted how individual and contextual factors may affect the learning experiences in a particular case.

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The reported research focused on the following questions: 1. How might Cathy’s affiliations to her native Chinese academic discourse and culture affect her learning experiences in an online course in the United States? 2. How might newly adapted affiliation to the US academic discourse affect Cathy’s view on her native academic discourse?

Perspectives Theoretical framework The theoretical framework of this study is situated within the sociocultural paradigm, pioneered by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky and later extended by other scholars including Ron Scollon and Suzanne Wang Scollon who proposed a discourse approach to the study of intercultural communication. Scollon and Scollon in their work ‘Intercultural communication: a discourse approach’ first published in 1995 were able to build a framework whereby culture and an individual person exist as one inseparable entity and as a single unit of analysis. Their study is the examination of ‘how the ideological positions of cultures or of discourse systems become a factor in the interpersonal communication of members of one group with members of other groups’ (Scollon & Scollon, 2001, p. 139). For the current study Scollon and Scollon’s ideas were of primary significance not only because they provided the framework where individual/contextual and national/cultural factors were placed in a shared co-ordinate system, but also because much of the empirical data that they used to develop their framework was based on the discussion of Western and Eastern (Asian, Oriental) cultures. This fact became very important when Cathy, a native of the Chinese city Shanghai, became the key informant of the case study. East and West, however, are not placed in direct opposition in the Scollon and Scollon’s framework. In their non-binary view of culture, a person belongs to a number of discourse systems based on age group, gender, occupation, SES, and so on. A person may also belong to two or more intersecting (or cross-cutting, as Scollon and Scollon put it) discourse systems which may lead to conflicts of identity. Using ESL (English as a Second Language) teachers as an example, the Scollons demonstrate that multiple memberships in discourse systems may result in (1) conflicting ideologies, (2) fragmentation of socialization and

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experience, (3) dilemmas in choosing the most appropriate forms of discourse and (4) multiple faces. Each of these conflicts will be discussed in detail in the Findings section.

US academic discourse versus Chinese academic discourse The Scollons’ detailed discussion of the conflict of identity that an individual may experience when two cultures intersect was highly valuable for enabling this study to examine how simultaneous affiliation to Chinese and US academic discourses might affect experiences of a student. No previous studies located used Scollons’ framework to research this question. However a number of studies addressed this topic from other perspectives. Generally the literature that studies the experiences of Chinese learners in US classrooms focuses on the differences that exist between Western Socratic and Eastern Confucian approaches to teaching and learning. Western education based on the Socratic approach ‘manifests itself in the emphasis on developing critical-thinking and problem-solving skills as the highest priority educational outcome’ (Greenholtz, 2003, pp. 122–3). The Confucian approach emphasizes acquisition (accumulation) of content knowledge coming from ‘authoritative sources (usually textbooks and classics)’ (Hu, 2002, p. 98). Differences in epistemological beliefs might be so prominent that ‘if students come from an educational tradition that does not emphasize the process of generating knowledge (but rather, the product), they may not recognize what is happening in a Socratic classroom as legitimate pedagogy’ (Greenholtz, 2003, p. 123). Greenholtz (2003) observed this with Japanese students who studied in Canada. Several other studies also reported international students’ dissatisfaction with instructional methods practised by their US professors (Pan et al., 2003; Shattuck, 2005; Wang, 2007). Keeping this in mind, the current case study was launched to collect substantial data to examine the experiences of a single student who used to be a Confucian learner but who voluntarily placed herself in the Socratic context of a US online course.

Method The year-long case study was a part of a larger mixed-method two-stage study conducted in a large research university in the northeast of the United States. Cathy, a native of Shanghai, was recruited as the key informant after

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she completed a survey and follow-up online interviews. Besides the survey and follow-up interviews, Cathy’s case data sources also involved: (1) online course logs (all Cathy’s discussion posts and her written assignments, as well as discussion posts of seven of her American peers and message exchanges with Cathy’s online instructor), (2) online interviews with Cathy based on course logs, (3) online interviews with Cathy’s online instructor, (4) a 59-minute long face-to-face interview with Cathy and (5) Cathy’s reflective journals she kept after she finished her online course and moved to the United States to study on campus. This portion of the study employed qualitative methods of data analysis. To answer the research questions, the study used Scollon and Scollon’s (2001) discourse approach to the study of intercultural communication; particularly it employed their method of analysing conflicts of identity that an individual may experience when she/he belongs to two or more cross-cutting discourse systems.

Findings During the course of the study, it became evident that Cathy’s learning experiences in a US online course could be described as requiring effort at balancing membership in cross-cutting discourses of the native and host academic cultures. Cathy was caught in the midst of two intersecting discourses  – her native Chinese, the involuntary discourse system that she belonged to from birth, and the discourse system of the US academy, which she joined voluntarily once she signed up for a course offered by a US university. Such multiple membership resulted in a conflict of identity that manifested itself in four domains: ideology, socialization, forms of discourse and face systems (Scollon & Scollon, 2001).

Ideology Scollon and Scollon argue that multiple memberships in discourse systems may result in conflicting ideologies when ‘the purpose of the two (or more) systems pull the person towards different goals, and as he or she places a value on both sets of goals, it becomes a recurring problem to decide in any particular case which set of goals to emphasize’ (2001, p. 217). If the purpose of education is to prepare young people to take their place in society as advocated in Arendt

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(1968) and supported in Greenholtz (2003), then the question arises: what society does an international student prepare to serve? For Cathy the answer was straightforward: she studied in the United States in order to apply her newly acquired knowledge in her native country of China. However, it became evident that what she learned at a US university was sometimes not what might be appreciated and welcomed in the educational system of her native country. The student-centred learning philosophy promoted in each of the courses she took online and on campus, and the communicative approach to language teaching that she was taught in one of her on-campus TESOL classes were not teaching and learning approaches that Cathy previously experienced before taking US courses. Nor were these approaches that, according to Cathy, would be readily embraced and integrated into the Chinese classroom. How did Cathy handle such a situation? In her journals, interviews and online course posts she shows her strong interest in and approval of a student-centred learning environment. She finds US classrooms ‘more inspiring and productive, since it is more individual-centered and a qualified American teacher is required to [be] able to encourage creative and challenging ideas from his/her students’. Data indicate that Cathy sees the discrepancies in the educational systems practised and promoted in the United States and her native country. She seems to be so enchanted with the American way that she openly criticizes her native academic discourse: Personally, I should say the authoritarian role of Chinese teachers is in its greatest need of change, given that it could hinder the development of students’ creation, imagination and independent thinking which are all crucial elements for their future academic growth.

However, Cathy also uncovers why the Chinese classroom might be set up the way it is: In China . . . we always have classes more than 40. . . . It is beyond possibility to provide each student with an opportunity to express his/her idea freely to cultivate independent thinking.

Moreover, Cathy is able to identify flaws that a student-centred classroom may have: I noticed that teacher in our class allowed us spontaneous class discussion anytime we want, which always resulted in the endless and distractive talking. . . .

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It is good that we can talk whenever we feel inspired or puzzled, the problem is that it could leave the main task of the class unfinished/unlectured. Personally, I argue that teacher should sometimes stop-and-state to ‘drive’ the class in a more organized manner.

Cathy does not just unthinkingly embrace the student-centred learning/ teaching philosophy but carefully weighs its benefits and drawbacks in the context of her native discourse. While understanding all its potential advantages for Chinese students, she understands that its integration would require ‘a tremendous ideological transfer from conventional wisdom’ (Cathy’s discussion post) that has been embedded into the system of education in China for centuries and whose roots lie in the Confucian approach with its emphasis on the accumulation of knowledge coming from authoritative sources (Hu, 2002). Cathy believes that while Socratic classroom activities that develop critical-thinking and problem-solving skills and might be more engaging and less ‘plain’, Chinese classroom ‘could be more harmonious and rich in content’ (Cathy’s discussion post). Data suggest that the most acute consequences of the conflict of ideologies may have surfaced after Cathy changes her status from a US student to an alumni of a US university and tries to apply the newly acquired knowledge and skills in her home country. The acuteness of the possible conflicts is probably best illustrated in the following face-to-face interview excerpt: I am Chinese and I come from country where Confucius culture is quite valued where people are supposed to be very modest, to be even shy, always obey the rules set by authority and respect the elders, senior people who are at the higher status over you. And you are supposed to be a good listener in the classroom setting. If I get back home and work with other Chinese teachers, it could be a problem for me to always have my own ideas, which are different from theirs. They will probably think of me as a kind of aggressive person and I could be isolated.

Cathy’s data also illustrate the conflict of identity related to her membership in smaller professional discourse systems – the discourse system of ESL teachers in the United States and the system of EFL teachers in China. In the following quote she describes the real dilemma she expects to face if she tries to apply a context-based approach to teaching a foreign language (that emphasizes communication skills) to the Chinese classroom where language teachers focus on the form (grammar rules and vocabulary) rather than function:

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Here comes my big concern. As I want to be an EFL teacher working back in China, I figure I will face up to a lot of practical problems in teaching my students, one of which concerns the assessment system in China, a system that focus mainly on students’ declarative language knowledge rather than procedural knowledge. If I were to start from the very basic question which is ‘What I want my students to get out of the class/unit?’ and use context-based materials, instructional strategies and evaluations, students will be very likely to fail in their final exam which is crucial in deciding whether they will be academically allowed for their higher level study. I feel frustrated by it.

Clearly, goals established for the language classroom by two educational systems – Chinese and the US – seem to be incompatible. Cathy is caught in the midst of conflicting ideologies she has to deal with on her own. She anticipates that she will face serious obstacles if she tries to practise the American way but she is still determined to do so: I’ll do it, I’ll do it. . . . The problem is that I have different audience. Students here in the US have a very different learning styles comparing with learning styles Chinese students have. They are not very comfortable if you teach the US way. They will think that you are just a crazy teacher.

While being labelled ‘a crazy teacher’ does not scare Cathy, behind her courage lies the acuteness of the problem she will most probably face when implementing US teaching approaches in her native discourse.

Socialization Besides conflicting ideologies, multiple membership in discourse systems may result in fragmentation of socialization and experience. In Scollon and Scollon’s (2001) framework, socialization refers to the process of learning culture and has to do with experiences that a person acquires in the process of informal learning (informal interaction with family members, peers, etc.) and formal education (pp. 163–4). They argue that a feeling of fragmentation may happen when ‘a person must select from among his or her total experience as a human just those aspects each discourse system values’ (p. 217). In Cathy’s case, one may expect that some experience that she acquires in the United States may not be valued in China, while some of her previous Chinese experience may not be valued in the United States. Cathy had ample chances to experience fragmentation of socialization. Having been socialized in Confucian society and having experienced Confucian

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approaches to teaching and learning, she was well prepared to diligently accumulate words of wisdom from authoritative books and her teacher who she was taught to respect and obey. However, when joining the US academic discourse, she was faced with the fact that the Western student-centred approach, rooted in Socratic methods of learning, valued critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, encouraged questioning of authoritative sources and self-generation of ideas, and perceived the instructor as a facilitator and equal partner in the creation of knowledge. Moreover, when signing up to her first US course, Cathy had faulty expectations concerning the size of the workload she might have in a graduate course. As a result, the beginning of the course was rough for Cathy: she fell behind with readings, failed to follow instructions for the written assignments and was unable to keep up with the work done by her group members and the rest of the class. However, because the US academic discourse dominated within the courses that Cathy took when being a student, she had to learn the values of this new discourse and practise the behaviour that fit its paradigm. The research data suggests that the acquisition of the new value system was neither short term nor easy. The following excerpt from the face-to-face interview demonstrates that Cathy was distressed when she had to alter, sometimes radically, her perception of acceptable and approved learning strategies and classroom behaviour: To be honest at the very beginning I felt very uncomfortable with this kind of learning style in the US because in China what we do is listen to lectures and we never ever try to challenge him whenever we want. . . . But in the US I found that students always raise hands whenever they want, just cut and jump and do everything but it’s crazy to me. [laughing]. But I am learning it. I actually did it. [laughing again] . . . I don’t want to do this rude thing but everyone did that.

We see that initially Cathy perceived the situation as ‘crazy’ and her classmates’ behaviour as ‘rude’ and ‘aggressive’ because what she experienced in the US classroom clashed with the values of her native discourse. However, she gradually came to the realization of the acceptability and usefulness of such behaviour: Professors . . . really want you to have some response or interaction with them, so they like the challenge, to make the topic go further even beyond the frame that is expected. And it is very helpful when you can get into it by challenging your professor or even your peers questions and you can actually get into this, this whole process. Yeah, I think it is good.

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In her interviews Cathy proudly mentions that she also practised jumping in to ask a question, express an opinion and challenge the instructor’s or her classmates’ ideas. She said that she gradually started perceiving such a behaviour as ‘normal’ and ‘natural’. However, the analysis of her online discussion posts and messages to the instructor revealed that Cathy was unable to fully disassociate herself from her native discourse even though the contextual factors called for this. Cathy used communication strategies that one does not expect to find in the US academic discourse such as the use of overly polite and too formal request phrases and an overabundance of adjectives showing admiration, enthusiasm and exaltation: Can you kindly let me know your usual ‘meeting hours’ so that I can check if I can be available online. Wonderful class with wonderful professor and dear classmates!

In several cases Cathy humbled herself when praising others as the following example shows: I bet you all have more much better ideas re this interesting and worth-talking question.

While Cathy did not observe silence in relation to her instructor (which is expected from a Chinese student), her messages were polite, respectful and grateful of the help she received. Even closer to the end of her second semester taking US courses she continued believing that ‘it is wiser to listen and analyse reasons behind’ classmates’ opinion. Thus Cathy’s behaviour in the US classroom reflected the values she acquired in the process of socialization (formal and informal learning) both in her native country and in the US industry; harmony with others, humbleness, loyalty to superiors, solidarity with others and non-competitiveness are among the most valued characteristics of a Chinese person (The Chinese Cultural Connection, 1987 as cited in Neuliep, 2009) that she/he learned not only in school but also at home and other public places. The US classroom, in its turn, reflects US values, such as self-interest, self-expression, self-gratification and independence (Hsu, 1969 as cited in Neuliep, 2009). Data shows that Cathy had to learn to be more competitive, openly express herself and critique authoritative sources. However, she felt it was impossible to do so without striving for group harmony and presenting herself as a humble and respectful person. This suggests that Cathy was unable to avoid fragmentation of socialization and experience.

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Forms of discourse The third problem that Scollon and Scollon (2001) expect to arise in situations of cross-cutting discourses is ‘dilemmas in choosing the most appropriate forms of discourse: each of the multiple systems favors different forms of discourse, and difficult selections must sometimes be made’ (p. 217). This may concern choice of language and language forms including choice of a genre or style. The Scollons illustrate this by recalling situations when ESL teachers criticize the language of a research proposal in the meeting of a faculty research committee instead of focusing on the content of the proposal. In Cathy’s case, the selection of the language seems not to be problematic: in the US classroom she speaks and writes in English, while when she communicates with her Chinese relatives or friends, she speaks in Chinese. However, the most difficult choices that Cathy might have had to make concerned the choices of English forms. Here it is appropriate to talk not about purely linguistic choices related to vocabulary and grammar, but rather the choices related to language pragmatics, that is, contextually appropriate use of language. Being raised and educated in Confucian society she seemed to be inclined to select forms that made her English sound too polite, formal and powerless. The examples of such sentences were provided above, but it will not hurt to offer an additional illustrative phrase that shows Cathy’s adherence to the fundamental Chinese value of humbleness: I quite enjoy the way you follow the thread of connecting all 5 articles which is much much better than that of mine.

This example demonstrates how Cathy transfers a pragmatic form appropriate in her native discourse to US academic discourse. Such influence of the native culture on the use of English as a foreign or second language is well known to ESL and EFL teachers and documented in many research studies (Kachru, 1983; Mesthrie & Bhatt, 2008). Another clash of forms of cross-cutting discourses might be anticipated when Cathy starts applying knowledge she acquired in her American TESOL classes to a Chinese EFL classroom. As it became apparent in the discussion of ideologies, Cathy might experience misunderstanding and criticism from her colleagues if she adapts the context-based language teaching approach that emphasizes functions of language forms and involves students in communicative activities. The discourse forms of a CLT (Communicative Language Teaching) follower might be incomprehensible to language teachers that design test-driven

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language classrooms that focus on form and offer students lists of words and grammar rules for rote learning and drilling. As a proponent of the CLT approach, Cathy may speak in a different language than her colleagues when designing curriculum, discussing the choice of activities, drafting learning materials, offering assessment, and so on, and this may result in conflicts with her colleagues.

Face systems Scollon and Scollon (2001) argue that in a situation of cross-cutting discourse systems, a person might have to assume two or more sets of face relationships, thus feeling ‘two-faced’ (p. 217). The scholars distinguish three types of politeness (face) systems: 1. difference politeness system: when participants consider each other to be on the same social level but are distant (e.g. university professors who met recently); 2. solidarity politeness system: when both sides feel equal in social status and feel close and use involvement strategies (e.g. two close friends); 3. hierarchical politeness system: when participants see each other to be on different social status levels (e.g. a boss and a low-rank employee). While one may probably find all three of these face systems in US academic discourse, student-centred learning environments are generally described as horizontal, that is, ‘characterized by informal student–student and student– teacher interactions without much emphasis on hierarchical relationships’ (Lee, 2007, p. 30). In the Scollon and Scollon framework horizontal relationships are found in difference and solidarity politeness systems. Scollons also show that developing close and equal relationships with students and colleagues is not unusual for ESL teachers who practise a communicative language approach. On the other hand, a traditional educational system is hierarchical in nature as it is based on a strict vertical relationships between teachers and students. In the Chinese classroom, this hierarchy is very tangible, and therefore one does not expect to find here a face system other than hierarchical. For Cathy, membership in the US academic discourse system, as well as her affiliation with the ESL/EFL professional discourse that espouses CLT, required her to engage in horizontal relationships with peers and instructor, which was evident in the communication strategies she employed. The analysis of Cathy’s online course messages demonstrated that more often than not she utilized

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what Scollons call involvement politeness strategies, that is, strategies that show her involvement in communication. For example, she pointed out common in-group membership (I am so proud of being a member of this family) or claimed a common point of view (In China, we share the same problem, even to a greater extent). These examples show that Cathy made attempts to fit into the solidarity politeness system where one expects to find a high concentration of involvement politeness strategies (Scollon & Scollon, 2001). On the other hand, Cathy’s journals and interviews showed that she initially felt discomfort speaking up, interrupting her professors and classmates and critiquing authoritative sources. Moreover, independent politeness strategies, which one expects to find in either hierarchical or difference politeness systems, were not absent in Cathy’s posts. For example, in her conversations with peers and instructors she used phrases where she apologized (Very Sorry for the [i]nconvenience I caused to the group) and was pessimistic (I am not quite sure if I interpret your problem in a right way).

Thus, these data suggest that it was problematic for Cathy to adhere to a single face system and that maintaining both face relationships was not easy for her. Cathy’s attempts to marry multiple face systems are also demonstrated in her using two first names for herself – her native Chinese and American: My name is Lian Wang.1 You can also call me Cathy Wang.

What is interesting is that Cathy uses several ways of naming herself: Cathy Wang, Cathy and Lian Wang. However, Cathy Wang was used most frequently, which seems to illustrate her desire to combine two discourse systems, two cultures – American and Chinese. This desire also surfaces when Cathy mixes ‘we’ that refers to her US peers/ colleagues and ‘we’ that refers to Chinese people: We can’t let it happen that our students lose their will and their ability of reading. In Chinese colleges and universities, we have book clubs joined by members of students.

Discussion The situation when a learner is placed in an academic discourse which significantly differs, if not opposes, the familiar native academic discourse, could

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be modestly described as complicated. Cathy’s description ‘crazy’, however, seems illuminating in this regard. This study showed that an international student that finds her-/himself in the midst of cross-cutting discourses may experience conflicts of identity. Following the Scollon and Scollon’s (2001) approach to the analysis of multiple discourse membership, the research found evidence of conflicts of identity in the areas of ideology, socialization, forms of discourse and face systems. Evidently for Cathy these conflicts are most significant in the differences that exist between teaching and learning philosophies and approaches endorsed in the student-centred US academic discourse and in the Chinese (academic) discourse based on Confucianism. Why then does Cathy, as well as most other international students who participated in the larger study, feel very positive about her learning experiences – both online and on campus? What made her experiences satisfying in spite of communication, relationship, linguistic, logistic and other difficulties that many international students experience according to data from the current study and previous research (e.g. Al-Harthi, 2005; Shattuck, 2005; Thompson & Ku, 2005; Zhang & Kenny, 2010)? Why do conflicts of identity that evidently complicate Cathy’s learning in a significant way not ruin her overall impression from her first US course? I would argue that the conflicts of identity that international students like Cathy experience may contribute to students’ development – both professional and personal, and a thinking student appreciates that. In Cathy’s case this growth was most evident in the shift in epistemologies (see Figure 1.1). Online course transcripts, interviews and reflective journals provided evidence showing that Cathy re-evaluated the nature and sources of knowledge. Her immersion into learner-centred pedagogical practices rooted in the Socratic teaching approach brought her to the realization that existing

us academic discourse

International student

Shift in epistemologies

Figure 1.1  Shift in epistemologies

Native academic discourse

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knowledge could be critically deconstructed while new knowledge could be co-created by students and instructors in the active, collaborative, critical and equal process of knowledge building. Having been engaged in online learning, Cathy also opened herself up to the educational value of communication technology as a tool for global learning and a legitimate space for knowledge creation. This shift in epistemologies seems to signal true changes in Cathy’s development as an individual. Apparently she acquired new psychological tools (Vygotsky, 1978) and new conceptual frames for further studies. These changes, however, might be a source of new conflicts that she might face when bringing her new vision of teaching and learning back to her native discourse, that is, to Chinese classrooms. In her interviews Cathy anticipated that her Chinese students might perceive her as a ‘crazy teacher’, while her colleagues might see her as ‘aggressive’. Optimists would probably argue that Cathy’s strong determination to create learner-centred environments in her classroom and her strong belief in the necessity to reform education in her native country might yield viable fruit and eventually result in shifts in epistemologies and changes in the instructional practices of those around her. Cathy and her confederates, whom she will most probably find among other Chinese alumnae of US universities, may serve as innovators and early adopters (Rogers, 2003) who will inspire and ignite others for educational reforms. However, caution should be taken in expecting any quick reforms in such a large and conservative system as Chinese education. Moreover, integration of learner-centred pedagogical practices might be problematic and challenging in cultures that value modesty, obedience to authorities (including teachers) and where ‘silence is gold’ (Yang, 2010). External factors, such as in very large classes,2 the nature of the assessment system and extensive curricula to cover, might also prevent teachers from introducing learner-centred course activities (Dautermann, 2005; Jacobson et al., 2010; Yang, 2010).

Conclusion and implications Overall the research findings suggest that international students like Cathy may be faced with the need to balance the academic discourses of their native and host cultures. The simultaneous membership in two cross-cutting discourses results in conflicts of identity. While complicating learning experiences, these

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conflicts may also stimulate individual growth and result in cognitive shifts such as the shift in epistemological beliefs as was the case with Cathy. This study and its findings have several important implications for research and practice. First, the study suggests that research exploring the learning experiences of international online students, as well as the experiences of other culture groups in different contexts, will benefit from case studies that focus on contextual and individual factors and involve a variety of data collection methods including interviews, reflective journals and the use of course transcripts. Such studies may avoid blaming US online programs for imposing cultural imperialism, colonialism and hegemony (which Moore (2006) shows to be inappropriate and useless for understanding the problem) and help researchers and practitioners gain a clearer and more balanced picture of how international students learn and feel in online US courses. Second, this study enabled extension of the applicability of sociocultural frameworks, particularly the Scollon and Scollon (2001) contextual approach to the discourse analysis of intercultural communication. Scollons’ methods of studying politeness strategies and analysing cross-cutting discourses were found to be very relevant to the study of international students’ behaviour in a US online classroom. Specifically, it was the Scollons’ approach to the study of multiple discourses that enabled this study to show that the identity conflicts experienced by Cathy were not destructive but rather had formative and constructive effect on her growth as a student and individual. Thus, sociocultural concepts may be as useful and productive for the study of learning experiences of diverse cultural groups. From a practical point of view, the study findings may inform course designers and facilitators. This research confirmed that courses need to be inclusive of multicultural content and sensitive to the linguistic and learning styles as well as affective needs of international students, recommendations that have been voiced numerous times previously (see, for example, Moore, 2006; Sadykova & Dautermann, 2009; Shattuck, 2005, Thompson & Ku, 2005; Tierney, 2006; Zhao & McDougall, 2008). Moreover, this study suggests that all course participants would benefit from tasks where students need to reflect on the applicability of the content knowledge in their own cultures and to suggest ways of reconstructing the content/skills making them applicable in their native contexts. Public discussions of these issues might not only help all students increase their cultural awareness but also foster a deeper understanding of the subject matter and develop critical analysis skills. Such tasks might be complicated to carry out but benefits might justify the effort.

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Notes 1 The name is changed to protect participant’s identity. 2 Yang (2010) reports that English language classrooms in China may have as many as 60–70 students or even over one hundred students in a class.

References Al-Harthi, A. S. (2005). Distance higher education experiences of Arab Gulf students in the United States: a cultural perspective. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 6(3). Retrieved from www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/ article/view/263/406 Arendt, H. (1968). The crisis in education. In Between Past and Future (pp. 173–96). New York: Penguin Books. Biesenbach-Lucas, S. (2005). Communication topics and strategies in e-mail consultation: comparison between American and international university students. Language Learning & Technology, 9(2), 24–46. Dautermann, J. (2005). Teaching business and technical writing in China: confronting assumptions and practices at home and abroad. Technical Communications Quarterly, 14, 141–59. Greenholtz, J. (2003). Socratic teachers and Confucian learners: examining the benefits and pitfalls of a year abroad. Language and Intercultural Communication, 3(2), 122–30. Hu, G. (2002). Potential cultural resistance to pedagogical imports: the case of communicative language teaching in China. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 15(2), 93–105. Jacobson, M. J., So, H.-J., Teo, T., Lee, J., Pathak, S., & Lossman, H. (2010). Epistemology and learning: impact on pedagogical practices and technology use in Singapore schools. Computers and Education, 55, 1694–706. Kachru, Y. (1983). Linguistics and written discourse in particular languages: contrastive studies – English and Hindi. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 3, 50–77. Lee, E. L. (2007). Linguistic and cultural factors in East Asian students’ oral participation in U.S. university classroom. International Education, 36(2), 27–47. Mesthrie, R., & Bhatt, R. M. (2008). World Englishes: the study of new linguistic varieties. New York: Cambridge University Press. Moore, M. J. (2006). Editorial: questions of culture. The American Journal of Distance Education, 20(1), 1–5. Neuliep, J. W. (2009). Intercultural communication: a contextual approach (4th edn). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Open Doors (2011). International student enrollments increased by 5 percent in 2010/11. Retrieved on 3 May 2012 from www.iie.org/Who-We-Are/News-and-Events/ Press-Center/Press-Releases/2011/2011–11–14-Open-Doors-International-Students

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Pan, C.-C., Tsai, M.-H., Tsai, P.-Y., Tao, Y., & Cornell, R. (2003). Technology’s impact: symbiotic or asymbiotic impact on differing cultures? Educational Media International, 40(3–4), 319–30. Reeder, K., Macfadyen L. P., Roche, J., & Chase, M. (2004). Negotiating cultures in cyberspace: participation patterns and problematics. Language Learning & Technology, 8(2), 88–105. Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th edn). New York: Free Press. Sadykova, G., & Dautermann, J. (2009). Crossing cultures and borders in international online distance higher education. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 13(2), 89–114. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2001). Intercultural communication: a discourse approach. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Shattuck, K. (2005). Glimpses of the global coral gardens: insights of international adult learners on the interactions of cultures in online distance education (D.Ed. dissertation). Pennsylvania State University, USA. Thompson, L., & Ku, H.-Y. (2005). Chinese graduate students’ experiences and attitudes towards online learning. Educational Media International, 42(1), 33–47. Tierney, R. J. (2006). Global/cultural teachers creating possibilities: reading worlds, reading selves, and learning to teach. Pedagogics: An International Journal, 1(1), 77–87. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wang, M. (2007). Designing online courses that effectively engage learners from diverse cultural backgrounds. British Journal of Educational Technology, 38(2), 294–311. Ware, P. (2005). Missed communication in online communication: tensions in a German-American telecollaboration. Language Learning & Technology, 9(2), 64–89. Yang, X. (2010). The globalization and localization of ‘learner-centered’ strategy from an international horizon. Asian Social Science, 6(9), 78–81. Zhang, Z., & Kenny, R. F. (2010). Learning in an online distance education course: experiences of three international students. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 11(1), 17–36. Zhao, C.-M., Kuh, G. D., & Carini, R. M. (2005). A comparison of international student and American student engagement in effective educational practices. Journal of Higher Education, 76(2), 209–31. Zhao, N., & McDougall, D. (2008). Cultural influences on Chinese students’ asynchronous online learning in a Canadian university. Journal of Distance Education, 22(2), 59–80.

2

Projection of Teacher Identity in Introductory Posts: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Strategies of Online Self-Presentation Denis Samburskiy

Introduction With online teaching becoming widespread, many educators are coming to understand the value of virtual instruction as a convenient’ timesaving environment. However, the shift from face-to-face to online teaching can be hampered not only by required computer skills, but also by a prerequisite change in teachers’ self-concept. Those instructors who are accustomed to their powerful classroom roles find it difficult to maintain them in virtual environments, where students feel more at liberty to share their opinions and exercise critical thinking (Kern, 1995). Online, some teachers experience a change in self-perception, as they feel that their professional identity has to accommodate the egalitarian atmosphere of the new teaching environment. Others defy this change and persist in projecting a more authoritarian stance, which may render virtual instruction more challenging (Saltmarsh & Sutherland-Smith, 2010). Self-presentations can communicate various ways of being online and contribute to broader understanding of how teacher identity manifests itself linguistically. This chapter examines online identity-presentational strategies that were employed by instructors in their introductory posts in a collaborative project between the State University of New York at Albany, New York, and the European Humanities University in Lithuania. Applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

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(Fairclough, 1989; van Dijk, 1993), I analyse the content of introductory posts of five teachers in the course management platform Moodle. My goals were to find discursive patterns of displaying expertise and power in the introductory posts and examine the themes that yielded more response from the students.

Identity and self-presentation online and face-to-face There is much debate about the role of teachers, teacher performance and their connection with the development of professional teacher identity. This active interest in professional identity formation is fuelled by the idea that a teacher’s concept of self as an educator affects her professional accomplishments in the classroom and in her interaction with students. An ample body of research has argued that identity is a volatile, socially constructed phenomenon that takes various forms according to the environment (see Bucholtz, 1995; Cook-Gumperz, 1995). Our identity permeates our behaviour, appearance and language. To negotiate the complex nature of our identities, we assume specific features of discourse to project our position in respect to the interlocutor. On the whole, teacher identity could be shaped by personal beliefs about teaching and perception of self (e.g. self-concept and self-efficacy (Bandura, 1995)) with teachers’ beliefs shaping student–teacher interactions. For example, Gibson and Dembo (1984) reported that high self-efficacy teachers were less critical and more helpful to struggling students than low self-efficacy teachers. Since teacher identity includes epistemological beliefs, concepts and expectations about teaching, professional self-awareness and self-efficacy, all these factors play a vital role in the formation of teacher self-presentation. Self-presentation (or impression management) is a fundamental, powerful and important psychological process  – one that influences virtually every interpersonal encounter (Leary, Allen & Terry, 2011). It has been persuasively argued that people tend to match their self-presentations to those with whom they are interacting, but they are usually not aware of doing so (Baumeister, Hutton & Tice, 1989). Thus, Schlenker (1980) distinguished between an image that a person desires to present (the desired image) and an image that was socially desirable in terms of other people’s judgements or social norms (a desirable image). However, conveying a desired image that would match a desirable one could be hindered in computer-mediated communication (CMC) between people. In face-to-face encounters interlocutors take a plethora of cues into account, most of which may not be perceivable on computer screens or completely

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absent in text-based CMC (email, chat, blog, etc.). When other cues are vague or non-existent, interlocutors rely on the textual content of the message to make an accurate judgement of its sender. Being aware of the additional importance that the words carry for the recipients, senders may embellish their messages to enhance the projection of a positive self-image. On the other hand, recipients react negatively when their interlocutors do not satisfy the images they project (Schlenker & Leary, 1982), so people realize that conveying reasonably accurate images works best for their positive self-presentation. As a result, people invest much of their self-presentational efforts in conveying truthful information about themselves, despite the occasional ‘beautification of truth’ it entails (Schlenker, 1980; Schlenker & Pontari, 2000). When teachers need to introduce themselves but are unaware of their prospective students, they understandably place extra emphasis on their academic affiliations, accomplishments and prior professional or personal experiences because that information could enhance their self-image as competent and seasoned educators. Meskill and Sadykova’s (2007) findings showed that graduate students in an online education course presented themselves with a heavy emphasis on their ‘progress in achieving the next level on the academic/ professional membership trajectory’ (p. 129). They all self-identified either through their academic status and/or as professionals of some sort. Therefore, educators’ professional identity and self-concept are so closely linked that, when they are asked to introduce themselves, the introduction revolves around educational and professional life achievements. The major challenge in constructing an introductory post is to disclose just enough personal information without making it egocentric. Although a list of personal achievements and awards would probably make the writer look professional and knowledgeable, it might also create an unnecessary gap between the instructor and the students. Therefore, sharing enough to seem professional without appearing to be ‘superior’ is not always easy, especially for those educators who view their teacher identity in terms of their professional accomplishments (Farrell, 2011). People tend to identify themselves with their professional role and social rank, that is, they describe who they are in terms of what they do. Thus revealing to students how far they have come in their academic career seems to add extra value to their opinions and claims. In analysing the introductory posts of five teachers, this study sought to answer the following questions: ll

How do online educators introduce themselves to their virtual students?

42 ll

ll

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What do texts of such introductions reveal about online teacher identity expression online from a critical discourse perspective? Which themes from teachers’ introductory texts do students more readily associate with in their responses?

Theoretical framework The analysis of the introductory posts was conducted implementing the framework of CDA. CDA originated from a critical theory of language that views the use of language as a form of social practice (Janks, 1997). CDA is not one method but a ‘shared perspective on doing linguistic, semiotic or discourse analysis’ (van Dijk, 1993, p. 131). Fairclough (1989, 1995, 2002) defined CDA as a research model that investigates three dimensions of discourse: 1. analysis of texts (description) 2. analysis of discursive processes (interpretation) 3. analysis of the socio-historical conditions governing these processes (explanation) CDA facilitates a perception of language as having meaning in a particular historical, social and political condition. The text is comprehended in a particular manner because of its enclosure in a discursive and sociocultural practice of the reader/writer. McGregor (2003) maintains that ‘discursive practice refers to rules, norms, and mental models of socially acceptable behavior in specific roles or relationships used to produce, receive, and interpret the message’ (p. 3). The sociocultural setting refers to the environment in which discourse takes place (e.g. online learning management platform Moodle). The environment determines what rights and obligations the participants possess, that is, what each is allowed and expected to do. Any text in CDA is more than just a number of words – it discloses how words are used in a particular social context (Huckin, 1997). Central to CDA is power that producers of text exhibit via words. Wodak (2002) stated that ‘the notions of ideology, power, hierarchy and gender together with sociological variables [are] all seen as relevant for an interpretation or explanation of text’ (p. 6). She maintained that discourse is both ‘socially constitutive’ and ‘socially conditioned’ because it creates situations, objects of knowledge, people’s identities and relationships between each other. This power lurks behind the choice of vocabulary, positioning of agents and recipients of

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actions (transitivity), intentionally including or excluding determining factors (foregrounding/backgrounding), incorporating words of uncertainty or probability (modality), using a specific register, or words that assume the truth of a statement (presupposition), and so on. These strategies help producers of texts communicate a specific identity – a way of being perceived by their readership.

Background of the study This study was part of a larger project involving the State University of New York at Albany, New York, and the European Humanities University in Lithuania. The larger project was called Teaching English Well Online (TEWO) and aimed at facilitating a transition into online teaching for a group of six instructors whose experience was mainly English as a Foreign Language (EFL) face-to-face instruction. In one of the phases of TEWO, Lithuanian teachers were to observe a two-week EFL course conducted by teachers from Albany using the online teaching management platform Moodle. The two-week observation was to improve teachers’ understanding of Moodle’s potential and show a wide range of strategies and methods of teaching English in an online setting. Prior to conducting the two-week course, the Albany teachers discussed learner-centredness and various techniques of creating a student-driven learning environment. The course was designed to engage the Russian-speaking undergraduate students located in Lithuania and Belarus (all attending EHU) in conversations about US and Belorussian cultures, English language and language learning technology. However, the topics were to be introduced implicitly without suppressing other emergent topics of interest. All teachers started the course with self-introductions that became the focus of this paper. Five teachers took part in the course: three native speakers of US English (Simon, Jack and Dwight), two non-native speakers (Jasmine and Daniel). All the teachers were enrolled at State University of New York at Albany as Ph.D. candidates. Their names have been changed.

Data collection and analysis In order to collect data for this paper, I was granted access to the two-week course taught by the five teachers. For a thorough analysis, I needed introductory

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posts of the teachers and subsequent responses of their students to examine the students’ reaction to the teachers’ introductory texts.

Textual analysis I used the 3D approach of CDA to determine the amount of power, affinity and commitment to the course objectives exhibited by each teacher. As pointed out by Fairclough (1995), I used all three levels of discourse should be analysed equally, as each level tends to reveal ideas that permeate the other two. The analysis of teachers’ texts showed an interesting pattern that I describe as a continuum of egocentrism. This concentration on self could be attributed to the teachers’ endeavour to show themselves in the best light and to assert their suitability for the course as highly competent professionals. This resonated with the concept of self-promotion developed by Jones and Pittman (1982) in their taxonomy, as it addressed the discourse in which speakers intentionally focused on their accomplishments. Both ends of the continuum represented manifestations of power/ egocentrism in its extreme manner. The left end showed the utmost focus on self and the tightest grip on power in interaction. The right end signified the least amount of power expressed and, consequently, the weakest position in interaction. The percentage of text that teachers devoted to descriptions of their personal and academic achievements was a determinant in their positioning on the egocentrism continuum. The location on the line was hypothetical and defined in relation to both the extreme ends and other teachers. To calculate the percentage of self-promoting text, I counted words in the texts that did not address students as an intended audience or that were not related to the online course per se. The matter of egocentric self-presentation not only concerned the amount of text that was devoted to positive self-image. As CDA closely looks at discourse strategies of constructing power in text, use of personal pronouns is often cited as an effective manoeuvre. I examined the number of pronouns of first and second person utilized by our teachers. Of interest were ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’ – related to self, and ‘you’, ‘your’ – related to the addressee. Table 2.1 shows numbers of occurrences of the abovementioned pronouns in the teachers’ introductory posts. The frequency of first-person pronouns (self-directed) in Jack and Simon’s texts clearly indicated a self-promoting trajectory of their discourse, with I-centredness being the focus of their entire posts. A large number of ‘you’s

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Table 2.1  The ratio of first- to second-person pronouns Name

I

My

Me

You

Your

Jack Simon Jasmine Dwight Daniel

33 31 18 11 10

12 10 8 5 3

1 2 2 0 0

2 13 7 1 15

0 0 4 0 4

in Simon’s text, however, could point to his awareness of the audience and inclusion of the audience in his writing. Most teachers shifted their focus on the students (i.e. became more audience-oriented) only at the end of the introductory posts. Table 2.2 shows the ratio of first- to second-person pronouns (i.e. self- and other-directed pronouns, respectively) in relation to one another and the entire text. According to Table 2.2, Daniel’s ratio of ‘I’ to ‘you’ pronouns demonstrated that only in his text the other-directed discourse dominated. This was supported by the highest percentage of other-directed pronouns (‘you’ and its derivatives) in his introductory post. Despite a surprisingly high percentage of self-directed pronouns, Jasmine balanced it out by using 11 ‘you’s in a relatively small post of 316 words. Therefore, Jasmine’s text represented an intermediary entity where egocentrism was intertwined with an appreciation of the reader. On the other side of the continuum are Jack, Simon and Dwight – all dedicating a tiny percentage of their text to the readers. Although Simon’s frequent use of ‘you’s was notable, his 678-word post (largest of all) made it seem insignificant. Jack’s voluminous description of his travelling and prior academic accomplishments ended with only one student-directed sentence. Lastly, Dwight’s post had one single mention of his audience, in which he stated that they had a 6-hour

Table 2.2  Self- and Other-directed pronouns in teachers’ texts Name

Jack Simon Jasmine Dwight Daniel

Self-directed vs Other-directed

Self-directed in entire text

Other-directed in entire text

Number

Ratio

Percentage

Percentage

46:2 43:13 28:11 16:1 13:19

23:1 3.31:1 2.55:1 16:1 0.68:1

8.35 6.34 8.86 7.62 5.14

0.36 1.92 4.35 0.48 7.51

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Sociocultural Context (explanation) Discourse (interpretation) Text (description)

Figure 2.1  Dimensions of Critical Discourse Analysis

time difference. Overall, the textual analysis supported the grouping that was established in Figure 2.1 with Dwight, Jack, Simon located closer to the I-centred end, Jasmine around the centre and Daniel closer to the Other-centred end. I do not claim that personal pronouns undoubtedly indicate a causal link between ‘focus on self ’ and ‘focus on other’. This link could also be established by other means and on other levels of discourse for example, choosing a topic that interests the teacher, requiring the use of a specific register that could constrain students’ self-expression, and so on. The choice of content in self-introduction, however, illustrated what approach teachers used to satisfy the same goal of affirming their legitimate status as experts or experienced instructors. On the one hand, some decided to emphasize their previous academic feats and work experience related to the course content. On the other hand, some chose to acknowledge their students’ presence by giving them ‘voice’ or shifting the focus on the readers of the post, not the writer.

Discursive and social analysis The introductory texts were coded according to five general themes. In outlining the themes I looked beyond mere words to meanings that the teachers were working to convey. Needless to say, part of any introduction was disclosure of personal information, professional standing and achievements, interests and leisure activities, and so on. However, every teacher had an indefinite number of possible discourse strategies at hand. Critical discourse analysts claim that speakers masterfully conceal their intentions behind the words. Thus, the speaker’s choice of words and sentence structures is never arbitrary but is revealing of how they wish to be perceived by their audience. It is even truer of written discourse because its content is not as ephemeral as the content of oral speech. All in all, I specified five themes in the introductory posts of the teachers: 1. Sense of Professionalism 2. Awareness of the Audience

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3. Sense of Affinity 4. Multifaceted Self-Image 5. Sense of Erudition The Professionalism theme revolved around personal and professional achievements, social and institutional statuses, ambitions, and so on. The teachers found it essentially relevant to their pedagogical role in the course to establish a trustworthy and knowledgeable image of themselves. In addition, Professionalism included parts of discourse where the teachers mentioned (or elaborated on) any accomplishments that defined them as educated, well-travelled and competent adults. The Awareness of the Audience comprised discourse in which the teachers addressed students as the audience of the posts and outlined possible topics for further discussion. This strategy added to the view of those teachers as goal-oriented and willing to assist new students with getting acquainted with the course and with the teachers as the course facilitators. However, the main value of this discourse was that it acknowledged the presence of the students in the interaction and encouraged the readers to be active participants. Any text in which the students were addressed or mentioned was coded as Awareness of the Audience because it clearly indicated an endeavour to engage the readers in the topic and validate their opinion. The Affinity theme comprised different discourse strategies that helped the teachers to project themselves as personable, amusing and approachable (of course, only in its abstract sense). This was achieved largely by sharing personal information with students. Each teacher decided how many private details were sufficient for the construction of an amicable self. The limits of openness to the unknown audience and revelation of one’s own sensitive side tend to be determined by the cultural and ethical norms of the teacher’s background (Kim, Lee & Gim, 2011; Kim & Papacharissi, 2003). Another aspect of Affinity was the manifestation of the positive attitude to the course. This undoubtedly created a favourable environment from the start, which enabled students to put more trust in the efforts of the instructor. Lastly, many teachers provided emotional assessment of the content of their own posts or prospective posts of the students. For example, positively loaded words or phrases such as ‘really happy’, ‘excited’, ‘brimming with ideas’, ‘peace!’, and so on, created a benevolent setting in which the teacher seemed more like a source of inspiration than a dour professional. Many participant teachers strove to show themselves as well-rounded individuals who lead active lives beyond their classrooms. Such information

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was referred to as Multifaceted Self-Image theme. This theme included any indication of hobbies, recreational activities or preferred pastime of any sort. Such information helped to establish an emotional link between teachers and students, find a common ground for subsequent conversations, and portray the teacher as a source of expertise that went beyond the subject of the course. Lastly, the Erudition theme was ascribed to an overt display of encyclopaedic knowledge or unnecessarily detailed description of a concept. This theme included various facts, data, statistics, and so on, which could be omitted without any damage to the introductory value of the posts. This information created an impression of an ostentatiously intelligent person who ‘flaunted’ knowledge where it appeared unnecessary. For example, elucidating the average annual temperatures, precise geographic location and demographics of a region, and so on. The results of thematic coding are presented in Table 2.3 and Figure 2.3. The distribution of themes in the teachers’ texts was noticeably unequal. Interestingly, Figure 2.3 resembles the continuum of egocentrism that was displayed in Figure 2.2. The degree of I-centredness or Other-centredness was dependent on the amount of discourse that each writer employed to create an effective egocentric self-presentation or bolster his/her connection with the reader. I-centredness

Other-centredness

l (1

nie )

)

%

%

9.9

6.2

(6

)

.7%

86

n(

mo

Da

ine sm Ja

Si

.1%

91 )

.8%

94

t(

igh

( ck Ja

Dw

)

Figure 2.2  Continuum of egocentrism in participant teachers Table 2.3  Distribution of thematic codes (in percentage) in teachers’ texts

Dwight Jasmine Simon Jack Daniel

Affinity

Professionalism

49 42.7 37.6 29.4 3.6

6.2 14.4 13.9 44.4 13.1

Multifaceted Erudition Awareness Self-Image of Audience 0 11.7 15.9 3.3 0

40.5 0 19.3 14.1 0

4.3 30.1 13.3 8.8 83.3

Projection of Teacher Identity in Introductory Posts

49

90

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0 Dwight

Jack Awareness of Audience

Simon

Jasmine Affinity

Multifaceted Self-Image

Daniel

Professionalism Erudition

Figure 2.3  Distribution of themes in teachers’ texts

The discourse techniques of the teachers in this study revealed their efforts to establish a particular view of themselves from the very start of the interaction in the online course. All teachers chose to foreground a specific kind of information, thus, giving importance to certain aspects of their identities. Thus, in Dwight’s text two themes were dominant: Erudition and Affinity. His focus was mainly on exhibiting his knowledge of the particulars of his region and giving details of technological obstacles at work that prevented him from posting to Moodle in a timely manner. Dwight had no experience in teaching, let alone EFL instruction. Therefore, his understanding of how a teacher could introduce himself might be rooted in traditional beliefs about a teacher being an authority. Gee (1990) argued that practices of discourse involve ‘ways of being in the world’ that depict specific and recognizable social identities. Being a teacher, undoubtedly, involves a number of obligations and rights – what is allowed and expected. In

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Dwight’s vision, making the introductory post was a sufficient contribution on the teacher’s part and students did not need another incentive to start adding to the thread. As a result, his post remained unanswered for several days, despite the fact that the course had officially started with his introduction. I may only hypothesize about true reasons for the passiveness of his students, but Dwight’s emphasis on bland factual knowledge and lack of topics that could potentially appeal to the students might have been one of the factors. Not until Dwight started a new thread with another introduction did the students start to become more active. His second post started with ‘hi friends’ and had a few pictures, which worked as an effective visual hook and stimulated a number of positive responses from his students. Jack’s foregrounding of his academic accomplishments was not surprising, as he had made ample achievements in the field. He had rich experience as an online instructor, teaching a course in computer-mediated learning and studying for a Ph.D. Jack presented himself as a competent language instructor and his extensive travelling added to that self-image. The Professionalism theme was often mixed with affinity-oriented evaluative remarks. He dedicated less effort to displaying erudition; nevertheless, he wrote a passage about demographics and climate of his place of origin. Jack’s details of a personal nature went along with mention of his academic achievements and teaching experience. It seemed that those parts of his background were inseparable in displaying him as a well-travelled, reliable, knowledgeable instructor. Jack’s formal tone communicated his experiences as facts, not as stories to be elaborated on or questioned. He addressed his students only in the two last sentences of his post. Jack attached one picture to his post – a small image of himself formally dressed. Simon made noticeable efforts to make an amicable impression, which was evident from an extensive monologue about his hometown, travelling and recreational interests. According to Table 2.3, almost 40 per cent of his post was coded with the Affinity theme. The amount of text that Simon employed to display a sense of erudition, professionalism, multifaceted interests and awareness of the readers was approximately equal. With the Awareness of the Audience being the smallest portion of his post, Simon managed to create an affiliation with his students at the end, where he asked a few questions and addressed the students directly. Although Simon foregrounded his personal and professional lives, he tried to find common ground with his students. He mentioned his excitement about the course twice, referred to good Russian friends of his (all students were Russian-speaking), dwelt on his love for sports and the outdoors, and so on.

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Jasmine’s introductory post covered a range of topics that helped her students to perceive her as a personable and well-informed host. It was especially important for cross-cultural communication to avoid any confusion regarding names. A native Malaysian, Jasmine expected her name to sound unusual to her students; so she spent some time explaining where her name came from and what it meant. After sharing some personal background information about her home and travel, Jasmine went on to give a few details about her professional experience and academic aspirations. As a personal interest, she mentioned tending to her personal YouTube account. By showing her love for web 2.0 technology, Jasmine implicitly encouraged her students to use digital media. Sharing interests like that in the introductory post served to establish common ground, especially if interests were directly related to CMC. At the end of her post, Jasmine encouraged her students to ask questions and learn about each other too. To set the tone for subsequent discussions, she presented a list of possible topics: likes and dislikes, interests, happiest memories, most difficult decision ever made, and so on. These broad themes were unrestrictive and led towards similar topics that could involve all students. Daniel’s post was quite different from the others because he chose to say little about himself. His text clearly ascertained his role as an instructor but did not foreground his accomplishments or competencies. His focus was primarily on his audience and the course objectives. Daniel created an image of a facilitator (not an authoritarian instructor) by stating that students could follow the pattern of his post but did not have to do that. He gave them an outline of possible self-expression, with his pattern being merely an example. He used only three short sentences to describe his academic affiliation and home country. He used expressive language to indicate his exhilaration and enthusiasm about the course. Like Jasmine, he gave his students an outline of possible topics to write about in their introductions, which served as a guide for those at a loss for words. Jasmine and Daniel were the only teachers who incorporated a guide with possible topics for discussion into their posts. The guide indicated that Jasmine and Daniel did not wish the introduction to be merely about them. Their understanding of what it meant to be a teacher was different. In his discussion of progressive education, Ellis (2004) referred to famous statement by John Dewey that the best education occurs when the teacher becomes a learner, and learners become teachers. Ellis argued that this view implied modelling on the part of teachers and an opportunity for students to share their experience. It ‘opens up the possibilities for peer teaching, for co-operative efforts, and for the

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teacher to study and therefore become more knowledgeable about the students themselves’ (p. 33).

Discussion By presenting themselves in terms of their achievements and ambitions, teachers unwittingly prescribed a mode of behaviour to their students. In response to teachers’ introductions, the students thought they were expected to ‘follow suit’ and provide similar information about themselves. This was where a gulf between a producer and a recipient of the text could be created. Since most students did not possess significant academic or professional accomplishments, they might feel inferior to more experienced teachers. A quick look at students’ responses supported this assumption, as almost all students could relate to their teachers’ descriptions of non-academic interests (Multifaceted Self-Image) but none dwelled on their academic careers. The traditional perspective on education and the role of the teacher in post-Soviet countries views the instructor as an incontestable authority, whose expertise must not be questioned. Students educated in the system of absolute teacher power become accustomed to never questioning any information conveyed by the teacher. Therefore, all details about our teachers’ academic lives might have been approached as enlightening stories that did not require any feedback. The students were simply not used to evaluating or reacting to their teachers’ discourse. On the other hand, the mentioning of non-academic interests revealed the instructors’ personable sides and many of their pastime activities coincided with their students’. As for Jasmine’s and Daniel’s students, nearly all of them followed a proposed list of topics. A few students also commented on Jasmine’s love for web 2.0, which led to a discussion about a particular social networking website. Some of Daniel’s students were thankful for having ‘good’ topics to write about and not having to think of their own. Perhaps, it was due to the fact that Jasmine and Daniel were the youngest of all teachers participating in the project, so they saw their students as belonging to the same age group. In addition, Daniel’s and Jasmine’s teaching and scholarly experiences were not on a par with the other teachers’, so they did not bring forward those aspects of their identity from the very start of the course. Social psychologists have long argued that a key factor in self-construction is the public nature of self-presentation because one’s awareness of an audience magnifies the effect of self-presentation on identity (Kelly & Rodriguez, 2006;

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Tice, 1992). Teachers have to constantly negotiate who they are and who they want to be, and after creating a desired public image, they adhere to it. This process is known as ‘public commitment’ (Schlenker, 1980; Schlenker, Dlugolecki & Doherty, 1994) and is part of a more permanent sense of self. Douglas and McGarty (2001) demonstrated that despite a seeming lack of social cues, individuals can perceive themselves as being public online. This may be especially true in online contexts that require people to introduce themselves to a wide audience. CDA often considers the producer and recipient of the text to be lacking direct contact; neither the producers nor the consumers know who their counterparts are. Therefore, the producers create their ideal viewers, readers or listeners, that is, their ideal subject. Since the teachers in this study had a vague idea about their audience, they unconsciously created a subjective understanding of what their students might or might not be like based on the teachers’ prior experience. Moreover, by generating an image of ‘ideal’ students, the teachers strove to match it with the image of themselves as ‘ideal’ instructors (e.g. Baumeister, 1982). For that purpose, they inevitably drew on their personal beliefs and notions of what an ideal instructor was, which might be different for each of them. Fairclough (1995) contended that ‘discourses include representations of how things are and have been, as well as imaginaries – representations of how things might or could or should be’ (p. 16). Therefore, self-presentation for an imaginary audience could imply the creation of a desired or idealized concept of self, for example, a highly experienced, knowledgeable teacher. I used the notion of egocentricity that resulted from the discourse analysis of the teachers’ introductory posts to answer one general question: Whose interests were being served by the choice of words? The power imbalance has always been woven into the discourse between teachers and students. Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of cultural capital, which metaphorically refers to economic capital, can be accumulated through access to and the possession of certain ‘cultural goods’: education, use of language, access to exclusive social institutions, their practices, high-ranking positions, and so on. These cultural goods are unevenly distributed in society and not accessible to all members in the same quantity. Thus, the social structure of a teacher–student relationship reflects their unequal status in terms of academic accomplishments, social rank, belonging to a more privileged social group, and so on. The interaction of both sides is often perceived as that of ‘the haves’ and ‘the have-nots’, as teachers possess the cultural goods that students pursue: that is, expertise.

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The inequality is also manifested in cultural affiliations. Two of the teachers were non-native speakers who had high language proficiency, years of living in English-speaking environments and wide-ranging experiences related to language instruction. The other three teachers were native speakers of English, which placed them in a more privileged position by default – a view that has been criticized in ESL/EFL research (e.g. Edge, 1988; Medgyes, 1994; Modiano, 2005; Moussu, 2010). On the other hand, our students all resided in Lithuania or neighbouring Belarus, where English usage is limited (mainly to classrooms) and near-native proficiency is hard to come by. Needless to say, our teachers made up a community of experts that possessed the skills their students badly needed to develop, hence the unavoidable power imbalance that led to a disadvantaged role of the students (‘have-nots’). In addition, the teachers were disparate as well, since not all of them were native speakers of English. However, some may contest the notion that non-native speakers are inferior to those born in a language because acquiring a language in childhood does not guarantee an understanding of all its complexities. People who have learned a language may be more acutely aware of other language learners’ problems. Therefore, there was a shift in Jasmine’s and Daniel’s focus from themselves probably to express solidarity and appreciation of their students’ difficulties. In this sense, non-native speaker teachers and their students share a similar ‘culture of learning a language’, not ‘culture of possessing a language’. Finally, the analysis of the teachers’ discourse revealed different patterns of identity construction. The posts of three teachers had significantly more text dedicated to their own achievements and academic interests, putting relatively little emphasis on acknowledging their students’ presence in the course. Jack and Simon wrote extensively about various life experiences, never asking for students’ opinions or stories of a similar kind. Their interaction with the readers appeared only at the end and made up a tiny part of their introduction. Although Dwight’s goal was to share information about himself, his text mainly concerned knowledge about his whereabouts and work-related facts. Based on these findings, I concluded that these three teachers employed the discourse of hegemony (albeit unintentionally) because their introductions did not offer opportunities for the students to be equitable contributors to the course. Jasmine’s and Daniel’s introductions displayed more readiness to include the audience into conversation by providing a choice of topics the students could relate to and constructing a sense of solidarity via inclusive pronouns. The amount of investment in the discourse of dominance was minimal. The teachers shifted the focus from their self-presentations to the presentation of the course as a

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platform for the students to communicate and share information. According to the analysis of themes that emerged in their posts, the teachers were positioned on a continuum of egocentrism. Since all students were required to participate in the conversation, the teachers’ posts were not analysed in terms of response count. Hence, the number of responses a post generated did not necessarily account for the notion of ‘successful’ strategies. The students had a specific rubric to follow and were obliged to contribute to the conversations a certain number of times during the two-week course. I propose that ‘successful’ posts were the ones that generated the most uptake of their themes in students’ replies, for example, when students narrated about their hobbies in response to the teacher’s text about hobbies. In this respect, the Other-centred teachers generated more uptake than I-centred teachers, as every student picked up on one or more of Jasmine’s and Daniel’s topics for discussion.

Conclusion Critical analysis of verbal and non-verbal communication between teachers and students can reveal unanticipated trends that belie beliefs that are no longer feasible in our post-modern world. Post-modern identity is flexible, multiple and extended (Weedon, 1987) as the boundaries of cultures become fuzzy. Post-modern teachers are intercultural educators and professional learners; students are their apprentices (Diaz-Rico, 2004). This new focus radically repositions interaction in face-to-face or online classrooms and calls for intercultural educators who could become learners about the language and culture of students. This epistemological change requires a shift in power relations between teachers and students. In the post-modern educational environment power circulates, as students now have the right to speak and share their opinion, even if it runs contrary to their teachers’ beliefs. Power must be negotiated because the traditional view of the teacher being endowed with incontestable authority has become obsolete. CDA is an approach to studying language that helps to disclose if and how this power shift takes place. As Wodak (2002) points out, ‘the constant unity of language and other social matters ensures that language is entwined in social power in a number of ways: language indexes power, expresses power, is involved where there is contention over power and where power is challenged’ (p. 11). In an educational setting, language is a medium for a constant negotiation of power in classrooms. Teachers are realizing that

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giving the students more opportunities to voice their opinions promotes an egalitarian power distribution thus enhancing students’ sense of self-efficacy. Online education could benefit from such egalitarianism too because teachers often attempt to compensate for the lack of their physical presence by excessive control over teacher–student and student–student interaction. Empowering learners is in itself a powerful move that acknowledges students’ active role in educational processes. I suggest that online instructors endow their students with more authority by doing the following in self-presentations: ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

remembering their audience and validating their presence continuously dedicating more of their message to students by addressing them directly encouraging students to be active readers by asking them to react to the text sharing more information that is likely to be relevant to students’ lives (e.g. personal interests, leisure activities, favourite books, movies, music) letting students believe they have something that the teacher may have an interest in knowing providing students with a number of possible topics to discuss putting less emphasis on the teacher’s power – empower the students learning more about students’ culture and language minimizing detachment from students, as online environments may already seem impersonal personalize your communication by adding an amicable picture to your account or a post

These ideas are simple heuristics that originated from the critical analysis of online introductions. The list is not exhaustive, as many new strategies might be added. Online teaching platforms like Moodle have a wide range of possibilities for instructors to turn their course into effective and empowering experiences for both parties.

References Bandura, A. (1995). Self-efficacy in changing societies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Baumeister, R. (1982). A self-presentational view of social phenomena. Psychological Bulletin, 91, 3–26. Baumeister, R., Hutton, D., & Tice, D. (1989). Cognitive processes during deliberate self‐presentation: how self‐presenters alter and misinterpret the behavior of their

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interaction partners. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 59–78. doi: 10.1016/0022‐1031(89)90039‐5 Bourdieu, P. (1977). Reproduction in society, education, and culture (with J. Passeron). Los Angeles: Sage. Bucholtz, M. (1995). From mulatta to mestiza: passing and the linguistic reshaping of ethnic identity. In K. Hall & M. Bucholtz (Eds), Gender articulated: language and the socially constructed self (pp. 351–73). New York: Routledge. Cook-Gumperz, J. (1995). Reproducing the discourse of mothering: how gendered talk makes gendered lives. In K. Hall & M. Bucholtz (Eds), Gender articulated: language and the socially constructed self (pp. 401–20). New York: Routledge. Diaz-Rico, L. (2004). Teaching English Learners Strategies and Methods. Boston: Pearson Education. Douglas, K., & McGarty, C. (2001). Identifiability and self-presentation: computer-mediated communication and intergroup interaction. British Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 399–416. Edge, J. (1988). Natives, speakers, and models. Japan Association of Language Teachers Journal, 9, 153–57. Ellis, A. (2004). Exemplars of curriculum theory. Larchmont, NY: Eye on Education. Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. London: Longman. — (1995). Critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language. London: Longman. — (2002). The dialectics of discourse. Retrieved on 5 October 2011 from www.ling.lancs. ac.uk/staff/norman/2001a.doc Farrell, T. (2011). Exploring the professional role identities of experienced ESL teachers through reflective practice. System, 39(1), 54–62. Gee, J. (1990). Social linguistics and literacies: ideologies in discourse. London: Falmer. Gibson, S., & Dembo, M. (1984). Teacher efficacy: a construct validation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76, 569–82. Huckin, T. (1997). Critical discourse analysis. In T. Miller (Ed.), Functional approaches to written text (pp. 78–92). Washington, DC: United States Information Agency. Janks, H. (1997). Critical discourse analysis as a research tool. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 18(3), 329–42. Jones, E., & Pittman, T. (1982). Toward a general theory of strategic self-presentation. In J. Suls (Ed.), Psychological perspectives of the self (pp. 231–61). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Kelly, A., & Rodriguez, R. (2006). Publicly committing oneself to an identity. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 28, 185–91. Kern, R. (1995). Restructuring classroom interaction with networked computers: effects on quantity and characteristics of language production. Modern Language Journal, 79(4), 457–76. Kim, H., & Papacharissi, Z. (2003). Cross-cultural differences in online self-presentation: a content analysis of personal Korean and US home pages. Asian Journal of Communication, 13(1), 117–36.

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Kim, J., Lee, S., & Gim, W. (2011). Culture and self-presentation: influence of social interactions in an expected social relationship. Asian Journal of Communication, 14, 63–74. Leary, M., Allen, A., & Terry, M. (2011). Managing social images in naturalistic versus laboratory settings: implications for understanding and studying self‐presentation. European Journal of Social Psychology, 41, 411–21. doi: 10.1089/cyber.2009.0257 McGregor, S. (2003). Critical science approach – a primer. Retrieved on 2 October 2011 from www.kon.org/cfp/critical_science_primer.pdf Medgyes, P. (1994). The non-native teacher. London, England: Macmillan. Meskill, C., & Sadykova, G. (2007). The presentation of self in everyday ether: a corpus analysis of student self-tellings in online graduate courses. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 11(3), 123–38. Modiano, M. (2005). Cultural studies, foreign language teaching and learning practices, and the NNS practitioner. In E. Llurda (Ed.), Non-native language teachers: perceptions, challenges, and contributions to the profession (pp. 25–43). New York: Springer. Moussu, L. (2010). Influence of teacher-contact time and other variables on ESL students’ attitudes towards native- and nonnative-English-speaking teachers. TESOL Quarterly, 44(4). doi: 10.5054/tq.2010.235997 Saltmarsh, S., & Sutherland-Smith, W. (2010). S(t)imulating learning: pedagogy, subjectivity and teacher education in online environments. Special Issue of London Review of Education, 8(1), 15–24. Schlenker, B. (1980). Impression management: the self-concept, social identity, and interpersonal relations. Monterey/California: Brooks/Cole. Schlenker, B., Dlugolecki, D., & Doherty, K. (1994). The impact of self-presentations on self-appraisals and behaviors: the power of public commitment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 20–33. Schlenker, B., & Leary, M. (1982). Audiences’ reactions to self‐enhancing, self‐denigrating, and accurate self‐presentations. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 18, 89–104. doi:10.1016/0022‐1031(82) 90083‐X Schlenker, B., & Pontari, B. (2000). The strategic control of information: impression management and self‐presentation in daily life. In A. Tesser, R. Felson & J. Suls (Eds), Perspectives on self and identity (pp. 199–232). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Tice, D. (1992). Self-presentation and self-concept change: the looking-glass self is also a magnifying glass. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 435–51. van Dijk, T. (1993). Elite discourse and racism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. London: Blackwell. Wodak, R. (2002). Aspects of critical discourse analysis. ZfAL, 36, 5–31.

3

An Exploration of 3D Virtual Worlds through ESL/EFL Teachers’ Perspectives in Second Life Ozan Varli

Upon arriving at the performing arts centre, I start eavesdropping and hear what everyone is talking about. One student complains about having an exam in his real life (RL) soon. Another one asks if anyone is up for hanging out together in a virtual cafe after class. All the students must be from different countries as they have very distinctive accents; however, it is almost impossible to tell by looking at them as their avatars are not self-representative. I look around and see that the place is a replication of a typical performance hall from its wooden stage to the red velvet curtains hanging on both sides (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1  The performing arts centre

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To my left, there is an interactive bulletin board mounted on the wall where pictures from previous shows are displayed along with a notification box to click to get the script of the play which is going to be performed. I click on the box and get my copy. It reads as ‘The Argument Clinic by Monty Python – Live at City Center’. I take a quick look at the material by scrolling down on the note card and find out that it is the original script of one of Monty Python’s comedy shows with a glossary at the end. While skimming through the text, I hear the teacher giving instructions about reading it out loud and assigning roles. Meanwhile, there are students standing in front of the stage and constantly checking if everyone can hear them. Some are still having problems with echoing and cannot hear the others properly, yet the teacher and a few volunteers support them by simultaneously typing what they are talking about in the local chat area. From time to time, avatars automatically animate and take different postures. This adds a sense of liveliness to the setting. They start studying the text by reading out loud while the teacher helps them work on their pronunciation skills and explains the unknown idiomatic expressions by using the new patterns in different sentences. ‘Ok, well, what do you think festering gob means? Have you ever heard of that before?’ asks the teacher. As the students try to answer, another native English speaker, who is an inhabitant of the city, adds to the conversation by giving a further reference from real life: ‘Oh yea, like .  .  . like .  .  . Uncle Fester in the Addams Family?’ Giggles arise when students start talking about the Addams Family. They all try to guess the meaning of the expression with the help of the examples and clues given, and eventually agree on its meaning which the teacher then confirms. The students pay attention to the notes for non-verbal actions given in brackets in the script, such as ‘clears throat, stunned, exasperated’, and do their best to incorporate these actions in their performances. Once the rehearsal is over, the teacher says, ‘All right, now, it is time to put it on stage!’ The teacher asks for volunteers, and some students step forward onto the stage. The stage is already furnished with the appropriate décor for the performance, and the acting students immediately dress up in their costumes which are distributed by the teacher and stored in the students’ Second Life (SL) clothes inventories. The dress rehearsal begins. The teacher stands next to the stage as the ‘director’ and gives constant feedback and support (see Figure 3.2). The other students watch the play and giggle. Voices rise in volume on the stage: ‘NO, I DIDN’T! . . . YES, YOU DID! . . . NOOO, I DIDN’T! . . . YES, YES, YOU DID!’ By their performance, one can easily tell that these students are all having fun.

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Figure 3.2  The students as actors/actresses and the teacher as director

The interest in the use of virtual worlds (VWs) in education is becoming more widespread, especially with the emergence of 3D graphical venues, such as SL. Numerous educators have been attracted to use these environments for both teaching and research purposes. Thanks to their rich and multimodal nature, they promote the sense of social presence, and therefore support life-like collaboration and social interaction experiences more than their predecessors did. According to a 2011 Linden Lab report (Second life education, 2011), there are over 700 educational institutions from all over the world in SL. This number shows how persistent immersive 3D VWs have started integrating into current understandings of teaching and learning in online environments.

Educational research in SL: Teachers’ perspectives Although the potential these worlds offer seems to be quite promising in terms of shaping the teaching practices of the future (Baker, Wentz & Woods, 2009; Childress & Braswell, 2006; Dede, 1995; Stevens, 2006), the dynamics of collaborative virtual environments need to be understood thoroughly by more qualitative explorations as is the case with any initial work done when a new technology emerges. One way of contributing to this understanding is by making in situ observations and by listening to the voices of practicing teachers

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in VWs. Research on teachers’ perceptions and perspectives emphasizes that investigating teachers’ beliefs and expectations about teaching and learning is highly important while exploring their teaching practices (Pajares, 1992; Williams & Burden, 1997). At this point, it is of paramount importance to find answers to how 3D VWs accommodate sociocultural aspects of teaching and learning languages, and how language teachers perceive such teaching and learning activities, and thereby adapt their pedagogies, design course content and deliver courses in a virtual setting. Attempts made to seek answers to these questions will consequently expand our understanding of teaching and learning in collaborative virtual environments.

Data collection: Observations and interviews With the above questions in mind, one of the most popular 3D VWs, SL, was chosen as the research site and explored by descriptions, explanations and analyses in order to develop a descriptive and in-depth comprehension of the educational activities in virtual learning environments (VLEs). Several hours of in-world observations were made to examine the experiences and, through one-on-one interviews, a closer look into the world of teachers was taken to find out about their interpretation of SL as an educational medium so that connections between their practices and the nature of the SL environment could be drawn. The broad aim was a holistic understanding of SL’s sociocultural potential in language education. Observations referred to in this chapter were made from 2008 to 2009, in various language teaching contexts. Each took between 60 and 90 minutes. The sessions were also recorded with a third-party screen capture application so that they could easily be referred back to when needed. The primary concern during the recorded sessions was to avoid any sort of immersion and interaction with the participants. Since SL features the camera view, zooming in and out from far distances without attracting attention was easily accomplished. Upon completion of the observations, I rendered into observational vignettes from the chunks of raw data drawn from the field notes as well as the recorded sessions. These include specific captions and lively images from the research setting, and therefore portray the teaching and learning activities in SL through the lens of sociocultural theory.

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The vignette at the start of the chapter is from one of my observational tours to English City which was created as a VLE for language learners by Languagelab, one of the first private, for-profit educational initiatives in SL. English learners of varying ages and mixed backgrounds can sign up for classes and practise their language skills in real-life-like situations as the city offers an abundant selection of venues – a bank, a restaurant, a hospital or even an airport. The educational activities are carried out either by certified English teachers or native English speakers from different professions so that the experience is very similar to the immersion experience in real life. The city also has its inhabitants who help the learners perform their daily tasks in English. In addition to the observations, personal interviews provide integral, supporting information as it is assumed that ‘the interviewer has the opportunity to probe or ask follow-up questions, and interviews are generally easier for the respondent, especially if you are seeking opinions and impressions’ (Trochim & Donnelly, 2008, p. 120). Since all the participants were from different countries and different time zones, I negotiated with them to set appropriate times and places, and a common means of communication. Among available tools were the integrated audio/text-chat tool of SL and other third party IM (instant messaging) applications. Due to the nature of the interview questions (see Appendix 3.1) and provocative discussions, the interviews took about 45 to 60 minutes each. Purposive sampling was preferred for the interviews because of the time constraints and number of available English teachers in SL. According to Trochim and Donnelly (2008, p. 47), ‘with a purposive sample, you are likely to get the opinions of your target population, but you are also likely to overweight subgroups in your population that are more readily accessible.’ The results and findings might have been overweighed, which might be considered as a bias; however, the conclusions drawn are based on the explorations within this specific study and they try to ascertain the presence of specific phenomena within language classes in 3D VWs. The participants of this study were five English teachers whose names are encoded as Amber, Dana, Irene, Jade and Jillian. Although personal characteristics of these teachers might have connections with their practices, I tried not to involve this information in my research because their professional experiences, opinions, beliefs and expectations about VWs are of primary concern. However, I thought a bit of personal background (see Appendix 3.2) might provide further insights in understanding the pedagogical approaches in SL.

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Results and discussion In analysing my observational notes and interview data, various themes emerged regarding the different aspects of the 3D VWs. However, since the main focus of this research is on what teachers say about the instructional processes they employ, my speculations will be more on the nature of the activities designed by teachers and how these activities are supported by the environment. My initial reactions to language learning situations in SL including the findings from other observational sites and teachers’ self-reported practices are discussed in the following themed sections.

Online immersion According to Warschauer (1997, p. 471) a language teacher’s focus should be on how to construct a setting in which individuals ‘learn language, learn about language, and learn “through” language’ by exploring the roles of interaction in a social and cultural context. Therefore, the basic assumption is that language, being the most significant semiotic tool according to Vygotsky (1978), plays a very important role while mediating purposeful action, and social interaction which is claimed to be the origin of all higher-order functions (Wertsch, 1985). As far as language classes in SL are concerned, learners are engaged socially online; they either talk by means of the voice chat tool or type in the local chat area to interact with each other. Participating teachers find these tools quite effective and report that 3D VWs support the integration of highly sociocultural activities in online language classes as Dana states: I was intrigued by what I heard SL had to offer to learners and teachers. I am a visual learner with an interest in technology and the internet. As a teacher, it was the immersive and collaborative nature of SL that appealed to me. I had also been looking for motivating ways to teach online, and the game-like nature of SL seemed to be one such way. . . . Because of the feeling of real presence, I think it can enhance distance education.

By pointing to immersive and collaborative features of 3D VWs, Dana mentions that these environments can also be motivating for teachers because of their high potential for participation and interaction. Moreover, she draws attention to the sense of presence by underlining its advantage in distance education.

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Collaborative dialogue Swain (2000), investigating the dynamics of social interaction as collaborative dialogue, claims that ‘in second language learning, it is dialogue that constructs linguistic knowledge’ (p. 97). That is to say, language learning co-occurs in such a cognitive and social activity because novice speakers are engaged in problem solving and knowledge building processes when they converse. Comprehensibility of input in a dialogue with an expert depends on negotiation of meaning which also leads to successful learning outcomes for the novice. Being another significant element of interaction, output also plays an important role for ‘output may stimulate learners to move from the semantic, open-ended, strategic processing prevalent in comprehension to the complete grammatical processing needed for accurate production’ (p. 99). Language learning takes place in collaborative dialogue since ‘internal mental activity’ originates from ‘external dialogic activity’ (p. 113). Indeed, when discussing other application of 3D avatars in her teaching, Irene notes how useful these are in student role-playing.

Participation and engagement Applying Sfard’s (1998) participation metaphor to second language learning contexts, Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) emphasize the importance of participation as it is distinguished from acquisition by certain tasks like ‘doing, knowing, and becoming a part of a greater whole’ (p. 156). From this perspective, language learning becomes more like a process of involvement in action and participation, rather than the acquisition of prescriptive rules. Offering distinctive tools for multimodal activities SL provides the content for learners to engage in the learning community. Jillian states: The way that you can have multiple channels of communication is great – instant messaging for a shy student, or for peer learning, a private voice call, open chat, music, textures with text; I think that all of them are useful to make it engaging.

In addition, holodecks and other menu-based scene generator tools are also quite popular in the SL world, as they grant numerous new settings appropriate for the lesson content. Teachers, equipped with these tools in their inventories, conjure appropriate settings (e.g. an airport scene with a check-in desk) to immerse learners in situations they were likely to encounter in RL.

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The fact that you don’t have to set the scene is great. You don’t need to say ‘Oh, imagine you are in the train station, etc’. . . . They are there . . . SL saves time! (Jillian)

Facilitation and ZPD Within traditional sociocultural perspectives in second language learning, learners are treated as novice participants in a community where they develop their knowledge and skills by interacting, engaging in conversations with more proficient users of that language. These learning processes take place within the realms of what is known as the zone of proximal development (ZPD). Vygotsky (1978) defines this notion as ‘the distance between the actual development level as determined through independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers’ (p. 86). SLA theoreticians identify the ZPD as a social domain in which novice learners cannot fully perform the competences on their own in the target language and culture; therefore, with the support of either native speakers or more knowledgeable learners, they learn how to accomplish certain tasks through the use of language. Collaborative scaffolding becomes a significant process in this stage as it assists learners in doing what they would not be able to do without assistance, such as gaining control over L2 forms and meanings (Dixon-Krauss, 1996; Kozulin, 2003; Lantolf & Poehner, 2008; Wells, 1999). Teachers facilitate activities whereby students use the target language to accomplish tasks, such as performing as actors/actresses on a stage. When students work on such a task, teachers prefer to stay at the background, observe their students and assist them only when they have difficulty in performing the tasks. Regarding their self-reported practices, teachers report that they enjoy the activities in which they are the facilitators, providing guidance to their learners. Teachers describe their favourite activities in SL as going on fieldtrips, carrying out intercultural activities and taking part in interactive games. For example, Jillian says: Ok, so, my favorite activity is ‘Dark Mines’  – an MMO style sim where the students have to work out puzzles, and then there are zombies, robots, very dark stuff going on . . . and a mine full of drill bots :) You are more of a facilitator and they work as a team.

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Authentic materials and culture Felix (2002) outlines three common characteristics of educational tasks shared between the sociocultural and communicative approaches to language teaching. So that tasks are contextualized, authentic and meaningful to students, SL teachers do not necessarily use commercial materials and they value authentic materials as they can effectively use them while presenting new language forms. Instead of following a traditional course book, teachers digitize authentic materials and store them in their inventories to be used in their lessons when needed. Thanks to authentic materials and contexts, the target culture is also immediate and accessible. Like the target culture, multiculturality is also very evident in SL language classes. Users represent diverse cultures as they log in from different countries, and this enriches the social environment. Indeed, it might be viewed as a teacher reward as Jade states: I just love hearing about the other cultures. I’m obviously fascinated when I hear students from China, Germany, Poland, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. . . . I keep a list; I got an Egyptian, also somebody from Lebanon.

Anonymity and risk-taking Learners from various age groups and backgrounds practise their language skills by conversing with teachers and other native speakers without any hesitation. They share personal stories from both their RL and SL and spend time together by hanging out in a virtual club or going shopping for their avatars after class. While engaging in these activities, they never feel shy or reluctant since these environments support a considerable degree of anonymity. Jillian mentions that: I think that the students are relaxed behind their avatars. I have taught mixed nationality classes in London and people’s prejudice and cultural mores are much stronger in the physical world. . . . Also, the dynamic between the ages is great here; we have students in their 60’s and they enjoy the fact that they can represent themselves how they like!

In addition to the levels of anonymity, it is also observed that students who represent themselves behind a surrogate digital persona are doing better when it comes to risk-taking. According to what Jillian says, the new roles that come with their new avatars can eliminate social and emotional barriers. As in RL,

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avatars take roles in SL, too. Therefore, when students are given a collaborative task, as in performing on a stage, they share the responsibility to accomplish the task by assigning new roles to themselves within their learning community.

Flexibility and resources Teachers believe that 3D VWs provide unbeatable educational opportunities. They draw attention to the different aspects of online education while sharing their ideas. For example, according to Dana, 3D VWs are flexible open spaces for learning: The classroom [main meeting point] is in a garden. . . . [We have] some sessions in my house. . . . But we use many different locations in SL depending on the lesson. . . . It’s a shame to stay in one place in SL. . . . Even worse to replicate real life classrooms.

In SL, it is possible to experience many things which sound ‘fantastic’ in RL, such as flying and teleporting oneself. Likewise, building skills empower those users who would like to contribute to the design processes of the VLEs. These skills bring creative and participatory dimensions to teaching and learning activities. Because SL has rich, diverse and continually expanding content and it is possible to change locations easily, Dana finds no value in getting stuck in a classroom where learners are comparably passive participants. She thinks that SL provides great opportunities for social immersion and interaction which simulate those in RL. In addition to their educational opportunities, 3D VWs offer flexible opportunities in terms of time, space, energy and cost. Amber says: I homeschool my children and cannot teach outside of the home. All my teaching has to be done online. [I prefer Second Life because it] can be done from home without leaving the children.

She emphasizes that she has the ease of being able to work from home, not necessarily having to leave her children. Similarly, Irene and Jillian also agree with Amber by saying: People don’t want to pay, they don’t want to use transportation time, and they don’t want to use transportation money, so the idea of having an e-learning platform at work is very very cool. (Irene)

An Exploration of 3D Virtual Worlds Real Life

• Full range of non-verbal actions • Mostly monocultural classrooms • Physical limitations of real world • Pressure of social mores while interacting with strangers • Use of imagination

vs

• Nature of content exchange • Real time, synchronous • Multimodality features • Pacing of lessons

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• Limited non-verbal actions • Multicultural classrooms • Limits of virtual space • Easier interaction with strangers through digital personae • Immersion in experience

Figure 3.3  Similarities and differences reported by the teachers

When they are asked about the similarities and differences they noticed in their teaching, they report that 3D VWs are both similar to and different from educational contexts in RL (see Figure 3.3). Teachers all agree on the statement that nothing can ‘beat’ face-to-face classes. However, teachers can make the most of 3D VWs and know more about the opportunities they offer. All participants are passionate about teaching and learning in 3D VWs because these environments have a promising future as places and tools for education: It is where education is going to be in the future. . . . It has the potential to be a major player long term. (Amber) I believe we are only at the beginning of this adventure with virtual worlds and one day they will become normal at least for online education! (Dana) I definitely want to say that I’m not even in little bit in doubt now. Maybe SL, may be not; but, definitely a virtual classroom. . . . I’m here to stay, I just started a company that’s called virtual learning, I will be here, you talk to me in ten years, I will be here, and I will always be with the best one. (Irene) I always thought that tech would change how students learn but I don’t think in my wildest dreams I could have thought of them, SL and English city. (Jade)

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Comparing observational and interview data, it is notable how teachers’ observed practices align their self-reported practices. There were several repeating themes with the teachers’ personal statements from the interviews supporting the themes that emerged from the observations. The common perspectives of teachers about the 3D VWs can be synthesized as follows: ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

potential for social collaboration, interaction, engagement, participation and immersion authentic tasks, contexts, experiences sense of community, sense of self anonymity, risk-taking multiple channels for conversation and discourse possibilities flexibility for teachers and students in terms of resources.

I believe that these reported characteristics provide insights about what constitutes pioneering language teachers’ understanding of language teaching and learning in 3D VWs among teaching professionals.

Conclusion My aim in exploring 3D VWs through ESL/EFL teachers’ perspectives in SL provided observations of current teaching practices in VLEs and commentary by SL language teachers. Analyses suggest a number of common themes and statements that provide further insights on how sociocultural aspects of teaching and learning ESL/EFL can manifest in 3D VWs in terms of pioneering language teachers’ understanding. In relation to the first research question ‘What constitutes pioneering language teachers’ understanding of language teaching and learning in 3D VWs?’, observations and personal statements suggest that the elements of sociocultural perspectives in language teaching and learning were reasonably evident in the practices and personal statements of the teachers who participated in this study. Teachers’ practices illustrate that they are following the sociocultural paradigms which explain language learning as it occurs in social environments: ll

ll

ll

ll

with assisted activity (Thorne, 2000) through social participation in a community of practice (Rogoff, 1994) by taking part in collaborative dialogue (Swain, 2000) by performing authentic tasks and becoming a social self and active member in a community (Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000).

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It can be concluded that 3D VWs provide several opportunities for ESL/ EFL teachers to accomplish teaching and learning activities suitable to such educational paradigms. In relation to the second research question ‘How do perceptions and perspectives of ESL/EFL teachers steer their instructional practices in VLEs?’, teachers observe they: ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

are excited and passionate about the opportunities 3D VWs offer for their students, their course content and their teaching are curious and impatient about the innovations in VWs technologies have positive expectations about the educational practices in VWs are aware of that fact that teaching in VWs is a different phenomenon than teaching in RL are in favour of social and collaborative learning activities and are hopeful about the future potential of these online worlds.

However, they still think that they need more time to explore the dynamics of this new setting and more training in building and design skills so that they can also have a say in design processes. Having these perceptions and perspectives, teachers are motivated to explore new tools and adopt best practices. There are also some practical implications for teachers and researchers. The findings about the current educational practices in VWs suggest that 3D VWs have significant potential in language education in light of sociocultural perspectives of teaching and learning. The collected data portray a rich picture of the current situation of language education in VWs; particularly, how courses are delivered, what kind of inworld tools are effectively used and what sorts of activities have proven to be useful by the teachers. Therefore, it is suggestive regarding roles of teachers, the nature of activities and learning processes. Since teaching and learning in VWs is becoming a growing interest, it can be concluded that more teachers will soon be needed. For this purpose, professional development programs might consider encouraging teachers, particularly the tech-savvy ones, to apply such teaching tools in their classes. Teacher education programs might include courses in their curricula to train the teachers of the future who are equipped with all the skills and dispositions to facilitate learning in 3D VWs. It was interesting to see how practices have evolved since the first time researchers started to talk about education in VLEs. Looking at the point where we are today, I see that the opportunities are increasing more and

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more as innovative technologies advance. More in-depth studies exploring the affordances and constraints of these worlds are needed. Focusing more on design and instruction processes, it would be interesting to investigate what kind of pedagogical practices teachers should adopt to make the best use of these worlds in language education.

Appendix 3.1. Interview questions 1. Tell me about how you first started teaching in Second Life (SL)? 2. Why do you prefer SL as the medium of your teaching? 3. What are your beliefs and expectations about teaching in a virtual classroom? 4. What do you think the similarities and differences between teaching face-to-face and teaching online are? 5. How would you describe your teaching in SL? 6. How would you evaluate the course material presented in SL? 7. What is your most favourite activity in your virtual classroom? 8. What do you think about the future of teaching in SL?

Appendix 3.2. Participant profiles Amber did both her bachelors and masters degrees in education with a concentration in communication in the United States. She started her teaching career in 1991 and has been teaching online and face-to-face classes since then. She also initiated and ran a private school at some point in her life. Currently she has a managerial position in an online educational initiative along with her teaching activities in SL. She is homeschooling her children and has been in SL since November 2008. Dana was raised as a German–Turkish bilingual in Germany. She trained as a photographer and started her own business as a part of her first professional career. Then, she studied translation and interpretation for two semesters in Turkey. She changed her mind again and got interested in becoming a multilingual secretary and learned French in addition to her English. She first started teaching by giving private English courses at home, and then went on in a language school in Germany. She liked teaching and got her CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults). She taught English in

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Germany, the United Kingdom and Turkey. She has been teaching in SL since the summer of 2008. Irene was born in South Africa although her parents are from Denmark. She lived in several other countries like China, Canada, Australia, the United States and Denmark. She studied Sinology in Taiwan and did her master’s in ICT (Internet and Communication Technologies). She started teaching ESL when she was in Australia and she has been teaching English, communication, cultural understanding at a professional training centre of a college. She teaches English and builds courses in SL with more than 300 hours of experience. Jade got her degree in real estate and worked as a property valuator for several years in the United Kingdom. Her experiences as a valuator included teaching business lectures at university level. She later moved to Australia and wanted to teach English there. She qualified for a CELTA degree and started her teaching career. She has been teaching business English in SL since February 2009. Jillian was raised as a Welsh–Indonesian bilingual in the United Kingdom. She started with social anthropology as her bachelors and got a masters degree with a concentration in digital culture and technology in the United Kingdom. She also did CELTA and taught English in Chile, Indonesia and the United Kingdom. She has been teaching online EFL classes in SL and working as the customer relations manager of an English school in SL.

References Baker, S., Wentz, R., & Woods, M. (2009). Using virtual worlds in education: Second Life® as an educational tool. Teaching of Psychology, 36(1), 59–64. Childress, M., & Braswell, R. (2006). Using massively multiplayer online role-playing games for online learning. Distance Education, 27(2), 187–96. Dede, C. (1995). The evolution of constructivist learning environments: immersion in distributed, virtual words. Educational Technology, 35(5), 46. Dixon-Krauss, L. (1996). Vygotsky in the classroom: mediated literacy instruction and assessment. White Plains, NY: Longman. Felix, U. (2002). The web as a vehicle for constructivist approaches in language teaching. ReCALL, 14(1), 2–15. Kozulin, A. (2003). Psychological tools and mediated learning. In A. Kozulin, B. Gindis, V. Ageyev & S. Miller (Eds), Vygotsky’s educational theory in cultural context (pp. 15–38). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lantolf, J. (2000). Introducing sociocultural theory. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Lantolf, J., & Poehner, M. (Eds) (2008). Sociocultural theory and second language teaching. London: Equinox. Pajares, F. (1992). Teachers’ beliefs and educational research: cleaning up a messy construct. Review of Educational Research, 62(3), 307–32. Pavlenko, A., & Lantolf., J. (2000). Second language learning as participation and the (re)construction of selves. In J. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rogoff, B. (1994). Developing understanding of the idea of communities of learners. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 1(4), 209–29. Second life education: the virtual learning advantage (2011). Retrieved from http:// lecs-static-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/work/SL-Edu-Brochure-010411.pdf Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27(2), 4–13. Stevens, V. (2006). Second life in education and language learning. TESL-EJ, 10(3), 1–4. Swain, M. (2000). The output hypothesis and beyond: mediating acquisition through collaborative dialogue. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thorne, S. (2000). Second language acquisition theory and the truth(s) about relativity. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trochim, W., & Donnelly, J. (2008). The research methods knowledge base (3rd edn). Mason, OH: Cengage Learning. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Warschauer, M. (1997). Computer-mediated collaborative learning: theory and practice. Modern Language Journal, 81(4), 470–81. Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic inquiry: towards a sociocultural practice and theory of education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wertsch, J. (1985). Vygotsky and the social formation of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, M., & Burden, R. (1997). Psychology for language teachers: a social constructivist approach. New York: Cambridge University Press.

4

Collaboration Unpacked: Tasks, Tools and Activities Andreas Lund

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. Charles Darwin

Introduction: Are two heads better than one? The networked society (Castells, 1996) challenges teachers, students, teacher educators and educational systems in a number of ways. What counts as valid knowledge in a fragmented myriad of available information, how to make sense of such fragments, how to represent and turn such information into coherent insights are but a few overarching questions. This chapter seeks to respond to two related questions: How can we understand learning as collaboration when digital networks afford (and constrain) group efforts? And what are some of the pedagogical implications when network-mediated collaboration is integrated in schooling? The purpose of the chapter is to make a contribution to teacher education as well as praxis; how theory informed practice and practice informed theory are mutually constitutive of development (Roth & Lee, 2007). But the purpose of the chapter is also didactical in the sense that it seeks to visualize how productive, technology-mediated interactions can be developed in the classroom. A large number of languages, English and Norwegian (the author’s L1) among them have proverbs such as ‘Two heads are better than one’. Behind

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such observations we find assumptions and experiences that point to better results when people join forces in problem solving; in short, that collaboration ‘pays’. But the gains of such collaboration are not always immediately visible in learning trajectories. There are certain prerequisites involved, for example, that we have a shared understanding of the tasks we encounter (Rasmussen, Krange & Ludvigsen, 2003) and can draw on common set of suppositions – what the sociologist Emile Durkheim (1898/1974) named collective representations. Another prerequisite is that we organize problem solving as object-oriented and productive division of labour (Engeström, 1987, 1999). When educational psychologists Jaan Valsiner and Rene van der Veer examine where and how ideas originate and how they are sustained and cultivated, they find that a long history of humans engaged in collaborative dialogue and collective cognition (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000). This view is not restricted to the Vygotskian (1978, 1986) legacy; Valsiner and van der Veer show how such perspectives can be traced in pre-Vygotskian scholarship in Europe as well as in the United States. Such perspectives are sociogenetic, that is, that ideas and their development are grounded in thinking as a social phenomenon. Learning and cognition emerges and is sustained and cultivated through human interaction, through humans interacting with artefacts (material as well as linguistic and symbolic), and as we relate to the cultural and historical institutions we construct. Recently research interest in collaboration has increased and from many diverse scientific and domain specific positions; for example, in philosophy, psychology, informatics and the learning sciences we see how researchers seek to document, examine and support collective cognition (see, for example, Lund, 2005 for an overview). One seminal factor for such interest is found in digital technologies that support and, indeed, require collaboration. There are obvious socio-economic reasons. Just like Karl Marx (1867/1983) analysed the material basis for capitalism, Manuel Castells (1996) analysed the networked society. The network has become a powerful metaphor for how we organize our world, socially as well as technologically, and how we encounter, share and develop knowledge through webs of information. But where we traditionally have cultivated collaboration in relatively small, co-located groups with established relations, online networks open up for mass collaboration between agents who may only temporarily share an object or have a common need, independent of time, place and culture (Lund & Rasmussen, 2010). There is a particular responsibility for teacher education to prepare student–teachers for practices where they can engage in, lead and guide different types of such collective knowledge advancement.

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However, there may be reasons to ask whether our understanding of collective knowledge advancement and technology-mediated collaboration is sufficiently developed, conceptually as well as in educational practices and teacher education. Certainly we have for many years engaged in different types of group work, but more critical, principled and theory informed approaches from a network perspective have not always travelled beyond the researchers’ domain. Thus, we can in a Norwegian newspaper read headlines such as ‘Danish researcher apologizes for having introduced group work in schools. Norwegian experts cheer’ (Dypvik, 2011). Such slightly tabloid statements might lead us into assuming that two heads are certainly not better than one but rather a dysfunctional constellation. Also, such a statement calls for empirical studies that can help us assess what collaboration in the network society entails and to what extent it is conducive to knowledge advancement. In order to pursue the two questions I raised at the start of this introduction, I will report from a longitudinal research project, TWEAK,1 where a series of different wikis were put to use at two different senior high schools in Norway. The school subjects in question are English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and Modern History (MH). Our experiences are summarized and discussed as four cumulative findings and with a particular view to task design. Briefly, our findings can be listed as needs to (1) match tasks with available cultural tools (artefacts), (2) align individual and collective contributions in networked environments, (3)  develop tasks that draw on curricular goals as well as learners’ lifeworlds and (4) exploit situations where boundaries of traditional teacher and learner roles are not distinct. These findings will be elaborated in the discussion. However, I will first seek to conceptualize the term collaboration since it is a fundamental concept for the following rendition and so that author and readers have a shared notion of how this term is used in the following.

Collaboration versus co-operation Studies of group dynamics and interaction patterns have since the 1950s been linked to problem-based learning (see, for example, Hare, Borgatta & Bales, 1955). In particular, important contributions have been made by David W. Johnson and Roger T. Johnson who, during the 1980s, focused on the ‘we’ of the classroom in the form of mutual, positive dependence. Another important contribution is found in ‘the jigsaw classroom’ (Aronson, Blaney, Stephan, Sikes & Snapp, 1978) in which participants work in groups on subtasks of a larger

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assignment and assemble pieces that add up to a relevant response to the overall assignment (pre-Google, the jigsaw pieces were most often provided by the teacher). This and similar approaches to collaborative learning are different from what we find in studies that focus on technology-mediated communication, social media and new literacies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Gee & Hayes, 2011; Gee, Hull & Lankshear, 1996; Thorne, 2009; Thorne, Black & Sykes, 2008). The distinction between the jigsaw approach and collaborative approaches has been explicitly articulated by Pierre Dillenbourg using the conceptual pair co-operation and collaboration: In cooperation, partners split the work, solve sub-tasks individually and then assemble the partial results into the final output. In collaboration, partners do the work ‘together’. However, some spontaneous division may occur even when two people do really work together. (1999, p. 8)

Thus, in collaboration we find a continuous, shared focus on the whole task. Collaboration goes beyond the individual perspective so prominent in the co-operative approach. But such a collective focus, and, consequently, a joint response to the problem to be solved, requires constant negotiation of procedures and relevant strategies for meaning making on a group level. This does not exclude a division of labour – everybody cannot do everything – but the participants always relate to the totality of the task and where they can connect their own contributions to the overall task and relate their own contributions to the multivoicedness (Bakhtin, 1979/2000) of their peers. This is a most important distinction when we turn to the empirical data from the wiki studies. In research the distinction has consequences for the unit of analysis. In studies of co-operation the unit of analysis can be the individual. Studies of collaboration are often anchored in social and cultural theories of learning and cognition and where dialogism (e.g. Bakhtin, 1979/2000; Wertsch, 1998), artefact-mediated development (e.g. Roth & Lee, 2007; Säljö, 1999; Vygotsky, 1978) and distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995) constitute established approaches. In studies of collaboration, processes of collective cognition and joint meaning making are in focus. In order to avoid this remaining a ‘black box’ we need to understand how agents who engage in such processes interact over time and how they make use of available cultural resources. Such processes must also be related to the contexts they are part of, whether it is the co-located classroom or the distributed digital network, learners’ lifeworlds (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000) or all of these. Such complexity requires that we develop

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research designs and use a unit of analysis that makes it possible to capture technology-mediated interaction. Collaborating through digital and networked technologies also affords potential for developing new knowledge. The reason is found in the fact that through networks an indefinite number of human and material resources can be rapidly linked and combined (Akkerman et al., 2005; Hakkarainen, Palonen, Paavola & Lehtinen, 2004; Mäkitalo-Siegl, Zottmann, Kaplan & Fischer, 2010; Sawyer, 2007). Combining networked technologies, powerful broadband infrastructure, web 2.0 applications and social media affords a communicative ecology characterized by many-to-many situations and trajectories. Mass collaboration is possible on a much larger scale and in modes that we are not yet accustomed to, at least not in schooling. In collaboration on such a scale we find emerging practices that have not yet been ‘didacticized’, that is, they have not been identified, cultivated and put to systematic use in order to support learning and teaching. Nevertheless, our learners must be prepared to work and contribute in such environments whether they materialize in the form of large organizations, networks of expertise, and local and global communities. Recent research also indicates that mass collaboration holds rich opportunities for taking on especially complex tasks (Kafai & Peppler, 2011). By examining various forms of collaborative learning we have seen how collective knowledge advancement, at a group level as well as at a mass collaboration level, challenges today’s and tomorrow’s classroom practices. The first question in the introduction concerned how we can understand learning as collaboration when digital networks afford (and constrain) group efforts. The response has been to evoke the notion of collaboration but also to extend it to the mass collaboration level. This approach does not mean that we neglect the contributions from individuals but that neither collaborative processes nor results can be reduced to an individual level (Stahl, 2006). Tensions may remain between individual and collective levels, for example, regarding ‘ownership’ and assessment of contributions. This represents a considerable challenge when making collective cognition and communication part of the formal educational repertoire. The following section summarizes some attempts.

Why collaborate? Some responses from research With the previous conceptual discussion of concepts as a backdrop it is worth asking whether research on collaborative learning gives us any indication as to

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its potential, to what extent collaboration is conducive to learning, how such learning materializes and if there is an aggregated result that ideally amounts to more than the sum of individual contributions. Such questions are among the most ambitious and challenging within the learning sciences (Stahl, 2006) as they involve cognitive processes that comprise participants’ interactions that are linguistic and communicative and include their use of available cultural tools. Sawyer (2006, 2007) shows how more than 20 years of educational research on collaborative discourse has documented the value of collaboration for learners as well as teachers. This pertains to a number of various school subjects such as for example, mathematics, biology, computer science, and in a number of language arts, also when we include comparative studies where individual and more competitive educational settings have been included. However, it is essential that collaborative learning needs clear objectives, structure and coaching. It is never sufficient to establish a group of learners and assume that learning will take place. Similar findings are presented by Hämäläinen and Vähäsantanen (2011). In a survey of 193 studies of possible links between collaborative learning and creativity they find that ‘orchestration’  – here understood as, on the one hand, a balance between design, structure and leadership and, on the other, improvisation, flexibility and openness  – is crucial for learners’ knowledge advancement. The Finnish researchers found that collaborative learning can be developed through object oriented activities, well-designed tasks, productive interactions and available resources such as digital technologies. However, they also found that teachers who engage in and commit themselves to such practices are often deterred by rigid administrative routines and control regimes, lack of institutional trust and a shared space for pedagogical exploration.

Collaboration in practice: The TWEAK project In light of such findings I now turn to a longitudinal research project in two Norwegian senior high schools where collaborative technologies in the shape of wikis were used. Between 2006 and 2011 a series of interventions resulted in transformation of tasks, tools, activities and assessment approaches. Among the technologies that support collaborative learning we – a team of researchers, programmers and web designers together with teachers and learners – chose to use wikis. The reason we opted for wikis was that they are widely used across

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professions, they are simple and flexible to use, often based on open-source code and therefore lend themselves to further development and rest on principles of reciprocity among its users (Leuf & Cunningham, 2001). To start with, we tested a series of collectively oriented tasks. Next, we developed the wiki according to needs and requirements we could identify from the first phase. Also, assessment of individual as well as collective production made this necessary. Detailed studies of separate interventions and pursuit of specific research questions are described elsewhere (see the references listed in Table 4.1 below). Table 4.1 seeks to summarize five interventions, mostly initiated by researchers but often in collaboration with teachers. These interventions came about partly as a need to change the tasks given to learners, partly by developing the wiki with certain features that made the collaborative activities more visible for those involved. Further, Table 4.1 shows how these interventions were driven by different research questions (column 2), a brief description of central activities (column 3) and findings (column 4). As human interaction and the use of artefacts constitute the analytical focus of the research project we have drawn on activity theoretical and dialogic perspectives (Bakhtin, 1979/2000, 1986/2004; Engeström, 1987; Engeström, Miettinen & Punamäki, 1999; Hauge, Lund & Vestøl, 2007; Wertsch, 1991, 1998). Activity theory was chosen because it links mediated collaborative human activity to a collective motive or object. In the case of the TWEAK project, such objects would typically be relevant collaborative responses to tasks with high ecological validity. Many of the research questions (column 2 in Table 4.1) pertain to the role of mediating artefacts (the wiki), how division of labour emerged and how such mediated collaboration was conducive (or not) to object oriented activity. Dialogic perspectives guided the more interaction oriented studies (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) where we sought to find participatory patterns in how learners engaged in many-to-many communicative actions. Table 4.1 constitutes a synthesis of five years of research into learners’ and teachers’ use of collaborative technologies. Throughout the TWEAK project we aimed to see tasks, activities, technologies and assessment as an amalgamation and not as separate entities, except for analytical purposes. An intervention in the form of, for example, introducing new technological features in the wiki should not merely be seen as a technological concern; it is intimately related to the tasks the learners met and how their teachers could assess the outcomes. Based on these five interventions we arrived at four cumulative findings which will be discussed immediately following the table.

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Table 4.1  Overview of research questions, activities and findings from five interventions pertaining to the use of wikis Research questions

1

We found two main types of collaboration: (1) co-located, tightly Subject: EFL. Two tasks: (1) Learners To what extent can a wiki knit collaboration in pairs or small groups, (2) loosely knit collectively convey how young contribute to collective networking on wiki contributions that relate to the larger task. knowledge advancement? Norwegians perceive the United States (duration: two weeks). (2) Learners build Collaborating in a wiki entails an epistemology anchored in How can teachers take part collective knowledge production. This is quite challenging a virtual ‘typical British town’ in the wiki in wiki-based activities? for learners as well as teachers as it represents a shift from (duration: one semester). Production an epistemology anchored in individual knowledge (re-) is extensive but it is difficult to keep a production. shared object in focus. Activities are The wiki environment does not afford a natural space for the teacher analysed in light of different types of who easily loses touch with what learners are doing. The teacher communities of practice. needs to design her-/himself into the activities. Detailed analysis: Lund & Smørdal, 2006. We identified tensions between the educational system’s traditional Subject: EFL. Identical tasks as above. What is the role of a emphasis on graded, individual efforts and the networked society’s Learners contribute to improving each wiki when fostering emphasis on collective and distributed production. other’s linguistic competence but hesitate collaborative competence Collaborative technologies such as wikis are conducive to knowledge in revising the content submitted by in foreign language advancement and linguistic development by affording an extended peers. The analytic focus is on collective learning? repertoire of interactions. processes and mutual development of What types of interactions learning communities as well as language It is essential to redefine the relationship between task types (that do learners engage in? have a collective orientation), available resources (material as well communities. as social), and assessment types and criteria. Detailed analysis: Lund, 2006, 2008.

2

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Intervention

3.

4.

Collective knowledge advancement takes place locally in pairs or small groups as well as in the larger learning community. It is difficult for learners (and teachers) to be equally aware of the two levels. There is a need to develop task types and assessment criteria that capture individual as well as local and global activities. Individual and local contributions must be assessed depending on how they relate to contributions from others as well as how they relate to the total, aggregated result. Detailed analysis: Lund & Rasmussen, 2008. The co-design resulted in technological development as well as pedagogical practices conducive to collaborative learning, including assessment types that capture how individual contributions relate to the collectively oriented task. Teachers experience a dilemma: when struggling with trying to fulfil innovative ambitions and being accountable towards existing practices it is tempting to give up the former. Detailed analysis: Lund, Rasmussen & Smørdal, 2009. There is a mismatch between the information ecology of the networked society and the textbook tradition. In traditional tasks there is a strong connection between tasks and textbooks; it is a ‘closed universe’. In collectively oriented tasks learners encounter an ‘open universe’ that invites exploration, negotiations and to make meaning of fragmented and partly contradictory information. Collectively oriented tasks can suspend the dichotomy between learning and teaching. Teacher and learner roles shift rapidly. Detailed analysis: Lund & Hauge, 2011; Lund & Rasmussen, 2010.

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How do relations between Subject: EFL. Learners examine how Anglo-American culture manifests itself in tasks and available the world. They resort to a series of diverse resources influence collaborative strategies, also when the wiki collective knowledge breaks down immediately before they are advancement? What types of participatory to present their work for the class. The analytic focus is on how learners make use patterns emerge? of collaborative technologies in order to respond to a collectively oriented task. Subject: Modern History. Design of How can researchers technological environments (re-design and teachers jointly of a wiki) and pedagogical activities design learning that support and boost collaborative environments conducive learning. The analytic focus is on to collaborative learning co-design – a process where agents and collective cognition? from diverse activity systems (teachers and researchers) develop a shared, technological–pedagogical object. Subject: Modern History. A team of How do teachers work teachers discuss and develop task types in order to develop that reflect competence needed in the collectively oriented networked society. Learners work with tasks? tasks in different ways, e.g. by recreating the political discourse during the Cold War and asking a multicultural cohort to produce a jointly written immigrant story. The analytical focus is on tensions between traditional, co-located and networked, distributed practices (up to 120 learners simultaneously in the wiki). Implications for teacher education are discussed.

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Discussion: Four cumulative findings From the summary of interventions and findings in Table 4.1 I seek to respond to the second question asked in the introduction about the pedagogical implications when network-mediated collaboration is integrated in schooling. Although I have made a point of emphasizing the unity of tasks, activities, tools and assessment, this discussion will for analytical purposes treat the cumulative findings (cf. the introduction) separately and connect them to certain challenges – not least for teacher education.

The need to match collaborative tasks and available cultural tools Historically, school tasks have been individually oriented, closely linked to material in a textbook, and learners have been assessed according to their ability to ‘solve’ the task isolated from human assistance or tools available in the out-of-school environment. This tradition has over recent decades been modified to include use of tools (dictionaries, calculators) but at exams learners’ access to the internet is still uncommon.2 The combination of collaborative activity and access to available and relevant resources places the traditional approach to problem solving under quite some pressure; ‘The explosion of new social network technologies has highlighted the awkward relationship between new “21st century” media practices and existing educational systems’ (Hickey, Honeyford, Clinton & McWilliams, 2010) and, consequently, ‘current methods of testing are incapable of validly measuring sophisticated intellectual and psychological performances’ (Clarke-Midura & Dede, 2010, p. 310). But if tasks are to have legitimacy and validity in the networked society they must correspond to curricular aims as well as learners’ lifeworlds. To sustain test situations where learners are deprived of human or technological assistance will violate their ecological validity and fail to foster the competences required in the twenty-first century. Consequently we need to approach task types and structures with fresh eyes. If a task can be solved without extensive collaboration and without the use of networked technologies it does not make much sense to introduce such artefacts. In column 3 (Activities and analytical focus) in Table 4.1 we can see that learners were asked to take on tasks that are too extensive, difficult or complex to be met at an individual level, for example, by ‘building’ a typical English town in the wiki, complete with a history, population, vital communal services, business life and educational services, and so on. The tasks we designed for the TWEAK project built on O’Neil, Chuang and Chung (2003) who define a

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collaborative task as ‘a task that requires that no individual has all the resources and it is unlikely that one single participant can solve the problem or reach the goals without at least some contributions from others in the group’ (p. 366). This represents a discontinuity of the traditional ‘task universe’ which builds on a strong connection between task and textbook, a universe that has only allowed for limited access to human and material resources. This is a ‘closed universe’ in the sense that it requires recognizable skills and competences on, mostly, an individual level. The solutions to such tasks are mostly known or predefined, and they can be controlled against accountable and dependable sources. Through teacher education and textbook practices teachers are socialized into this task universe. Networked technologies, social media and web 2.0 applications represent an ‘open universe’ which invites and requires exploration, negotiation and competence in making sense of fragmented, often unaccountable or even contradictory information. If we merely copy the task culture from the ‘closed universe’ into the ‘open universe’ it will result in copy-and-paste practices, simply because such tasks can be ‘solved’ that way with minimal effort. For learners, the aim of the task will continue to be understood as finding the ‘correct’ answer, something which already has been done by others and which can easily be found on the net. Still, it should be noted that not all copy-and-paste practices amount to blind and senseless plagiarism. Studies show that many learners (also quite young ones) use this as a strategy for problem solving where bits and pieces of information harvested from the net are put into ‘scrapbooks’ (usually a temporary word processor document) to be reorganized or synthesized as part of responding to the given task (Rasmussen, 2005; Rasmussen et al., 2003). This growing concern with matching tasks and available cultural tools finds its historical parallel in Vygotsky’s (1978) principle of double stimulation where the first stimulus is the task to be negotiated and the second stimulus a ‘neutral’ artefact that is appropriated by the learner in order to assist her/him in a cognitive effort. In networked and digital environments, however, learners have to appropriate various complex artefacts and practices and eventually use them as a second stimulus. Thus, we need to align the principle of double stimulation with situations where we have a series of complex tools as second stimulus, instead of a neutral relatively stable tool as was the case in Vygotsky’s experiments. Investigating which tools are actually picked up and appropriated by learners and how they put them to use for object-oriented endeavours is a foundational issue (Lund & Rasmussen, 2008). According to Ritella and Hakkarainen (2012) investigating students’ and teachers’ strategies of such tool selection and tool use also appears to be a promising area of research.

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The need to align individual and collective contributions Closely related to the matching of tasks and tools is the need to align individual contributions to the collectively produced wiki. Learners need to demonstrate how their individual contributions are relevant to the larger, collective perspective and also how their contributions relate to contributions from others. For teachers, it is also essential to be able to identify both levels for purposes of assessment. Our research revealed that it is challenging for learners (and also for teachers) to at any time be aware of how individual and local work (pair, small group) relates to the collective level and the global production. This is a critical and often decisive factor when learners meet collectively oriented tasks. When we observed learners in such situations over time, an activity pattern emerged, which can roughly be outlined as follows: ll

ll

ll

Learners spent considerable time approaching the task. This implied opting for certain elements they wanted to work on, teaming up with classmates, planning ahead, considering relevant resources and loosely agree on division of labour. The teacher was very much present and assisting learners in this phase, but it still proved to be taxing for the learners. Crucial moments appeared as learners tried to juxtapose their individual or pair/small group work with the emerging wiki content produced by all learners together. This proved to be an exercise of communicative awareness. In this phase of the process, co-ordination of contributions was essential, usually by making links between and commenting on contributions from classmates. It resulted in revised contributions but learners hesitated in revising others’ content while readily improving each other’s linguistic productions. At this stage the teacher tended to lose sight of what the individual learner was doing, and without a teacher present, learners could easily become lost or isolated in their local production. This led directly to an intervention in the form of a redesign of the wiki and the feature of the ‘activity map’ (see intervention no. 4 in Table 4.1 and Figure 4.1). In practice we experienced how some learners became peripheral to the totality of the tasks. In interviews with the participants we learned that the notion of private ownership to written production is deeply etched into schooling, the question of different epistemologies loom large in the background. This is a considerable challenge for teacher education when preparing practitioners for collaborative and distributed practices.

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Figure 4.1  Activity map with icons for different types of contributions and diagonal connectors between collaborating participants. The pop-up window shows the contribution (e.g. the difference between the original and a revised text) and a white space for commentary. In this case, the teacher makes a comment on a learner’s analysis of a movie used in the school subject, English as a foreign language.

Depending on the nature of the task, the outcome at a collective level could be described as a result that ideally amounted to more than the sum of the individual contributions. In other words, a possible synergy and aggregated result was achieved as learners revised contributions, linked between them and added comments. However, such an aggregated result failed to materialize in a task where learners were asked to produce a collective perception of the United States. Faced with this task, they (individually, in pairs or in small groups) typically produced somewhat unconnected wiki pages on US politics, the entertainment industry, famous people and historical events, and so on. On the other hand, the construction of the English town in the wiki produced an aggregated, collective result and where the various aspects of the town were nicely linked to constitute a whole. The same was the case in a task where learners adopted the political views of the United States and the Soviet Union and re-enacted the argumentation

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from the Cold War. In this latter case the log files indicated a ‘lived’ experience as well as an increased awareness of argumentation and political rhetoric. After the first interventions in the TWEAK project, researchers, programmers, web designers and teachers joined forces in redesigning one of the wikis (Confluence3), we found to be suitable for our needs. In particular the need for an ‘activity map’ – a feature that could track the individual trajectories as well as the collaborative patterns – arose (see Figure 4.1). In this way learners as well as teachers could keep up with what the others were doing at all times while they could see how contributions related to each other and the overall task. Each time a learner contributed in the form of a new wiki page, a revision, link, a comment or a ‘label’ (key words) materialized in the form of a specific icon and was assigned to the learner involved. The icons added up to a horizontal line which chronologically represented the learner’s trajectory over time; a feature called ‘swim lanes’ by the participants. Whenever a learner (or teacher) placed the cursor over an icon, a pop-up window showed the contribution and at the same time offered a small window for comments from the teacher or peers. In addition to the horizontal, individual trajectories, the activity map also showed the connecting lines between the one who made a comment or link and the one who was on the receiving end. Thus, diagonal lines added up to a graphical representation of wiki collaboration over time. By zooming in on a short and intense collaborative spell or zooming out in order to map collaboration over, for example, several weeks, participants could easily keep track of the collective efforts; who was involved, to what extent, and in what ways.

The need to develop tasks that draw on curricular goals as well as learners’ lifeworlds The activity map made it easier for the teacher to assess what was going on in the wiki but also for the learners to be involved in the assessment practices that developed. We introduced two fundamental principles that accompanied every task. Learners were always asked to demonstrate the following: ll

ll

How my contribution(s) relate to the overall task. Point to the relevance. How my contribution(s) relate to (some of) the contributions from my peers. Point to the relevance.

These two questions were usually answered by learners as they made oral presentations for the class of their work in the wiki, accompanied by PowerPoint slides or some other visual aids. While the tasks developed by teachers and researchers closely adhered to aims in the Norwegian subject curriculum

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for EFL, we quickly discovered how learners, in their wiki work as well as in their presentations, drew on their own contexts, their out-of-school social and cultural experiences, their lifeworlds (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). Where there were connections or contrasts between curricular aims and learners’ lifeworlds, learners were invited to reflect on this. For example, during their work of developing the ‘typical English town’, a small group of boys started describing a part of the city (‘Southside’) dominated by gangs named ‘the Gatblasters’, ‘El Muertos’, and the like. One of the classmates intervened by using the comment function in the wiki to produce the following statement: ‘I think you should swap the american [sic] gangsters with some more typical Englishmen [sic]. More like the characters in the Football Factory movie.’ This learner used the wiki feature to impose a control mechanism and her/his reference to a movie dealing with English football violence proved to be a relevant comment displaying cultural competence. This and similar instances prompted a task that built more directly on learners’ local contexts. At one of the schools where the TWEAK project was conducted, approximately 70 per cent of the learners had an immigrant background, quite a few being second- or even third-generation immigrants to Norway. We asked them to write about how they or (by interviewing) their parents/grandparents/ significant others experienced settling in Norway. Learners from Norwegian descent were likewise asked to interview family members or others how they experienced immigration to the areas they lived in. As the narratives and interviews materialized, learners linked texts and parts of texts where they found similarities, contrasts and generally issues that were illustrated from different points of view. Thus, a dialogical and multivoiced text emerged in the wiki, mediated by learners’ opportunities to draw on their lifeworlds as well as linguistic practices that transcended the curricular aims. Such ‘hybrid’ and ‘3rd space practices’ (Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, Alvarez & Chiu, 1999; Kostogriz, 2005) seemed to give usually reticent learners a voice. Also, the teachers who knew their learners well pointed to the fact that those who collaborated online were not necessarily the same who stuck together during breaks or outside of school. In sum, when access to networked resources is sought, combined with curricular accountability as well as the educational affordances found in learners’ lifeworlds, we found that our tasks tended to become increasingly meta-oriented; that is, they activated scenarios and alternatives, hypotheses, connections and correlations, and often an element of making syntheses out of fragmented and even contradictory information. Along with the need to match tasks and tools and align individual and collective contributions, we found that blending curricular accountability with lifeworld contexts seemed conducive to learners’

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communicative development. Tasks that can be characterized as ‘meta-tasks’ seem to lend themselves to technology-mediated collaborative learning.

Traditional teacher and learner roles are not discrete entities Connected to the previous point, possibly as a consequence, we saw how traditional separation of learner and teacher roles was suspended; learners temporarily took on teacher roles and teachers increasingly acknowledged the value of this. Collectively oriented tasks tend to blur the teaching–learning dichotomy.4 In collaborative and networked learning environments teachers as well as learners tend to commute between such positions. For example, immediately after the first iteration (in Table 4.1) learners were asked to participate in a survey and to complete statements such as ‘I liked working in a wiki because . . .’, or ‘I did not like working in a wiki because . . .’. We received responses such as, ‘I like this because it is a win/win situation. To help others and get help back is nice. Co-operating is very important in our daily lives and our future jobs!’; ‘We never worked alone, and many helped me with my work’ and ‘Because then I don’t have to be afraid of making a mistake ’cause [sic] there will always be someone there to clear it up!’ The statements reflect situations where learners momentarily acted as teachers. Together with the collaborative patterns revealed by the activity map (Figure 4.1) we see how learners commuted between responding to a task as learners while extending such a response to include peer support and, indeed, accomplishing in promoting inclusive education where teachers and learners produce together (Tharp, Estrada, Dalton & Yamauchi, 2000). However, and in accordance with Vygotskian pedagogy, teachers have a particular responsibility for scaffolding and orchestrating activities. Immediately after the first wiki iteration, the teacher involved in a videotaped interview offered the following observations: I lost the learners . . . it was difficult to trace, for me as a teacher . . . and I felt that I lost the learners, I did not know where to go in order to guide them . . . because in general there is no extensive space for a teacher [in a wiki], it becomes a separate world . . . they [learners] tend to disappear into their separate worlds and it becomes difficult for me to guide them and maintain my job as a knowledge provider.. . . I don’t know what is the end product, what I am supposed to assess at the end.

This teacher points to several problems which in sum make her feel unconnected to the wiki work of the learners. This teacher’s voice articulates many of the

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profession’s core practices and how they suddenly become disrupted: a felt presence for the learners, close supervision and monitoring of learners’ activities, providing knowledge and being responsible for assessment. Such essential practices became threatened in the wiki environment with the result that the learners ‘tend to disappear into their separate worlds’ as this teacher aptly puts it. As it was not sufficient merely to observe only parts of what was going on in the wiki (the production was substantial) the teachers involved in the project became directly instrumental in developing the activity map feature. For them, the situation as summarized by the teacher (above) was a learning experience.

TWEAK synthesis: Interaction and transformation Let us briefly consider the mechanisms at work behind the teachers’ description in the previous section. Metcalfe’s law (Tongia & Wilson, 2007) has often been used to document the dramatic increase in the number of relations between participants engaged in networking. Mathematically, the number of relations is expressed as follows: n(n – 1)/2

This means that if we take the number of members (n), multiply by the number minus one and divide by two we get the number of possible relations in a network. In a class of 30 learners the number of possible relations will be 30(30 – 1)/2 = 435. In the TWEAK project we had up to 120 learners in the wiki (4 classes in Modern History) which results in 7,140 possible relations. No wonder the teacher felt she lost the learners and struggled to find a space for her own professional practices like she was accustomed to from the co-located classroom. Teachers and student–teachers are not prepared to work under such conditions. If the potential of digital networks is to be realized, teachers need to meet and take part in the practices that are emerging and given opportunities to design learning environments and trajectories conducive to learning. We still know little as to what this entails, although work life increasingly depends on collaboration (Sawyer, 2007; Tapscott & Williams, 2006). If teachers are not given support and guidance in developing such designs they will risk losing sight of learners and new learning as reflected in the teacher’s statement quoted above. Networked, distributed collaboration necessitates technologies that support and regulate such processes. But technologies alone do not guarantee learning outcomes. No matter how sophisticated the application and how quick and

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reliable the digital infrastructure is, the need for a teacher’s presence and leadership is crucial. Within a sociocultural perspective, this view of the teacher as the most important scaffolding element can be traced back to Vygotsky (1978) who shows development depends on instruction or assistance from one or more knowledgeable peers. Whereas teachers have relied on experience from co-located classrooms, they now encounter very different challenges in networked and distributed settings. This chapter has sought to argue that when digital and networked technologies impact communicative practices in classrooms we need to study the interrelationship between tasks, tools and activities. Often, we find studies that are confined to examining the possible effect of one specific technology in a particular school subject, the time spent on teaching with or without technologies or activities that have a limited duration. This means that subjects, learning and teaching are treated as stable elements while technology seems to be perceived as a tool that may enhance learning or ‘fail’ to do so. In the latter case investments in technologies are perceived to be a waste of time and money. But digital and networked technologies cannot be regarded as mere tools or instruments that ideally result in ‘better’ or ‘more effective’ learning. Over time we see that the use of such technologies transform existing practices and bring about new ones. The current chapter has argued that networked collaborative technologies afford transcending many of the restrictions found in traditional knowledge production. Based on the findings from the TWEAK project we would argue that the affordances of such transformed and emerging practices need to be addressed in teacher education. However, there is also a tension between individual and collective knowledge advancement. Such tensions need to become central in teacher education as well as in-service training. The TWEAK project also taught us much about how teachers, researchers and programmers can collaborate in designing new technologies as well new practices for the knowledge society by developing tasks and tools as part of the larger learning environment and in a learning trajectory perspective. In this collaboration, specific and proprietary interests converged in a shared objective: a praxis that makes collective knowledge advancement feasible and relevant for schooling. Such interdisciplinary collaboration often seems to be a missing link between the domains of research and the practice. Kollar (2010) points to the fact that such a missing link would be inconceivable within domains such as medicine and how separation results in attempts at forcing potentially innovative practices into existing structures and procedures. The consequence is that teachers and policy makers may perceive technologies as failing to serve education or prove to be downright counter-productive.

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Practicing their craft in networked environments represents no modest challenge for language educators as well as for learners. At the same time, we see increased opportunities as new communicative ‘outputs’ (Crystal, 2011) emerge. Implicitly, our findings also point to an imminent need for rethinking assessment types and criteria with high ecological validity for situations where networked technologies function as representations of knowledge as well as learning environments. We would argue that here is considerable – but exciting – developmental work awaiting teachers as well as teacher educators.

Notes 1 TWEAK is short for Tweaking Wikis in Education for the Advancement of Knowledge. The research project was conducted at InterMedia research centre, University of Oslo, between 2006 and 2011. 2 In Norway spring 2012 the National Directorate for Education and Training opened up for an experiment in which some EFL classes were allowed to have unrestricted access to the internet during national exams. Preliminary results show that learners as well as teachers were very satisfied and that, contrary to common assumptions, learners with grades below average benefited more than those with grades above average. 3 www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/overview 4 Note that Vygotsky used the Russian term obuchenie – a dialectic concept for an activity that unifies teaching and learning. This has caused quite a lot of problems when translating the Russian term to languages (e.g. English as well as Norwegian) where teaching and learning are conceptualized as distinct entities (Cole, 2009; Lund & Hauge, 2011).

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Jordan, B., & Henderson, A. (1995). Interaction analysis: foundation and practice. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 4(1), 39–103. Kafai, Y., & Peppler, K. (2011). Beyond small groups: new opportunities for research in computer-supported collective learning. In H. Spada, G. Stahl, N. Miyake & N. Law (Eds), CSCL 2011 conference proceedings. Volume 1 – long papers. Connecting computer-supported collaborative learning to policy and practice (Vol. 1 – Long papers, pp. 17–24). Hong Kong: International Society of the Learning Sciences. Kollar, I. (2010). Turning the classroom of the future into the classroom of the present. In K. Mäkitalo-Siegl, J. Zottmann, F. Kaplan & F. Fischer (Eds), Classroom of the future: orchestrating collaborative spaces (pp. 245–55). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Kostogriz, A. (2005). Dialogical imagination of (inter)cultural space: rethinking the semiotic ecology of second language and literacy learning. In J. K. Hall, G. Vitanova & L. Marchenkova (Eds), Dialogue with Bakhtin on second and foreign language learning (pp. 189–210). Mahwah, NJ & London: Lawrence Erlbaum. Leuf, B., & Cunningham, W. (2001). The wiki way: quick collaboration on the web. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley Longman. Lund, A. (2005). Collective epistemologies in an upper secondary school. A preliminary analysis. Paper presented at the Earli conference, Nicosia, CY. — (2006). WIKI i klasserommet: individuelle og kollektive praksiser [WIKI in the classroom: individual and collective practices]. Norsk pedagogisk tidsskrift, 90(4), 274–88. — (2008). Wikis: a collective approach to language production. ReCALL, 20(1), 35–54. Lund, A., & Hauge, T. (2011). Designs for teaching and learning in technology-rich learning environments. Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, 4, 258–71. Lund, A., & Rasmussen, I. (2008). The right tool for the wrong task? Match and mismatch between first and second stimulus in double stimulation. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 3(4), 25–51. — (2010). Tasks 2.0: education meets social computing and mass collaboration. In C. Crawford, D. A. Willis, R. Carlsen, I. Gibson, K. McFerrin, J. Price & R. Weber (Eds), Proceedings of society for information technology & teacher education international conference 2010 (pp. 4058–65). Chesapeake, VA: AACE. Lund, A., Rasmussen, I., & Smørdal, O. (2009). Joint designs for working in wikis: a case of practicing across settings and modes of work. In H. Daniels, A. Edwards, Y. Engeström, T. Gallagher & S. Ludvigsen (Eds), Activity theory in practice: promoting learning across boundaries and agencies (pp. 207–30). Oxon, UK and New York: Routledge. Lund, A., & Smørdal, O. (2006). Is there a space for the teacher in a wiki? Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on wikis (WikiSym ’06) (pp. 37–46). Odense, Denmark: ACM Press. Marx, K. (1867/1983). Kapitalen, bind I [Capital, volume I]. Trans. E. Kielland & S. Rafoss. Oslo: Oktober. Mäkitalo-Siegl, K., Zottmann, J., Kaplan, F., & Fischer, F. (Eds) (2010). Classroom of the future: orchestrating collaborative spaces. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

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O’Neil, H., Chuang, S.-H., & Chung, G. (2003). Issues in the computer-based assessment of collaborative problem solving. Assessment in Education, 10(3), 361–73. Rasmussen, I. (2005). Project work and ICT. A study of learning as trajectories of participation. Doctoral dissertation, University of Oslo, Oslo. Rasmussen, I., Krange, I., & Ludvigsen, S. (2003). The process of understanding the task: how is agency distributed between students, teachers and representations in technology-rich learning environments? International Journal of Educational Research, 39(8), 839–49. Ritella, G., & Hakkarainen, K. (2012). Instrumental genesis in technology-mediated learning: from double stimulation to expansive knowledge practices. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 7(2), 239–58. Roth, W.-M., & Lee, Y.-J. (2007). ‘Vygotsky’s Neglected legacy’: cultural-historical activity theory. Review of Educational Research, 77(2), 186–232. Sawyer, R. (2006). Analyzing collaborative discourse. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (pp. 187–204). Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press. — (2007). Group genius: the creative power of collaboration. New York: Basic Books. Stahl, G. (2006). Group cognition: computer support for building collaborative knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Säljö, R. (1999). Learning as the use of tools. a sociocultural perspective on the human-technology link. In K. Littleton & P. Light (Eds), Learning with computers. Analysing productive interaction (pp. 144–61). New York: Routledge. Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. (2006). Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything. London: Portfolio/Penguin. Tharp, R., Estrada, P., Dalton, S., & Yamauchi, L. (2000). Teaching transformed. Achieving excellence, fairness, inclusion, and harmony. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Thorne, S. (2009). ‘Community’, semiotic flows, and mediated contribution to activity. Language Teaching, 42(1), 81–94. Thorne, S., Black, R., & Sykes, J. (2008). Second language use, socialization, and learning in internet interest communities and online gaming. Modern Language Journal, 93(1), 802–21. Tongia, R., & Wilson, E. (2007). Turning Metcalfe on his head: the multiple costs of network exclusion. Paper 120. Department of Engineering and Public Policy. Carnegie Institute of Technology. Valsiner, J., & van der Veer, R. (2000). The social mind. Construction of the idea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. — (1986). Thought and language. Trans. A. Kozulin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wertsch, J. (1991). Voices of the mind: a sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. — (1998). Mind as action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

5

Synchronous Online Language Teaching: Strategies to Support Learner Development Iryna Kozlova and Evon Zundel

Online learning has become more mainstream in the academic community in the past several years for a number of reasons. For many students, it increases the educational opportunities they otherwise may not have when specific classes are not offered at their educational institution. Further, it reduces conflicts in students’ schedules (Picciano, Seaman, Shea & Swan, 2012) as it provides flexibility for learners to participate from any location and at any time (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000). Another reason why learners might consider online learning as a positive option is that contemporary web conferencing applications such as Wimba Classroom, Elluminate Live! and Blackboard Collaborate Web Conferencing can be used in supporting increased student participation in class activities. These applications feature multimodal tools that allow many participants to take part in activities at the same time through synchronous multimodalities. Sociocultural theory purports that language learning is socially mediated and language is both the object of learning and the tool that assists in language development (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). From this perspective, students’ participation in collaborative dialogues with their peers and the instructor becomes essential for language learning. While traditional classroom interaction affords one student talking at a time, web conferencing applications allow for simultaneous contributions from multiple students as they can engage in instructional conversations with their teacher and classmates utilizing both audio- and text-based communication channels.

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In this qualitative study, we analysed 25 archived synchronous sessions from 5 different foreign language instructors. Analyses of these sessions were aligned with interview and questionnaire data to understand how and why instructors engage multiple students in instructional conversations through multimodalities. The instructional conversations examine and instructor commentaries about them provide illustration of how teachers guide learners to simultaneously participate in construction, reconstruction and transformation of situated meanings by communicating in multimodalities. Sociocultural approaches see learning as socially mediated and occurring within the zone of proximal development defined as ‘the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers’ (Vygotsky, 1987, italics in original). Learning is a process through which learners, with assistance of an expert, come to understand how to solve the problem or how to perform. According to Tharp and Gallimore (1991), teaching also ‘occurs when performance is achieved with assistance’ (p. 3, italics in original). Thus, from a sociocultural perspective, learning and teaching are dialogical in nature and are rooted in the interaction between a learner and an expert. Not all types of interaction, however, may result in learner development; only that type which assists new skills are needed for the individual performance on similar tasks (Ellis, 2003). Teacher–learner interaction that leads learners to building new skills is known as scaffolding or instructional conversations defined as ‘the questioning and sharing of ideas and knowledge that happen in conversation’ (Tharp and Gallimore, 1991, p. 5). When scaffolding occurs, the expert does not provide answers to a learner. Instead, they invite them into a collaborative dialog through which the learner is not only able to accomplish the task, but also gains new skills that can be applied to a variety of similar tasks. Due to its emphasis on learning with others in the course of achieving a certain instructional goal, task-based approaches are compatible with sociocultural perspectives on teaching and learning. The task as an instructional activity is goal-oriented and ‘requires learners to process language pragmatically in order to achieve an outcome that can be evaluated in terms of whether the correct or appropriate propositional content has been conveyed’ (Ellis, 2003, p. 16). Meaning-oriented, language learning tasks may be designed to coerce learners to use specific forms in situations resembling authentic communicative situations and ‘can engage productive or receptive, and oral or written skills, and also various cognitive processes’ (p. 16). Since tasks force learners to produce

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language, and thereby make decisions about language use, participation in communicative tasks provides learners with an opportunity for self-regulation as it ‘requires the learner to mobilize and orchestrate knowledge and abilities in a direct way which will become a catalyst for learning’ (Foley, 1991, p. 69). While tasks, according to Foley (1991), provide learners with opportunities to apply their knowledge to achieve performance, the same task can be accomplished ‘through different actions and with different forms of mediation’ (Lantolf, 2000, p. 9). Because participants have different motives for accomplishing the same task, they can perform different actions for its achievement, and their actions ‘can result in very different kinds of activity’ (Ellis, 2003, p. 185). This is shown in the well-known example from the cross-cultural study by Wertsch, Minick and Arns (1984, as cited in Lantolf, 2000) who compared the means of mediation provided by Brazilian urban school teachers and rural mothers to the children when performing the same task of copying a barnyard scene from the model. Although the two groups achieved the same goal of copying the barnyard scene, the task resulted in different types of activities because participants had different motives. Since the rural mothers were motivated by the economic considerations of error-free performance, they directed the children’s performance to avoid errors. Although the rural children made fewer errors, they ‘failed to learn much about how to orient themselves toward and copy models’ (Lantolf, 2000, p. 10). The urban teachers, on the other hand, were motivated by educational considerations of teaching children to think independently. They gave the children strategic help and guided them through the process by scaffolding ‘which allowed the child to figure out for him- or herself what to do at each point along the way’ (Lantolf, 2000, p. 10). This illustration suggests that in terms of educational considerations, scaffolding is the type of activity that facilitates learning in the process of achieving the completion of a specific task. While uses of synchronous multimedia for language teaching are on the rise, there has been little research on how these uses support student engagement in instructional activities. Most studies focus on technical advantages and disadvantages (Hampel, 2003; Wang, 2004), evaluation of technology in practice and instructors’ and learners’ experiences (Hampel & Hauck, 2004), task design (Hampel, 2010; Kötter, 2001; Rosell-Aguilar, 2005; Wang, 2007) and the use of audio-channel or audio-channel supported with video for language instruction (Ko, 2012). This study seeks to explore (1) how online instructors use multiple modalities to engage students in instructional conversation and (2) what factors influence these uses.

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Study Context Completely online foreign language courses that combine synchronous and asynchronous learning  – offered by a US-based, not-for-profit educational organization  – were the focus of the inquiry. Online real-time live sessions were conducted using multimodal web conferencing platforms such as Wimba Classroom and, Elluminate Live!, platforms with video- and audio-conferencing tools, text-chat and an interactive whiteboard. Live sessions were archived by each of the five participating instructors using an integrated recording function. While Elluminate Live! records all features from synchronous live sessions including the activity on participation panels, for example, raising hands, polling, status change, displaying emotions and private chat messages, Wimba Classroom does not save students’ messages sent to private chat.

Methodology To examine how online instructors use multiple modalities to engage students in instructional conversations, we watched five randomly chosen archived live sessions from five foreign language courses, twenty-five sessions in total. The five courses taught by five different instructors include second-year high-school Arabic, third-year high-school German, second-semester college Japanese and two first-year high-school Russian courses. In each of the five classes, the participants used multiple modalities for greeting, saying good-bye, answering routine questions requiring formulaic type responses, reporting technical problems, making off-task comments and asking instructors questions not directly related to the task. For the purpose of this study, we analysed only task-based activities which required students’ performance. Participants’ interactions were transcribed using transcription conventions adapted from Jefferson (1984; for transcription conventions see Appendix 5.1). To handle transcriptions of instructors’ interactional practices during the task-based activities to account for how students and the instructor collaborated on achieving task performance, we took a Conversation Analysis approach. Conversation was thus viewed as a collaboratively constructed product (Schegloff, 1995). Conversational outcomes depend on how participants interpret each others’ contributions to the talk and how with each turn they achieve constructed meaning collaboratively. During interaction, participants

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attend to visual input such as body language and eye gaze. In online environments, these types of input are not available when the video modality is not utilized; however, there are additional sources of input that can provide the learner with information such as text-chat and the interactive whiteboard. To help explain how instructors and students make meaning of their actions to achieve performance in such environments, the slide on the whiteboard at the time of the instructional conversation and text-chat messages were examined. Actions such as pointing, circling, drawing and typing/writing on the whiteboard were also noted. While the sequential analysis of instructional conversations can explain how performance is achieved, it is not apparent through this analysis alone why some of the instructors utilize affordances involving multiple modalities. To help address this question, we gave each instructor a preliminary questionnaire to collect information about their teaching experience, training to teach online and their uses of the synchronous multimodalities to develop students’ communicative skills. We then asked each instructor to view specific recordings of class activities and prompted them to discuss the lesson goals, processes and their choices of modalities during the live session.

Participants Five instructors participated in the study. Ghada, Daniel and Julia teach Arabic, German and Japanese respectively. Olga and Anna both teach Russian. The instructors’ teaching experience varied. Ghada and Anna have taught online the longest at five to ten years. Anna has taught for over ten years in a face-toface environment but less than five online. Daniel and Olga taught languages in face-to-face classrooms for less than five years and online for less than a year. All instructors received training when hired. Ghada and Olga took courses on online pedagogy. Only Ghada was trained specifically in how to use multimodalities when engaging students.

Data analysis and discussion In this section, we discuss our analyses of the focal class sessions and corresponding commentary by the instructors. It is notable that, as we worked with each teacher, we began to see that the instructors’ theoretical perspective on teaching and learning languages framed the types of observable tasks that took place in the sessions.

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Performance as an imitation We observed that not all of the instructors used multimodalities to support student engagement; not all engage students in conversation to assist them in achieving performance. Rather, instructors’ distinct perspectives on student performance resulted in different practices for providing assistance. Indeed, some instructors do not treat performance as the independent solving of linguistic problems, nor as a collaborative effort to achieve successful performance. For Olga, for example, performance seems to equate with students’ accurate imitation of a linguistic structure. Her online teaching practices are geared to providing all possible forms of support for accurate oral pronunciation. She pronounces the utterance several times for the students and provides romanization of the target utterances next to the Russian vocabulary on the slide. The slide design for the instructional task (Figure 5.1) requires students to ask about the locations of the animals in the pictures and respond to these same questions. This design assumes students are not expected to make decisions about the use of language as both the questions and the answers to these questions are visible on the slide. The questions are arranged in a column on the right demonstrating a pattern of combining a question word Где ‘Where’ and a noun

Figure 5.1  Slide design of the speaking task from Olga’s class

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following the question word. The answers are also arranged in a column with the Prepositional Case endings highlighted and demonstrating another pattern. While the questions and the answers are in Russian, the answers are followed by the English translation and romanization. In the English translation, the words on the are also highlighted. Olga starts this activity by telling students that if they want to ask about the tiger, the question would be Где тигр? ‘Where is the tiger?’ In addition, she adds the translation of the question, for example, ‘Does anyone want to ask the question? Where is the tiger?’ For Olga and the students who participate in the task, repetition of the target sentence means performance. This is also evident for Nick who does not seem to be paying attention. He asks, ‘What was that? What do you want me to say?’ Olga repeats the question, provides its translation, ‘Где тигр? Where is the tiger?’, and also points to the question on the slide. Nick imitates the question and the instructor evaluates his answer as correct. The instructor’s calling on volunteers to answer a known-answer question also suggests that for Olga, student performance is not independent construction of the target structure. While Olga’s translation of the question allows students to find the answer on the slide by matching the English versions of the question with the answer and then to read either the Russian version or its romanization, Olga asks students if anyone remembers how to say ‘on the chair’ in Russian. Although she uses the verb ‘remember’ thus asking students to make an effort to think about the answer, she provides the first part of the response на::: ‘on’ and waits for someone to complete the utterance. Simultaneously, she points to the answer on the slide. Since all of the information about the meaning and the form of the response is on the slide, her query about whether students remember how to say ‘on the chair’ is more likely to refer to pronunciation. Despite the fact that Olga includes romanization of the answers on the slide, students need to apply their knowledge of the Russian sound system to correctly read the romanization and when Peter correctly pronounces the response, Olga evaluates it as correct. Olga goes on to assess whether each student is pronouncing the target correctly by listening to each student individually using the audio function.

Performance as a final product While Ghada engages students in independent solving of linguistic problems, performance means a final product rather than part of learner development that can be supported via the instructor’s assistance. In this regard, teaching is the transmission of the instructor’s knowledge that culminates in students’ products. This can be observed through such practices as explicit correction and

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a detailed explanation of students’ errors. Although Ghada does engage students in independent performance, she corrects errors without providing them with an opportunity for self-correction under her guidance. To engage her students in language production, Ghada designed a slide (Figure  5.2) in such a way that students can write sentences on it using the whiteboard pen tool. The goal of this task is to use Arabic plural nouns and adjectives in sentences such as ‘They are Egyptian teachers.’ The instructor keeps students focused on the task by placing the Arabic personal plural pronouns that students are supposed to use at the top of the slide. Each student is assigned to write two sentences. Since the whiteboard is a shared tool annotations are instantly visible to all participants as soon as they write them and enables the teacher to view the output as soon as it appears on the screen. When the students complete their sentences, she provides feedback using audio along with different coloured annotations. Ghada provides feedback to Caitlin on her sentence by explicitly stating what is wrong, ‘You don’t need ‫ و‬/ and here.’ and crosses it out. Then, she indicates that it is plural, writes ‘are’ above the sentence, and adds the plural ending to a noun and an adjective. Although the instructor explains the errors thus transmitting her knowledge to Caitlin, she does not encourage Caitlin to self-correct the errors by providing strategic assistance. In this writing task, students and the instructor work in two modalities, the whiteboard and audio. The use of the whiteboard for the writing task works well as all students can participate at the same time and each can receive instructor feedback. Instructor feedback alone, however, does not guarantee that students

Figure 5.2  Slide of Ghada’s writing task

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understand their errors as the instructor does not cue them to make changes themselves. Although the instructor does not engage students in assisted performance, her explanation of the students’ errors via audio may be useful for other students still working on their sentences.

Performance as a collaborative effort Practices observed in Daniel’s, Julia’s and Anna’s classes are similar to one another in that the instructors treat individual problem solving and teaching and learning as a collaborative effort between the teachers and students to achieve successful performance. If students experience difficulty, these instructors do not provide the correct answers but instead provide scaffolding that pushes students to perform on their own. Only after students produce the desired output do these instructors provide a brief follow-up. Examples 3 and 4 from Daniel’s and Julia’s classes demonstrate how these practices are implemented in listening and reading tasks.

Listening comprehension task Daniel often uses pictures that he has taken when travelling as a source of authentic cultural information while developing student listening comprehension skills. The slide (Figure 5.3) for the listening is a picture of a door to a corridor in a building in Germany. Use of the picture provides anchored visual clues to assist students in understanding what the instructor says in German. Example 1 shows how during the listening task, the instructor and students collaborate on the meaning construction of the German word Studentenheim ‘dorm’, abbreviation UG and the meaning of negative one depicted on the door. Daniel facilitates students’ listening comprehension by providing them with written input along with the focal aural talk about German numbering systems. For example, when asking students about the meaning of the word Studentenheim ‘dorm’, he simultaneously types it in the text-chat area. He also provides students with visual and aural hints as he waits for students’ responses. When two students, Jack and Rick, provide the meaning of the words in chat, Daniel confirms that their responses are correct, and continues his narrative about German logic. When Daniel asks a question, ‘Und in welchem Stockwerk lebte er?’, he does not scaffold its meaning, but translates it and asks what the depicted floor is called. This time he does not type hints in chat. After the 7-second pause where students do not respond to his question, he further scaffolds their response by

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Figure 5.3  Slide design of the listening comprehension task from Daniel’s class

providing more input in the chat, ‘UG = Untergeschoss’ which helps Kate to understand and respond.

Reading comprehension task Similar to Daniel, Julia also collaborates with students while they are working on the task and further follows up on the students’ performance after it is achieved with her assistance. Julia presents the reading text on the slide (Figure 5.4). The instructor reads sentence by sentence orally and asks the students to send their translated sentences using a different modality, private text-chat. She uses the private text-chat so student individual performance would not be influenced when seeing their peers’ answers. As soon as a student’s response is posted, Julia provides her feedback via chat and audio. If needed, she scaffolds individual student answers. Students, messages sent to the private text-chat were not recorded because the Wimba Classroom tool records only teachers’ private messages. However, their responses are inferred from the instructor’s comments. While some of the students are still working on sentence 8, Julia circles sentence 9 and reads it in Japanese (lines 2–5). It seems that students have difficulty with the word おき

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Figure 5.4  Slide design of the reading comprehension task from Julia’s class

ました ‘woke up’ as there is a 4-second pause (line 4). Julia then calls on Jenny to ask what it means. She tells her to think about the context and provides her with hints (lines 7, 8, 11, 13, 16, 17). While collaborating with Jenny via the audio-channel, Julia also provides feedback to Nicole’s contributions in chat (line 15), and then, she again addresses Jenny using audio (line 19) to check if Jenny was able to find the meaning of the word. Jenny, finally, sends her correct response as Julia responds in chat, ‘Yes, Jenny’ (line 21). Only after Jenny correctly translates the sentence, does Julia explain the strategy of how to find the word in the dictionary, which, apparently, Jenny has already used (lines 21, 22). (3) 1 T OK, I am still waiting for most of you to do number 8 2 [((circles 9, underlines words as reads them)) 3 [きゅうばん、おかあさんも　おそく　おきました。/ 4 number 9, Mother also woke up late. 5 (4) 6 Jenny-san, さん、おきました。/‘woke up’. 7 What might you do late on Sunday? Think about 8 context. おかあさんも　おそく　おきました。/ Mother 9 also woke up late. 10 (3) 11 What might you do until late on a Sunday or Saturday? 12 (6) 13 Have we had church, any discussion on church in this textbook? 14 (3)

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

yes Nicole then it’s probably not church, if you did not have to go to church, what would you do on a Sunday morning? (3) You can’t find おきます?/wake up Yes Jenny Because you need to use the short form to look at everything at the back

While the listening and reading tasks are similar in that they are designed to engage multiple students in the instructional dialogue, these tasks differ in that Julia uses private chat for students’ responses whereas Daniel uses the public text-chat area. When using private chat, students cannot see each other answers and the instructor can evaluate and scaffold each student’s isolated individual performances. Daniel’s listening task is not intended for checking students’ knowledge, but for co-construction of new knowledge. Therefore, students’ viewing each others’ responses assists them in co-construction of new meaning.

Speaking task Anna also engages multiple students in the production of the target language structures and assists their performance like Daniel and Julia. However, one practice was observed only in Anna’s class. This practice is engaging students in peer–peer instructional conversations while she is interacting with other students via audio. In the following task, students are to perform dialogues in which they inquire where different people live. The slide (Figure 5.5) displays the model of the dialogue and pictures of France and Japan. Since students need to use the nouns denoting countries in the Prepositional Case, the prepositional case ending is underlined in the model. Above each of the pictures, there is a name of a person and a country in Russian which students are asked to include in their dialogues. Anna does not translate the words above the pictures requiring students to solve this problem using prior knowledge. While Anna is talking to Jack (Example 5), who has volunteered to participate in an earlier dialogue, Harry raises his hand (see lines 1, 2, 6, 11, 12). At the same time, Terry, Sam and Nick negotiate the meaning of the words denoting the countries in the chat. Terry appeared to not read the words Франция ‘France’ and Япония ‘Japan’ above the pictures, but relied on the pictures, as he incorrectly guesses ‘PARIS’ and ‘CHINA’ as seen in the chat (lines 3, 5). Sam

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Figure 5.5  Slide design of the speaking task from Anna’s class

types the correct meaning of the word Франция ‘France’ (line 8), but incorrectly guesses the meaning of Япония ‘Japan’ and refers to it as Asia (line 13). Nick corrects Sam by typing, ‘that’s Japan, not China’. By collaboratively constructing the meanings of the Russian words denoting countries, students prepare for participation in the task. (5) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 15

T: We have a couple of more minutes, so we can do one more slide, so who is now? Now, I remember Jack [Brown Terry: [PARIS!!!! T: um [wanted to ask a question Terry: [CHINA!!!! T: and who will help him? (3) Sam: france and (2) Terry: EVAN!!!!! T: YEAH! Harry! […] ok, Jack and Harry … Sam: asia Nick: that’s Japan, not China

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Students initiate instructional conversation before using the geographical names because they need to be able to read and understand them. Therefore, Terry seems to seek assistance from others and to invite others to participate in meaning negotiation by offering his guesses. While only two students can participate in a dialogue, the students waiting for their turn to participate engaged in planning their responses for the next dialogue.

Discussion: Instructors’ uses of multimodalities for student engagement Although the scope of our study included a small sample, we found that these online teachers’ theoretical perspectives on how students learn language seem to be a major factor in whether and how they employ multimodalities to engage students. As the analysis of the teacher–student interaction shows, Daniel, Julia, Anna and Ghada, who treat performance as student independent production, use the audio-channel jointly with one of the text-based channels, text-chat or the ability to write text on the whiteboard. Since text-based channels allow all students to participate at the same time, using them provides all students with opportunities to perform. Instructors can simultaneously provide feedback or assist multiple students with their performance using the audio or text-chat. Although the four instructors provide feedback to students’ responses, not all types of feedback provide instructors with evidence of students’ learning. For example, despite the fact that Ghada engages all students through the whiteboard, she does not scaffold their performance. Therefore, there is no indication that students are able to incorporate her feedback as evidence of their learning. Daniel, Julia and Anna, on the other hand, scaffold students’ performance. In doing so, they are able to see whether students need more assistance as students’ assisted performance provides them with evidence of learning. Another reason for using multimodalities, discussed mainly during the instructor interviews, is to actualize students’ attention and gain evidence that students are engaged in class activities. In synchronous online learning, instructors do not see their students if they do not turn on the video and, consequently, cannot detect whether or not students are distracted. To check if students are paying attention, all of the instructors regularly call on students, ask them to respond to questions using the polling tools and monitor the text-chat area for off-task discussions. Daniel, Julia, Ghada and Anna also reported that they engage students through multimodalities to have observable evidence of

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their participation. The only instructor who does not do so is Olga. This may be explained by her approach to language learning in general. For Olga, students learn language through imitation and, therefore the audio-channel is the main channel to engage students. She may be able to guess that students are distracted since they do not always respond to her questions. However, she does not engage them all since it is impossible for everyone to participate through the audio-channel at the same time. We found that another factor in using multimodalities to engage students was to solve a problem they had in the virtual classroom, for example students’ using chat for personal conversations. For example, Anna explained during her interview that she began to engage students through multimodalities when students in her new classes engaged in disruptive text-chat. In this instance, she told us she had to redirect the students’ attention and alter classroom management to make students’ online experiences more rewarding. Daniel and Julia reported that if they notice that students stop responding during a task, they immediately change the activity in such a way that each student can provide responses. Although we predicted that teacher training might influence instructors’ uses of multimodalities, we found that training did not appear to play a decisive role in instructors’ choices concerning the use of several communication channels for instructional activities. While only Ghada was trained on how to use multimodalities, the other four instructors had not. Nevertheless, all of them but Olga employed multimodalities for teaching.

Concluding remarks This study on the use of multimodalities in synchronous online teaching helps us understand the relationship between instructors’ teaching practices and whether and how they make use of multimodalities in their teaching. Where employing multimodalities might make good sense from one perspective, it does not from another epistemological stance that sees learning and teaching as teacher-fronted and didactic. In order to provide more meaningful language learning experiences for students taking online language courses with a synchronous component, the teacher training and continual professional development for using these tools should include components on how language learning theories and effective classroom management correspond to using multimodalities with multiple students simultaneously. Specifically, the notion that languages are learned

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through a collaborative process and through guided student production suggest very strongly that the affordances that allow this to take place should be utilized in ways that encourage students to learn in this way.

Appendix 5.1. Transcription conventions T:

teacher

Terry:

student

T: Terry:

Jack EVAN

Voice-based utterances are typed in regular font Utterances from text-based chat are in italics

Helen:

[‫تافيطل‬/are pleasant

Utterances written on the whiteboard are in bold italics

T:

YEAH!!!

Utterance pronounced in a loud voice

(5)

The pause length

Фран[ция [кто

square brackets indicate the onset of overlapping utterances or actions

T: Jack: на:::::

semicolon indicates prolongation of a vowel sound

Франция ((wrong case))

double parentheses include transcriber’s comment

Где?/Where?

slash separates a foreign word and its translation and/or romanization

‘hom la te fat’

quotation marks include romanization of a foreign utterance

Appendix 5.2. Instructor background questionnaire 1. Please provide your first and last name. 2. How long have you been teaching languages? 0–6 months 7 months to 1 year 13 months to 5 years 6 to 10 years more than 10 years 3. How long have you been teaching languages online? 0–6 months 7 months to 1 year 13 months to 5 years ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

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6 to 10 years more than 10 years 4. Did you receive any training from blendedschools.net before teaching your online language classes? Yes No 5. Have you taken any courses on online pedagogy? Yes No 6. List any advantages (if any) to teaching communicative skills in synchronous web conferencing tools (e.g. Wimba Classroom, Elluminate Live! and Blackboard Collaborate)? 7. List types of activities that you believe facilitate students’ development of communicative skills in synchronous online environment? 8. Based on your experience, how do students use the chat function in web conferencing tools during synchronous class sessions? 9. Does the students’ use of chat ever become disruptive? Yes No ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

References Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based language learning and teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foley, J. (1991). A psycholinguistic framework for task-based approaches to language teaching. Applied Linguistics, 12(1), 62–75. Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical Inquiry in a text-based environment: computer conferencing in higher education. Internet and Higher Education, 2(2–3), 87–105. Hampel, R. (2003). Theoretical perspectives and new practices in audio-graphic conferencing for language learning. ReCALL, 15(1), 21–36. — (2010). Task design for a virtual learning environment in a distance language course. In M. Thomas & H. Reinders (Eds), Task-based language learning and teaching with technology (pp. 131–53). London, New York: Continuum. Hampel, R., & Hauck, M. (2004). Towards and effective use of audio conferencing in distance language courses. Language Learning & Technology, 8(1), 66–82. Jefferson, G. (1984). Transcript notation. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds), Structures of social action: studies in conversation analysis (pp. ix–xvi). London: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.

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Ko, C. (2012). Can synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) help beginning-level foreign language learners speak? Computer Assisted Language Learning, 25(3), 217–36. Kötter, M. (2001). Developing distance learners’ interactive competence: can synchronous audio do the trick? International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, 7(4), 327–53. Lantolf, J. (2000). Second language learning as a mediated process. Language Teaching, 33, 79–96. Lantolf, J., & Thorne, S. L. (2006). Sociocultural theory and genesis of second language development. New York: Oxford University Press. Picciano, A., Seaman, J., Shea, P., & Swan, K. (2012). Examining the extent and nature of online learning in American K-12 education: the research initiatives of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Internet and Higher Education, 15, 127–35. Rosell-Aguilar, F. (2005). Task design for audiographic conferencing: promoting beginner oral interaction in distance language learning. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 18(5), 417–42. Schegloff, E. (1995). Discourse as interactional achievement III: the omnirelevance of action. Research on Language Social Interaction, 28(3), 185–211. Tharp, R., & Gallimore, R. (1991). The instructional conversation: teaching and learning in social activity. National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning. Vygotsky, L. (1987). The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (Vol. 1). New York: Plenum Press. Wang, Y. (2004). Supporting synchronous distance language learning with desktop videoconferencing. Language Learning & Technology, 8(3), 90–121.

6

The Educational Value of Student Talk in Online Discussions Sedef Uzuner Smith and Ruchi Mehta

Introduction Since Socrates and Plato, dialogue has been assigned a fundamental position in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Educational theorists of all times have consistently recognized the potential of dialogue to mediate learning. A particular approach that highlights the mediating role dialogue plays in learning is sociocultural theory. One of the assumptions guiding this theory is that learning is an interactive process that relies on social interaction. Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of internalization, which emerged from sociocultural theory, helps to explain this process. Internalization holds that learning occurs on two planes. First, it appears on a social plane (between people), then it appears on an internal plane (within an individual). The quote below by Wertsch (2007, p. 187) illustrates this point: Higher mental functioning appears first on the ‘intermental’ and then on the ‘intramental’ plane. . . . this means that the first stages of acquaintance typically involve social interaction and negotiation between experts and novices or among novices. It is precisely by means of participating in this social interaction that interpretations are first proposed and worked out and, therefore, become available to be taken over by individuals.

As part of this sociocultural perspective, Wenger (1998) identified learning as negotiation of meaning, referring to ‘continuous interaction’ and ‘give-and-take’ through which individuals ‘extend, redirect, dismiss, reinterpret, modify or

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conform to’ meanings (pp. 52–3). These perspectives together provide good theoretical reasons for viewing learning as a social phenomenon. The idea that meaning making does not solely take place in the minds of individuals, but instead in the interactions with their social partners is supported by much research that investigated classroom talk and student learning (Applebee, Langer, Nystrand & Gamoran, 2003; Brown & Hirst, 2007; Jennings & Mills, 2009; Mercer, 1994; Mercer & Wegeriff, 1999; Wegeriff, Mercer & Dawes, 1999). Among these studies, Mercer’s (1994) work is particularly significant in that it relates the discussion of classroom interaction as the medium of learning to a consideration of the quality of that interaction. In this work, Mercer distinguished between three types of talk: cumulative, disputational and exploratory talk, the latter being the quality talk associated with the best learning outcomes. Mercer and Wegeriff (1999, p. 97) defined exploratory talk as follows: Exploratory talk is that in which partners engage critically but constructively with each other’s ideas. Statements and suggestions are sought and offered for joint consideration. These may be challenged and counter-challenged, but challenges are justified and alternative hypotheses are offered. In exploratory talk, knowledge is made accountable and reasoning is visible in the talk [italics in original].

The general consensus of the studies conducted by Mercer and others (Rojas-Drummond & Zapata, 2004; Webb & Treagust, 2006) is that learners’ engagement in exploratory talk is crucial because it is in such talk that they acquire or produce knowledge and create new meanings that transform their understanding. It is important to note here that Mercer’s conceptualization of exploratory work originated from research with young children, but viewing it as primarily related to children’s learning would be an error. In fact, Mercer’s ideas have been taken up and validated in studies conducted with post-secondary students (e.g. Atwood, Turnbull & Carpendale, 2010; Fisher, 2011). Findings of these studies also suggest that higher education students’ use of talk in exploratory ways makes an important contribution to their thinking and learning. There is a growing amount of research and scholarly work directly linking sociocultural theory, especially its view of the social nature of learning, to online learning. Much of this research turned attention to the asynchronous discussions generated in online learning environments to identify the social learning processes that are unique to these environments. Such research provided evidence to suggest discussion boards in online courses as venues for collaboratively

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constructed meaningful learning (Agee & Uzuner Smith, 2011; Bassett, 2011; Nicol, Minty & Sinclair, 2003; Tsai et al., 2008). However, drawing on Mercer’s notion of exploratory work, Uzuner (2007) cautioned that not all interactions produced in online discussions can lead to collaborative constructivist learning. She distinguished between two types of online talk: educationally valuable talk (EVT) – talk that is constructive, critical and substantiated; and educationally less valuable talk (ELVT) – talk that lacks substantiated reasoning and reflection. Uzuner further suggested that meaningful learning in online courses happens through interactions that are grounded in EVT. This idea provided the impetus for this study. We believe that the focus of contemporary research exploring the interactive processes of learning in online courses should be on the production (or lack thereof) of EVT. Therefore, taking a fully online course as our context, we asked the following questions: 1. Was there evidence of EVT as the students discussed the course material among themselves in online discussions? 2. How often did the students engage in EVT in their discussions? 3. Did the students relate their perceived learning in the course to the quality of talk that took place in the online discussions?

Methodology Context A fully online, master’s level course offered by a large university in the northeastern United States provided the context for this study. The course consisted of seven modules/units that dealt with issues related to language, literacy and technology. Each module lasted two weeks and included individual, small and large group activities, readings/discussions and presentations. The study examines the weeklong whole-class discussions generated in three modules: Module II, Module III and Module IV. We focused on these three because they were the only modules where whole-class discussions constituted the main learning activity.

Participants Nineteen students were enrolled in the course (seventeen masters, two Ph.D. students). Only two students had no prior experiences with online learning.

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Researchers The first author was the teaching assistant for the course, assisting the instructor in facilitating discussions and grading. To reduce potential bias, the second author who was not involved in teaching the course in any way joined the study during its design. As a non-participant, she was potentially less biased in the analysis process.

Course structure The instructor for the course was committed to developing an interactive environment that supports learning. So, she made a concerted effort to encourage meaningful contributions to class discussions. For example, during the first week, she asked students to construct norms, referred to as discussion norms. The norms the students came up with were presented to them in all modules as a reminder of class expectations. In addition, for each posting, the instructor asked the students to conduct a self-evaluation using Grice’s (1975) maxims. The following information was provided to the students in the syllabus: ll

ll

ll

ll

Quantity: make your contribution as informative as is required, but not more, or less, than is required. Quality: do not say that which you believe to be false or for which you lack evidence. Relation: be relevant. Manner: avoid ambiguity and obscurity; be clear, brief and orderly.

The students were asked to rate their posts in terms of quantity, quality, relation and manner on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 meant ‘my posting reflects this maxim 100 per cent’, and 4 meant ‘I could do much better when it comes to this maxim.’ Finally, twice in the course (at the end of Modules III and IV), the instructor asked the students to conduct a retrospective analysis where they reflected on their learning, discussion participation, as well as the quality of the overall discussions.

Data sources and analysis Two sources of data were used in this study. The first data source included the printouts of the weeklong whole-class threaded discussions that took place in

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the 3 modules selected for analysis. The printouts consisted of 285 postings, excluding those made by the instructor, teaching assistant, as well as the 2 students who knew about the study. We analysed these data using quantitative content analysis, which includes the process of searching text for recurring trends to identify core consistencies and frequencies (Adler & Clark, 2011). This analysis allowed us to examine the presence of EVT in the discussion postings and to quantify our findings – processes that were useful for investigating the first two research questions of the study. We conducted the content analysis using Uzuner’s (2007) EVT and ELVT coding scheme (see Appendix 6.1), which was previously used in Bliss and Lawrence (2009). Our unit of analysis was sentences/paragraphs in a post that were representative of EVT or ELVT. We read each post carefully to code for all possible EVT/ELVT indicators in them. When a post’s text was representative of more than one indicator, we counted both instances as separate indicators. To ensure that we were applying codes consistently, we worked together to resolve any disagreements that arose during the coding process. Once all the posts were coded, frequency counts for each code were conducted to look at the total representation of codes. The second data source included the retrospective analyses students conducted at the end of Modules III and IV. As we read through this data set, we made ‘marginal remarks’ (Miles & Huberman, 1984) about students’ evaluations of their own learning and their perceptions of the talk quality in the discussions. These remarks then became the descriptive material that allowed us to answer our third research question.

Results Research question #1 Was there evidence of EVT as the students discussed the course material among themselves in online discussions? The whole-class discussions analysed from the three modules included multiple threads. Although most of these threads could be used as examples showing evidence of EVT, due to space limitation we focus only on one thread from Module II to answer our first research question. We present messages from the thread as they were posted, without changing the order in which they appeared, to provide a snapshot of an actual conversation. With this mode of

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presentation, we hope to preserve the data in the context of the whole. Each message is followed by our analysis that draws on the EVT framework (Uzuner, 2007). Before proceeding to the analysis, we provide some contextual information which we regard as important in framing the contents of Module II from which we selected the discussion thread to showcase our findings. Module II focused on the role of technology in literacy instruction. The learning objectives for this module included understanding various definitions of literacy and exploring ways in which teachers can use technology to help promote literacy instruction in today’s classrooms. The required readings were three book chapters and a journal article. The module relied on discussions with discussion participation being the only form of assessment in the module. In the first week of Module II, the students were placed in groups of five and each group was assigned an article or a book chapter from the list of required readings. Members in each group read and discussed the assigned reading, and before the end of the week, they created a product (e.g. a PowerPoint presentation, picture, summary chart, quotation list) that represented their collective understanding of the topics they had read and discussed. At the beginning of the second week, each group posted their products to the whole-class discussion area for other students to comment and raise questions. A total of 104 messages were posted to the whole-class discussion area in Module II. Most messages were in response to the group products, while others were in response to individuals’ messages, as shown below. (The names of the students are all pseudonyms.) The post below by Judy was one of the first messages that initiated a thread in which there were several responses showing evidence of EVT. Judy began her post by alluding to a quote she saw in one group’s final product (a summary chart with quotes from the assigned reading): I want to comment on this quote in particular: ‘Teachers must ensure that the technology they use supports and enhances their curriculum, instead of distracting from it, which could easily occur when teaching new skills.’ As I stated in an earlier thread in this module, I’ve familiarized myself with most of the technologies my school offers. And while I can’t say I’m ‘fluent’ compared to my younger colleagues, I’ve used most of these technologies, as appropriate, in the classroom, including a multi-media cart. However, I’d like to add that some of the most truly engaging classes I’ve facilitated and witnessed involved no technology at all; the classes (in my experience) where learning occurred most

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actively were the classes in which rich circle discussions took place. Teachers shouldn’t feel pressured to use technology simply because ‘it’s there.’ In fact, to do so under those conditions will surely distract from (rather than add to) the curriculum. Technology, along with all resources at a teacher’s disposal, is secondary to common sense. If a lesson is going well in and of itself, then what need is there for artificial enhancement? I can’t think of a more valuable learning experience than a meeting of minds in conversation.

Judy used this message as a springboard for critically examining the question of whether new technologies offer real improvements in student learning. Although at one point she sounded very much like an advocate of technology-supported instruction, she immediately negated this position with her concern that merely using the available technology does not automatically enhance student learning. She then made explicit connections to her personal experiences to offer discussion-based approaches as an alternative to technology-based approaches in classroom instruction. Her framing of the issue in light of her personal experiences is suggestive of critical reflection, which is characteristic of EVT. Modality in word choice (‘shouldn’t feel pressured’, ‘will surely distract’) and the if/then grammatical structure of the question that follows, which reflect Judy’s argumentative position, serve as discussion starters, inviting others to comment. All in all, Judy’s talk reflects several elements of EVT including the exploratory, invitational, argumentational, critical, reflective and implicative functions. We now turn to Jim’s posting which was introduced in response to Judy’s message. In this post, Jim elaborated on and validated Judy’s claims about teachers’ uncritical use of technology by making connections to his observations as a substitute teacher: I definitely agree with you on this point. While I am just a substitute right now, I have witnessed the forced use of technology in the school that I work at. I have noticed that the administrators seem to force the use of the technology that the school has available on the teachers, regardless of whether it is appropriate or not. The use of technology in the class should be fluid, not forced. I think this forced use of technology might be a justification for having the technology. I think that teachers and administrators feel that the technology that they have must be used in order to justify having it. I think there might be a feeling on the part of the teachers that if we don’t use the technologies that we currently have, we will be unable to procure new technologies at a later date. If they don’t use what they currently have, how will they be able to justify needed new technologies to the district?

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Jim’s message includes substantiated agreement to the ideas presented by Judy in the earlier message. He built on and added to Judy’s claims by locating the problem in the school (‘the forced use of technology in the school’). Note that his use of hedges/qualifiers such as ‘might’ invites disagreement. In addition, the question he posed in the end is thought-provoking, inviting discussion of contrasting views. Like Judy, in this post, Jim’s talk also has elements of EVT including the explanatory, invitational, reflective and implicative functions. In the next post, Kyle joined his peers in expressing his concern about the forced use of new technologies in classrooms. He took this topic one step further by revealing another issue (the issue of teacher training) to investigate: In Chapter 3, Principled Uses of Media and Technologies, the author describes the teacher as being an ‘orchestrator’ of mediated language learning activities. As an orchestrator, it is the teacher’s responsibility to be ‘the engineer of productive linguistic activity between and among her students.’ This involves ‘facilitating collaborative learning with media and technologies .  .  . to help mediate a particular focus and provide tools with which learners can get things done.’ And what is ‘done’ in this context is very different from what used to be ‘done’ in the pedagogical context of the blackboard and the text book: ‘In contrast to the past where textbook dialog prevailed, media and technologies allow us to base our models of language in use on oral language and the target culture in addition to texts representing these.’ In short, the result of the application (or ‘orchestration’) of the technology is a qualitatively different experience for the learners that would occur in a non-electronic learning environment. In order for this to occur the teacher has to learn how to become a master orchestrator who can construct learning experiences which are multi-modal. MANDATING THAT ELECTRONIC MEDIA BE USED IN CLASSROOMS WITHOUT SUBSTANTIAL IN-DEPTH TRAINING FOR TEACHERS IS SHEER FOLLY, AND A WASTE OF MONEY. It is like throwing books in front of people who do not know how to read. It would be a defensible assertion to say that the level of skill and training needed to become an effective reading teacher is little different from the level of skill and training needed to become a teacher who is able to ‘orchestrate’ the complexities of an electronic learning environment. Just giving teachers technology greatly underestimates the challenge at hand.

Kyle began his post by referring to the course text as an authoritative tool to show the changing nature of teachers’ roles and responsibilities in today’s classrooms as a result of the new pedagogical context of technology-mediated learning.

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This textual integration wherein connections are made between a text that was read and a situation/issue at hand is a characteristic of higher-order thinking. After doing a great deal of textual integration, Kyle makes a claim. His use of capital letters implies importance of his argument and his depth of feeling as he framed the problem. He then drew on an analogy to reiterate his argument and ended on a note of caution and concern. All these features that exist in Kyle’s post are consistent with EVT as they include language use for explanatory, informative, implicative, exploratory and argumentational purposes. In the last post on this topic, Ellen responded in an affirmative modality to Kyle. She wrote: I like your comments, Kyle. I would like to add that there are many older teachers who are not educated in the new technology but are, nevertheless, effective teachers. Many are also resistant to change from any methodology that they feel successfully works for them and their students. I think that what has to be kept in mind is the GOAL of education, not how much technology can be implemented in the classroom, nor how innovative each teacher can be with the technology available to them. Not everyone is talented in the use of technology, and because of this limitation perhaps not all teachers should be expected to incorporate it extensively into their instruction. They may not be effective in its use, whereas they would be effective through more traditional means. For myself (at the age of 54), I have utilized the technology that has been applicable to my university courses; but not having been previously involved in education, I have not had the pressing need to engage in a variety of classroom technology. As my plans are to educate adult ESL learners, I do realize, however, that I should be prepared for the possibility of working with both technologically deprived and technologically savvy individuals.

EVT indicators visible in Ellen’s talk include explanatory, interpretative and heuristic features. In her opening statement, Ellen was supportive of what Kyle had said, but also built on his ideas. This reflects the explanatory feature of her talk. Ellen then changed the discourse – instead of talking about teacher training (a topic brought up by Kyle), she wrote about ‘the goals of education’ for technology integration. After this, she began hypothesizing about possible reasons that could affect teachers’ readiness and enthusiasm for teaching with technology. These exemplify the interpretative, and to some degree argumentative, nature of her talk. And in the rest of her post, Ellen personalized the topic by raising issues that are important for her to keep in mind in her future teaching. This last feature illustrated the heuristic nature of Ellen’s post.

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As mentioned earlier, the messages analysed above are from a single discussion thread from Module II. We used this thread to illustrate the kinds of talk the students were generating in the whole-class discussions. Our analysis demonstrated that educationally valuable conversations characterized as substantiated, exploratory transactions were taking place among the course participants. As we compared the discussion transcripts from the three modules with each other, it appeared that the generation of EVT was the norm rather than exception in students’ online dialogue in the course. The frequency of EVT use in the discussions we analysed is shown in the section below.

Research question #2 How often did the students engage in EVT in their discussions? Modules II, III and IV included a total of 285 posts in the whole-class discussion area. The breakdown of the number of posts in each module was 104, 110 and 71 in Modules II, III and IV, respectively. Each post was coded for any presence of EVT. In Module II, 81.25 per cent of the coded instances of talk was found to be educationally valuable as opposed to 18.75 per cent that was found to be educationally less valuable (see Figure 6.1). The share of EVT in Module III increased to 85.4 per cent and, as a result, ELVT was down by more than 4 per cent, representing approximately 14 per cent of the total coded talk in that module. Module IV had 81 per cent occurrences of EVT and the remaining 19 per cent were found to be ELVT. Overall, a key finding was that instances

Module IV

EVT ELVT

Module III

Module II

0

20

40

60

Figure 6.1  EVT and ELVT shares in each module

80

100

120

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of EVT outweighed the instances of ELVT in all three modules, and they were consistently over 80 per cent. In all three modules, 334 instances of EVT were found. As mentioned earlier, one post may have been coded for multiple indicators from the coding scheme. Hence, the number of total indicators should not be confused with the total number of posts in the three modules. The indicators that were most frequently found in the total EVT count in the three modules included explanatory talk at 10.8 per cent and interpretative talk at approximately 15 per cent. Both invitational and interpretative talk were found to have equal shares (about 13.5%) (see Figure 6.2). The total number of instances coded as ELVT was 70 for the three modules. This was less than one-fourth as compared to the instances of EVT (N = 334). As Figure 6.3 shows, a bulk of the ELVT (40%) produced in the discussions was experiential in nature, referring only to personal experiences not followed IMP EXPL INF ANL INTP Percentage of EVT indicator

REF HE CRT ARG INVT EPL 0

5

10

15

20

25

Figure 6.2  Share of EVT indicators found in three modules MIS REP EXP JDA

Percentage of ELVT indicator

JA ASP AA AF 0

10

20

30

40

50

Figure 6.3  Share of ELVT indicators found in three modules

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by a reflection. Miscellaneous talk, such as non-content-related talk, was 15.7 per cent, and reproductional talk, talk that is repetitious and unelaborated, was 13 per cent of the total ELVT produced. 11.4 per cent of the ELVT included affective statements adding social presence to the discussions. Although such statements do not contribute to the meaning-making process, they are important in creating and supporting a community in online courses. Therefore, their presence in the analysed discussions was expected.

Research question #3 Did the students relate their perceived learning in the course to the quality of talk that took place in the online discussions? The data source that provided insight into this question was the retrospective analyses students conducted at the end of Modules III and IV. These analyses were not graded and they were confidential. Each consisted of five open-ended questions that allowed students to reflect on their learning and experiences in small-group and whole-class discussions. Among these questions, those that were most relevant to our third research question were: ll

ll

ll

What do you think about the discussions we had in this module? Were they productive? Did they have any teaching value for you? Why/Why not? Are you satisfied with the quality of your posts as well as those of your peers? Why/Why not? What did you learn?

The students’ responses to these questions were very positive. The following excerpts illustrate their responses to the first two questions: I am usually very careful about writing my posts, with regards to both the content and the manner, so I would have to say that I am quite satisfied with the quality of my posts. For the most part, I am quite happy about others’ posts as well. I think most postings have been relevant and well-thought. I am satisfied with my quality of the posts as well as my group members. Every time before posting, I read, think carefully and try to find something new to join the discussion. The quality of the posts has been very good. Our group members have been posting thoughtful questions and responses. The posts are not too long and generally stay on topic.

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In general, the posts in this course have been better than what I’ve seen in some of the other online courses. There is less of ‘fluff ’n stuff ’ or essentially vacuous replies posted for requirement’s sake only.

Although not asked, one student commented in her retrospective analysis that knowing the discussions norms for the dialogue and being reminded of it at all times provided an impetus for her to make substantive contributions to the discussions: Almost no discussion goes without several responses, most responses are substantive and well thought-out because there are guidelines that prevent us from just answering yes or no.

Several students also commented on how self-evaluating their own posts using Grice’s maxims gave them a framework they could use to know how to contribute to the discussions and to do so in ways that generate meaningful discussions: Self-evaluating our own posts was a very good idea, even though we stopped doing that, it still remained in our mind. The quality of the posts was very good. A major part of our discussion for this module involved sharing our thoughts and experiences, which can lead to long-winded, off-topic discussions. With self-evaluation everyone did a great job of making sure their responses were relevant and only long enough to make their point.

The excerpts above show that the students valued the online discussions highly, seeing them as having high quality. When asked about their learning developing through those discussions in the course, most students commented on how they took up aspects of each other’s ideas and thoughts and saw things in a different light as a result of the conversations they had with each other. In their view, the discussion postings which included a great deal of EVT provided them with opportunities for discovery, exploration and knowledge building. In their comments, the students almost always connected their perceived learning to the talk quality in the discussions. The excerpts below, which echo what most students have said, illustrate this: For the most part, I found the submissions and discussion flows in this class very beneficial. As a result, I am learning different ways to interpret technology’s effect in education, as well as tips for its integration.

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I thought the majority of the postings were well thought out and well connected with each module’s content. So I thought they were productive and I learned a lot from them. They helped me gain a deeper understanding of the articles’ content. The discussions are enlightening and I often walk away from my computer thinking about the ideas being introduced. My ideas need to be much better developed and clearer. Several of the other students in the class set the bar quite high.

These excerpts suggest that students’ perceptions of their learning were related to their perceptions of the quality of the online discussions. This has implications for a theory of online learning as social interaction that considers the quality of that interaction as a significant predictor of learning.

Conclusion Although our findings are confined to one study and need to be replicated with different types of online courses, they reiterate the importance of talk quality in online discussions as a precursor to meaningful learning. Our analysis of both the whole-class discussions and students’ own accounts of their perceived learning developing through those discussions provide support for Vygotsky’s conceptualization of learning as a social process. In addition, and more importantly, they provide support for an explicit focus on talk quality within the context of social learning. Despite a recognition of the social nature of learning in online courses, there have been surprisingly few studies focusing on the link between talk quality and meaningful learning in online course discussions. This study’s significance lies in its attempt to bring this link to the fore using the EVT framework. We conclude that as our understanding of online learning continues to expand, a Vygotskian framing of learning complemented with Mercer’s call for an explicit focus on talk quality provide a sound theoretical basis from which to launch future research.

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Appendix 6.1. Uzuner’s (2007) EVT/ELVT coding scheme EVT indicators

Acronym

Definition

Exploratory

EPL

Invitational

INVT

Argumentational

ARG

Critical

CRT

Heuristic

HE

Reflective

REF

Interpretative

INTP

Analytical

ANL

Informative

INF

Explanatory

EXPL

Implicative

IMP

Affective

AF

Recognition of some confusion/curiosity or perplexity as a result of a problem/issue arising out of an experience/course readings; posing a problem and enticing others to take a step deeper into it. Inviting others to think together, to ponder, to engage by asking questions, requiring information, opinion or approval. Expressing reasoning (with analogies, causal, inductive and/or deductive reasoning, etc.) to trigger purposeful discussions. Challenging or counter-challenging statements/ideas proposed by others OR playing devil’s advocate. Expressing discovery (similar to ‘A ha!’ moments or expressions like ‘I find it!’); directing others’ attention to a newly discovered idea. Examination of past events, practices (why/how they happened) or understandings in relation to formal content. Interpretation of formal content through opinions that are supported by relevant examples, facts or evidence. Interpretation of content through the analysis, synthesis and evaluation of others’ understanding. Providing information from literature and relating it to course content/topic of discussion. Chain of connected messages intended to explain/ make clear OR statements serving to elaborate on the ideas suggested in previous posts. Assertions that call for action OR statements whereby participants formulate a proposal/decision about how to achieve a certain end based on the insights they gained from the course readings/discussions. Short posts that ONLY contain a statement of personal feelings (likes & dislikes). Short posts that ONLY contain appraisal (praising & thanking someone). Questions or comments that add social presence to the discussion but do not contribute new information. Short posts that ONLY contain brief statements of agreement. Short posts that ONLY contain brief statements of disagreement without elaboration.

AA ASP Judgemental

JA JDA

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134 Appendix 6.1  Continued EVT indicators

Acronym

Definition

Experiential

EXP

Reproductional

REP

Miscellaneous

MIS

Posts that only contain personal experiences, narratives, descriptions that are not followed by reflection. Repeating/reproducing the ideas mentioned/ proposed in the previous posts without elaboration. Opinions that seem to be off topic OR statements regarding technical problems/course logistics.

References Adler, E., & Clark, R. (2011). An invitation to social research: how it’s done. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Agee, J., & Uzuner Smith, S. (2011). Online discussions in a doctoral research methods course: ‘Like a text by many authors’. Studies in Continuing Education, 33(3), 301–19. Applebee, A., Langer, J., Nystrand, M., & Gamoran, A. (2003). Discussion-based approaches to developing understanding: classroom instruction and student performance in middle and high school English. American Educational Research Journal, 40(3), 685–730. Atwood, S., Turnbull W., & Carpendale, J. (2010). The construction of knowledge in classroom talk. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 19, 358–402. Bassett, P. (2011). How do students view asynchronous online discussions as a learning experience? Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning & Learning Objects, 7, 69–79. Bliss, C., & Lawrence, B. (2009). Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? A comparison of small group and whole class discussion board activity in online courses. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 13(4), 25–39. Brown, R., & Hirst, E. (2007). Developing an understanding of the mediating role of talk in the elementary mathematics classroom. Journal of Classroom Interaction, 41(2), 18–28. Fisher, A. (2011). Creating an articulate classroom: examining pre-service teachers’ experiences of talk. Language and Education, 25(1), 33–47. Grice, H. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds), Studies in syntax and semantics III: speech acts (pp. 183–98). New York: Academic Press. Jennings, L., & Mills, H. (2009). Constructing a discourse of inquiry: findings from a five-year ethnography at one elementary school. Teachers College Record, 111(7), 1583–1618. Mercer, N. (1994). The quality of talk in children’s joint activity at the computer. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 10, 24–32.

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Mercer, N., & Wegeriff, R. (1999). Children’s talk and the development of reasoning in the classroom. British Educational Research Journal, 25(1), 95–111. Miles, M., & Huberman, A. (1984). Qualitative data analysis: a sourcebook of new methods. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Nicol, D., Minty, I., & Sinclair, C. (2003). The social dimensions of online learning. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 40(3), 270–80. Rojas-Drummond, S., & Zapata, M. (2004). Exploratory talk, argumentation and reasoning in Mexican primary school children. Language & Education, 18(6), 539–57. Tsai, I.-C., Kim, B., Liu, P.-J., Goggins, S., Kumalasari, C., & Laffey, J. (2008). Building a model explaining the social nature of online learning. Educational Technology & Society, 11(3), 198–215. Uzuner, S. (2007). Educationally valuable talk: a new concept for determining the quality of online conversations. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 3(4), 400–10. Vygotsky, L.(1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Webb, P., & Treagust, D. (2006). Using exploratory talk to enhance problem-solving and reasoning skills in grade – 7 science classrooms. Research in Science Education, 36(4), 381–401. Wegeriff, R., Mercer, N., & Dawes, L. (1999). From social interaction to individual reasoning: an empirical investigation of a possible socio-cultural model of cognitive development. Learning and Instruction, 9(6), 493–516. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wertsch, J. (2007). Mediation. In H. Daniels, M. Cole & J. V. Wertsch (Eds), The Cambridge companion to Vygotsky (pp. 178–91). New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Focusing on the Social: Research into the Distributed Knowledge of Novice Teachers in Online Exchange Melinda Dooly

Introduction In a presentation at a UNESCO conference a decade ago, Dirke Van Damme described globalization at that time as: (i) the driving force of technological innovation, more specifically in ICT; (ii) [bringing about] intensification and space-time compression of social communication and giving way to a global network society; and (iii) increasing the importance of knowledge and information in various levels of the organization of society. (2002, p. 1) Ten years after the UNESCO conference placed ICT at the forefront of social advances and transformation there have been even further technological, political, economic and cultural changes that continue to affect society. Given the central role of education in today’s knowledge society, teacher development becomes critical as educators are consequently obliged to rethink what and how they are teaching generally, and in terms of language and literacy in particular. Core to this review of teaching is careful consideration of exactly what comprises knowledge within a framework of continuous expanding interconnectivity of individuals and collectives across the world. Interconnectivity implies that knowledge is not located in any given place; it is constituted through networks of connections formed from multiple experiences of sharing, creating, participating and interacting with a knowing

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community (Downes, 2010). Of course, this definition is applicable to many types of configurations of knowing communities, from informal discussion groups about how to overcome levels in video games to twitter communities of geologists promoting higher critical awareness of environmental issues. Along these lines, the concept of Communities of Practice, or CoPs (Kahan, 2004; Wenger, 1998) has grown in popularity as both model and investigatory tool for online education. This notion encompasses the idea of expert and novice participants engaged in a common professional domain, such as teaching, wherein they share views and expertise while pursuing common goals of inquiry about issues that emerge from their practice. Concepts such as CoPs and professional learning communities (Stoll & Louis, 2007) have enriched the ‘theorisation of school-based learning’ and ‘the understanding of learning-toteach in school and classroom contexts’ (Wright, 2010, p. 282). However, as opportunities for geographically distanced interconnectivity between individuals interested in exploring a common subject grows exponentially, a revised understanding of community (virtual, transient, ebbing and flowing) is needed. This dovetails into a need for redefining what is understood as situated, contextualized learning and an expansion of our understanding of online socially constructed knowledge. Is the context local or global, physical or virtual? Does the notion of socially constructed knowledge include the incorporation of folksonomy that has ‘gone viral’? And perhaps more importantly, how can research and practice in teacher education understand and integrate these new concepts of knowledge and knowledge building? In circumstances of what one might call ‘deliberate’ learning experiences such as those in formal educational settings, it can be argued that interconnectivity can and should be helpful for student–teachers gain in developing conceptual thinking (Johnson, 2009). Teachers must be able to understand a situation by identifying patterns or connections and then integrate these factors into a conceptual framework that draws from professional training, direct experiences and inductive reasoning in order to come up with viable teaching strategies in varying circumstances. Recently researchers working in the area of teacher education have begun to refer to professional vision to describe teachers’ cyclical process of noticing situations and events and then applying knowledge-based reasoning (Seidel, Blomberg & Stürmer, 2010; Sherin, 2007; Sherin, Jacobs & Philipp, 2011; Sherin & Van Es, 2005). Lefstein and Snell (2011) use the term to describe the knowledge-based processes of directing attention and information processing and Minaříková and Janík (2012) propose that teacher professionalism integrates three key dimensions: professional knowledge

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(knowing and understanding theoretical principles), professional vision (ability to identify situations and events that are instrumental for successful pedagogical action) and professional action (pedagogical interventions based on the other two features). Of course, suggesting that there needs to be a paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1962/1996) in the processes of teacher development is neither new nor radical. As Johnson (2009) indicates, teacher education has experienced shifts in epistemologies continuously and over decades; one of the more recent shifts being increasing support for sociocultural foundations. Villegas-Reimers (2003) suggests that teacher development must be perceived as a long-term, collaborative process. Basing her premise on sociocultural perspectives, Villegas-Reimers argues that technology can play a major role in requiring student–teachers to engage in higher-order thinking, acquire deep knowledge of both content and process and make connections to the real world (see also Arnold & Ducate, 2006; Chapelle & Hegelheimer, 2004; Dooly & Sadler, 2013; Guichon, 2009; Hubbard, 2008; Meskill & Anthony, 2010, who pose similar arguments). The underlying paradigms of sociocultural models of teacher education can be traced back to a ‘constructivist view of how people learn to teach’ (Freeman & Johnson, 1998, p. 402) and this same epistemic stance is now quite prominent in teacher education approaches based on computer-mediated communication. Conceived and situated within such paradigms of teaching and learning, the teacher development program outlined in this study aimed to enact the notion of knowledge sharing that is so fundamental to today’s society, thus promoting greater teacher awareness of local–global relationships as well as the role technology can play in sustaining these. Through a mixed methods approach, this study examines the ways student–teachers display teacher conceptual thinking. Whether and how student–teachers progress from intuitive ideas towards more concrete thinking (e.g. from vague objectives of language teaching such as ‘getting them to use the target language’ to explicit display of complex language teaching strategies involving moment-by-moment understanding of pupil development, tool and artefact uses, and content within context) is examined in the context of online professional development collaborations.

The online international exchange program Online professional development conversations between two groups of student– teachers  – one group in Catalunya (Spain) and the other group in Illinois

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(USA) – are examined. Both groups are studying to become foreign language teachers. The online exchange is designed to involve student–teachers in various online collaborative activities throughout the academic year, culminating in co-developed products (e.g. teaching sequences, podcasts and complementary educational activities). Interactions took place via Skype, Moodle, Voicethread and Second Life (SL). Activities in the first year principally consisted of personal information exchange (text-chats about professional aims, general learning processes, etc.) and tandem-peer correction of in-class activities. Gradually the amount of online collaboration increased and after the second-year participants worked in small, online collaborative groups to help each other design and improve teaching sequences to be implemented during their teaching internships in schools. The amount of collaboration was further augmented as they include shared work on the design and creation of teaching materials that used technology (e.g. podcasts) and subsequent reflection and evaluation on both the process of creating the materials as well as the implementation of the activities that accompanied the materials. A key component to the exchange – and one which is too often treated as corollary to existing frameworks rather than an integral part of the approach – is the holistic embedding of technology into the development process. With this in mind, the latest version of the curriculum for both classes is 80 per cent transdisciplinary and carried out through collaborative online exchange facilitated through an institutional agreement between the two institutions.

Analytical approach There is considerable divergence in opinion as to how to measure the effectiveness of teacher development programs. Apart from the traditional divide between quantitative and qualitative research paradigms, the fact that teacher development encompasses infinite and intrinsically complex factors of context, content and human variables and is, first and foremost, a process implies that measuring the effectiveness of any program may best be approached by balancing observable data at both macro- and microlevels. Thus, a mixed methods approach is used to triangulate (Croker, 2009) two types of data: quantitative and qualitative. This also has the advantage of providing a manageable approach to a very large database. The qualitative data (online artefacts, transcripts of online conversations) constitute the main focus. These data are examined to provide a rich description

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of one student’s progress during a one-year period. It has been argued that triangulation cannot ensure complete validation of any results, given that each source must be understood on its own terms (Bazeley, 2004), however, it can also be argued that the use of diverse data types can complement each other and provide multiple perspectives, especially when considering complex human processes. First, the frequency of use of field-specific terms related to teacher education was taken from students’ internship final reports was determined. This provides a macroperspective of acquired teacher knowledge. Then, in order to provide a richer, detailed description, one student’s output and related artefacts was taken from the same tutorial course and examined for recurring patterns that might be contrasted with the internship group’s overall corpora. Combining these perspectives allows for a line of investigation that clearly considers learning as a ‘process that is directly observable, evolving on a local moment-by-moment basis’ so that not only the overall, general results are considered but also ‘how learners and their co-participants construct “learning” activities locally, and how they continuously demonstrate to each other that they are engaged in a “learning” activity’ (Hougaard, 2009, p. 3). Lastly, students’ final marks (averages and ratio of students grouped according to these averages) give a longitudinal glimpse of the efficiency of the program over a four-year time period.

Main themes discussed in students’ final reflections Using a Grounded Theory (GT) approach to manage a large amount of qualitative data in a systematic, yet flexible way, allows for the analysis to emerge from the data rather than having preconceived notions of what will be found (Charmaz, 2006). Moreover, the version of GT proposed by McCallin (2009) embraces the multiplicity of world realities and recognizes the subjectivity of generalizations, subsequently acknowledging the researcher’s purpose underlying the creation of themes, and thus ensuring meaningful descriptions that are pertinent to the research questions. In this data set, all of the student–teachers’ final reports from the tutorials during one year are culled for educational themes significant to language teacher strategies and understandings. The ten most frequently mentioned themes appear in Table 7.1. The third column indicates the number of times the theme was explicitly linked to a specific episode from the online collaboration (e.g. providing a chat transcript as evidence or explanations of learning).

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Table 7.1  Most frequently mentioned themes from student–teachers’ reports Theme

Using a communicative approach to teach an FL Student motivation Creating ‘authentic’ communicative opportunities for learners Classroom management Importance of planning and teaching objectives Working through integrated competences Use of ICT for language teaching and learning Lifelong learning Assessment Teaching grammar

Frequency Mentioned within context of online dialogue 47 44 42

35 28 36

38 29 27 23 19 14 9

17 25 9 18 2 11 3

The final reports required that the student–teachers reflect on their previously negotiated learning objectives and on the processes they had engaged to appropriate (or not) these objectives. These high-frequency themes will now be examined from a microperspective of one student–teacher’s specific experience during the academic year.

Tracing one student–teacher’s learning through artefacts Bogdan and Biklen (1992) describe qualitative data as ‘rough materials researchers collect from the world they are studying; they are the particulars that form the basis of analysis’ (p. 106). The ‘rough materials’ or artefacts chosen for this study stem from different phases of the 2010–11 tutorial sessions and activities. At the beginning of the course students were asked to complete a self-diagnosis of their own learning needs, based upon a ranking system that was adapted from the EPOSTL: European Portfolio of Student Teachers of Languages (Newby et al., 2007). Using their initial self-analysis, along with classroom discussion of vignettes and recordings from a three-week internship in a school at the beginning of the year, students wrote their own specific learning objectives and proposed an action research project on a topic that they were interested in delving into further. In addition, students had to design teaching sequences to be implemented in a second internship carried out in the middle of the course. Parallel to this, students were exploring theoretical issues related to

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the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). These different areas of face-to-face and/or individual activities and knowledge construction converged with the online exchange activities through critical discussion, peer feedback and learning activities carried out in virtual collaborative groups. One student, Andrea, was randomly selected to explore regular, recurring patterns of interaction and behaviour in these activities. To locate recurrent patterns, all the artefacts were systematically scanned and a code was assigned to subcategories (naming of variables) that emerged from a preliminary analysis. Analysis included locating recurrent episodes in more than one domain or artefact (minimum three occurrences) in the student’s learning process, which were then cross-referenced with the frequency patterns of the larger data set discussed above. The most recurrent themes that emerged in this particular student’s artefacts and which are also frequent in the general group’s themes are then examined in more detail. Specifically, these are (1) teaching through integrated competences, (2) importance of objectives in planning and assessment, (3) use of online collaborative exchange and (4) relevance of ICT for teacher development and for language teaching. Each of these themes and an example from the artefacts or online interactions in which they emerge are discussed in detail in the following sections. As previously mentioned, the students were asked to carry out self-reflection on their own needs as future teachers, based on an intensive (full-day) three-week period of internship at a school. Resources the students had for this reflection were video-recordings of brief interventions they had carried out in the school, guiding questions and a self-ranking document (Figure 7.1), based on EPOSTL. In one section on planning, Andrea1 ranks the following teaching competences as the top three she felt she needed to work on during the course: 1. Structure lesson plans and/or plan for periods of teaching in a coherent and varied sequence of content. 2. Identify curriculum requirements and set learning aims and objectives suited to the learners’ needs and interests which also challenge learners to reach their full potential. 3. Plan when and how to use the target language, including meta-language needed in the classroom. Andrea places the need to plan for learner presentations and learner interaction in the eighth position of importance. Later on, however, this particular competence takes on another dimension for her, as it emerges as a recurring topic for her and her peers through the online exchange.

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Figure 7.1  Extract from Andrea’s EPOSTL self-ranking

Figure 7.2  Andrea’s personal learning objectives shared with online peers

Following their self-ranking and revision of the video-recordings, the students then presented their proposed learning objectives to their peers (face-to-face and online) for small-group discussion (Figure 7.2). At this point, Andrea’s interventions are quite broad; she appears unable to diagnose in specific terms where her needs lie.

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It is not until further in the first term, when the students begin to actually work together online, that specific domains of planning and more specific details of organizing learning events begin to emerge in the conversations. In one of the first discussions of an early draft of Andrea’s teaching sequence (Extract 1), her online partner (Tony) remarks on the ‘sociocultural elements’ in her planning, emphasizing the need to focus on these features over ‘linguistic goals’ (turn 15:00:32). It is important to note, too, that it is Tony who signals the need for Andrea to state her goals and objectives for the unit (turn 14:57:31). In turn 15:06:01, he insists on more specific content for the mural that Andrea has designed for the teaching sequence and had sent to him before their online chat. Despite her previous diagnosis of needing to learn to get unwilling students to participate, Andrea’s planning does not include specific strategies for grouping beyond dividing students into groups for each season, (which in a class of 25– 30 students implies quite large groups), see turn 15:06:01. She does, however, pinpoint an opportunity for the students to reflect on their own learning by having them make and comment on the season mural (turn 15:06:39). Her partner then responds by suggesting a wider audience for the learners for their output by including the students’ parents. Extract 1: Online chat 26 October 2010 – Andrea, Tony [14:55:34] Andrea: ok [14:56:04] Andrea: So we can start [14:57:31] Tony: yes. Shall we talk about your draft first? What is your overall plan for the unit? Goals/objectives etc. [14:57:37] Tony: It looks great! [14:59:18] Andrea: Thank, it took me time to think about it. I started planning the unit for three weeks ago. [15:00:32] Tony: i really like the sociocultural elements to it. I think it is so important that you considered factors over and above linguistic goals. These are important: cooperative learning, learning to learn, personal autonomy. . . . excellent! You mentioned murals, poems, make luggage, postcards. These are vital as they are visual ‘right-brain’ activities. . . . so important for the age of the students [15:01:51] Tony: what do you think the murals will look like/include? [15:06:01] Andrea: I thought that each mural would include important aspects of each season. I will divide the class into four groups and each group will have to work with the season that they will have chosen.

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[15:06:39] Andrea: I think that it is a good opportunity for kids to realise what they have been learning during these sessions. I will plan a general structure that they could follow to build their murals. [15:08:35] Tony: true. Perhaps at the end of the unit, the parents could come in for a mural/poster exhibition? The children display their work and the parents walk around asking questions about it???

Two days later, Andrea meets with a different online peer (Extract 2). She mentions the feedback she had already received from Tony (turn 15:35:14), indicating that she is going to incorporate his ideas into her planning. This time her peer, Missy, brings Andrea’s attention to the need for more thought in her sequencing of activities and to just how these activities are going to be introduced to the students (turn 15:38:11). Missy tries to facilitate Andrea’s planning by providing her with some guiding questions meant to both prompt a reply as well as provide new ideas. Andrea does not respond directly to Missy’s intensive questioning. Instead she indicates that she will send her a fuller version of her teaching sequence later on (turns 15:38:58–15:39:32). Continuing along the lines of detailed planning of each session, and in particular, the introduction of topics, Missy gives Andrea some ideas for warm-up activities (turn 15:42:17). In the next turn, Andrea reiterates that her draft is still very general and then, a bit more abruptly this time, tells Missy that she will send a fuller version soon and begins setting up dates for their next online meeting. Extract 2: Online chat 28 October 2010 – Andrea, Missy [15:31:28] Andrea: I won’t use textbooks [15:31:49] Andrea: I will create my own material for the six sessions. [15:32:19] Missy: Then are you going to teach for six sessions? [15:32:37] Andrea: yes [15:32:39] Missy: And are you going to teach 4 seasons for 6 sessions [15:34:16] Missy: I’m wondering what kind of materail are you going to use in the classroom . May that deicde the development of your class. . [15:35:14] Andrea: Two days ago I spoke with Andy about what I will plan for the six sessions and he gave me an idea that was: Last session it will be about collectiong all the information and preparing murals of each season. Then, he told me that it will be a good idea that when students finish their murals, they come in front the class to expalin what they have been learning, what they writhe down on their murals and time for asquing questions between them.

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[15:36:17] Andrea: the first session will be related to introducing the seasons, then the four following seasons will be to talk about each one and then, for the last on (6 session) will be to sump up this teaching sequence. [15:38:11] Missy: Then in the first session, how are you going to introduce the four seasons? Are you going to ask some questions? or Are you going to show them some video-clips related with four seasons? What kind of activities are you planning to? [15:38:58] Andrea: In this session I am going to introduce the topic that kids are going to work with during the following six sessions and it will be about seasons. [15:39:31] Andrea: During these weeks I will send yourthe teaching sequence of each session [15:39:32] Andrea: ok? The draft that I sent you was related to general information of my teaching sequence. Now I have started preparing each session. [15:42:17] Missy: Usually as a warm-up, using vedio-clip can attratc students attention for the lesson. But finding the right English video-clip takes lots of time. At the beginning of the class, something interesting or fresh is quite useful. How about your idea about warm-up? [15:43:05] Andrea: I thought to do play different games, present activities such as: Mixt game, flashcard . . . [15:44:21] Andrea: Missy . . . I will sent you all the information about the sessions and the warn-up that I will present. Now I have to leave. We meet next Tuesday at 3pm in Chicago and 9 pm in Spain. [15:45:06] Missy: All right. See you then!

The overall tone of the two conversations is quite different. In the first chat, Andrea seems more open to suggestions by her online peer and even mentions them to Missy. In the second chat, Andrea is more evasive and, rather than answer all of her peer’s questions, she prefers to set up another meeting when she has the teaching sequence more fully developed. Interestingly, however, following these discussions and before finalizing her teaching sequence to be implemented in her January–February mid-term intensive internship, Andrea begins to focus more on the issue of carefully and completely planning classroom interaction. Moreover, when elaborating her Action Research Project for which she will compile data during the internship, she decides to focus on this very topic. In her online discussions about her project

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with another peer (Julia), it is Andrea who seeks more peer feedback about setting up effective classroom interaction, in particular, how to promote collaborative work between pairs and groups (turns 10:39:18 and 10:47:20). Julia then gives her a long answer about the setting up of collaborative groups, including having individual roles and goes on to explain how this can help students feel more responsibility for their own learning. In turn 10:47:20 Andrea agrees emphatically (using capital letters in the text-chat) about using peer collaboration and then in 10:49:54 Andrea brings up the importance and challenges for the teacher to plan the interactions carefully, to which Julia agrees. Extract 3: Online chat 28 November 2010 – Andrea, Julia [10:38:27] Andrea: Julia . . . first Thank you very much for your attention [10:38:38] Andrea: I really apreciate it [10:39:18] Andrea: According into the first vignette: Is it important to give roles to the groups to have each one a signed activity? What do you think? [10:40:45] Julia: oh, I agree that it is important to assessing roles to students as you encourage a positive interaction and group processinng [10:41:23] Julia: we should choose roles that will help students overome communication difficulties to get the project done and done well [10:41:40] Andrea: it is truth [10:42:46] Julia: besides, each student should get a role, a task to accomplish as it makes him to feel important, that he somehow contributes to the activity completion, that he is a part of an assignment [10:44:22] Julia: when a student feels responsible for something, that his input into a certain activity is also crucial, you know, that he has a job to do, so he kind of focus more, works harder to carry out his duties, tasks the best he can [10:45:47] Julia: it’s important to give a role to a certain student but a role that is a part of the whole; as studnets at the end might analyze their ideas, discuss them and improve their communication skills as well as teamwork [10:46:49] Julia: Assiging roles to studnets also allows diffrent individuals to develop and utilize diffrent skills / abilities [10:46:50] Andrea: I agree about what you say. [10:47:20] Andrea: Giving roles so that everyone can feel involve with activity: PEER COLLABORATION

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[10:48:27] Julia: yes, they know that they have kind of job to do in order for whole to work,,, so they feel responsible and involved ;) [10:49:54] Andrea: Yes but for doing this, it must be a hard work for part of the teacher. She/He must plan a very good lesson.

In the final stages of her planning (end of January), a more focused approach to planning and implementing group work is evident in Andrea’s teaching sequence. She underscores this personal goal in her online declarations of self-diagnosed areas for improvement (Figure 7.3).

• What areas should I target for improvement? I will like to improve peer-collaboration because I want all kids to feel involve in the actvities such as, working in group school where I will implement my teaching sequence, there is a lot of diversity and newcomers with different level want them to feel part of this unit. • What could I do differently if I could? I will chang the way I planned some activities for the newcomers because some of them were too difficult to follow. • Why? Because I think that they have to do the same activity but I could have adapted the content to be easier for them to underst • What features from the ECML language teacher portfolio do I see that I can do? I can create a supportive atmosphere that invites learners to take part in speaking acvivities and I can evaluate and select of meaningful speaking and interactional activitis to develop fluency such as: discussion, role play, problem solving, among • What features form the ECML language teacher notfolio do I see that I need to work on?

Figure 7.3  Andrea’s prezi about areas for action research

Transcript of prezi •  What areas should I target for improvement? I would like to improve peer collaboration because I want all kids to feel involve in all the activities such as working in groups. In the school where I will implement my teaching sequence, there is a lot of diversity and newcomers with different levels of language learning and I want them to feel part of this unit.

At the end of February, in her reflection about achieved objectives looking back at the planning and implementation of the teaching sequence, Andrea highlights this in her online wiki. Her online partners give her positive feedback while acknowledging the teacher knowledge that Andrea has acquired.

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Moving on in the semester, during a Skype chat that took place in March (Extract 4), there is a role reversal. Andrea now gives her online peer advice on setting objectives. In turn 8, Andrea recommends that her partner make the learning objectives explicit to the learners and that she unpack how to plan and explain objectives through the use of SWBATs (an acronym for Students Will Be Able To), which is, in fact, a term first introduced to the Catalunya group by the US peers earlier in the semester. Extract 4: Online Skype chat – Kimmy, Andrea

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Kimmy: in my school we also have computer class for our students Andrea: ah ok Kimmy: so maybe I can ask for some help from computer teacher Andrea: OK Kimmy: And then we can work together Andrea: ok nice Kimmy: yeah that’s a great idea thank you Andrea: (laughs) you’re welcome_ another thing that I thought that you could explain them what they are going to learn during these sequences because in your draft in the in the interaction I didn’t see that you you wrote about how to to explain what the students will be able to do or what they are going to do during these teaching sequences so I thought that it could be a good idea for them to explain what they are going to achieve during these session_ or not? 9. Kimmy: oh I see_ you mean during the three hours? 10. Andrea: yeah 11. Kimmy: oh I see yeah yeah I have to make it in detail In turn 13 (Extract 5), Andrea’s partner asks her for suggestions on what her objectives should be. Andrea appears to understand the question as a request for a more detailed explanation of objectives as a concept. In line 20, however, Andrea realizes that Kimmy is asking for the objectives of her teaching sequence, to which Andrea once again provides the formulaic phrase ‘students will be able to’ along with at least one suggestion. Extract 5: Online Skype chat – Kimmy, Andrea

12. Andrea: ah ha 13. Kimmy: yeah yeah thank you_ do you have any suggestion? 14. Andrea: Sorry?

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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Kimmy: do you have any_ good idea what the objectives Andrea: the objectives_ I mean do you have you seen my dropbox Kimmy: yeah I I saw yours Andrea: ah you tell me to think about your objectives no (1) Kimmy: ahm ahm I mean do you have any suggestion for my draft as for objectives Andrea: objectives I mean so students will be able to (.) to umpreh comprehend different reading texts Kimmy: ah_ I see OK yeah that would be great Andrea: Students will be able to I don’t know Kimmy: (laughs) OK that sounds yeah oh good fine

In her final report, Andrea reflects on the changes she has observed in her own teaching strategies. Change #3 (Figure 7.4) describes in detail the importance of carefully planning the type of interaction that will promote learning. She then goes on to link the use of SWBATs for specific planning of the interaction in teaching activities. In her conclusion about her learning trajectory in the final report, Andrea highlights the convergence of the blended learning environment (local factors): ‘without the guidance of Melinda and my school placement teacher, I could not have had a successful teaching sequence’ with the global theoretical issues

Figure 7.4  Slide from Andrea’s final reflection

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always prevalent through the dialogic interaction in class and online: ‘[with Julia] we talked about readings and materials about key teaching concepts to understand better’; ‘the AR [Action Research] has helped me to understand planning interaction’; ‘I have learnt critical awareness so that I will always seek more knowledge.’

Conclusion The emergence of context- and content-specific topics on teaching across different domains of interaction as reflected in the qualitative data suggests that the participants are engaged in ‘conceptual thinking’ by ‘making their everyday concepts explicit, . . . reflecting on and critiquing them, . . . beginning to think in concepts about aspects of their teaching which are relevant to their daily professional lives’ (Johnson, 2009, pp. 64–5). Tracking and analysis of one student’s online interactions suggest a shift from merely communicating information to true collaboration aimed at extending her and others’ knowledge in order to better apply, refine and generalize developing teacher know-how. Instances of teacher development in the online conversations reflect joint inquiry through which the participants constructed meaning and deeper understanding of teaching concepts that had been vague to them at the beginning of the year. By the end of the year, not only is Andrea able to reify the conceptual underpinnings of language learning strategies, she is able to make them explicit for her peers in their own development suggesting her emerging professional vision of herself as a professional educator. Chris Dede, a staunch promoter of distributed-learning communities in teacher development, challenges us thus: How a medium shapes its users, as well as its message, is a central issue in understanding the transformation of distance education into distributed learning. The telephone creates conversationalists; the book develops imaginers who can conjure a rich mental image from sparse symbols on a printed page. . . . As we move beyond naive superhighway concepts to see the true potential impact of information infrastructures, society will face powerful new interactive media capable of great good or ill.  .  .  . The most significant influence on the evolution of distance education will not be the technical development of more powerful devices, but the professional development of wise designers, educators, and learners. (Dede, 1995, Transforming, para. 4)

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As teacher educators across the globe provide more opportunities for future teachers to experience and learn from similar distributed-learning communities, holistic embedding of technology into these teacher professionalization processes is clearly warranted.

Note 1 All participants’ names have been changed to protect their identities (except the researcher/author’s).

References Arnold, N., & Ducate, L. (2006). Future foreign language teachers’ social and cognitive collaboration in an online environment. Language Learning & Technology, 10(1), 42−66. Retrieved on 15 July 2011 from http://llt.msu.edu/vol10num1/pdf/ arnoldducate.pdf Bazeley, P. (2004). Issues in mixing qualitative and quantitative approaches to research. In R. Buber, J. Gadner & L. Richards (Eds), Applying qualitative methods to marketing management research (pp. 141–56). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Bogdan, R., & Biklen, S. K. (1992). Qualitative research for education. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Chapelle, C., & Hegelheimer, V. (2004). The language teacher in the 21st century. In S. Fotos & C. Browne (Eds), New perspectives on CALL for second language classroom (pp. 299−316). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory. A practical guide through qualitative analysis. London: Sage. Croker, R. A. (2009). An introduction to qualitative research. In J. Heigham & R. A. Croker (Eds), Qualitative research in applied linguistics: a practical introduction (pp. 3–24). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dede, C. (1995). The transformation of distance education to distributed learning. [Online] Retrieved on 8 April 2013 from www.hbg.psu.edu/bsed/intro/docs/ distlearn Dooly, M., & Sadler, R. (2013). Filling in the gaps: linking theory and practice through telecollaboration in teacher education. ReCALL Journal, 25, 4–29. Downes, S. (2010). Learning networks and connective knowledge. In H. H. Yang & S. C.-Y. Yuen (Eds), Collective intelligence and e-learning 2.0: implications of web-based communities and networking (pp. 1−26). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Freeman, D., & Johnson, K. (1998). Reconceptualizing the knowledge-base of language teacher education. TESOL Quarterly, 32, 397–417.

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Guichon, N. (2009). Training future language teachers to develop online tutors’ competence through reflective analysis. ReCALL, 21(2), 166–85. Hougaard, G. (2009). Legitimate peripheral participation as a framework for conversation analytical work in second language learning. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 10(2), 1–16, article 4, Retrieved on 11 May 2011 from http://nbnresolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs090247 Hubbard, P. (2008). CALL and the future of language teacher education. Calico Journal, 25(2), 175−88. Johnson, K. (2009). Second language teacher education. A sociocultural perspective. New York & Abingdon: Routledge. Kahan, S. (2004). Engagement, identity and innovation: Etienne Wenger on communities of practice. Journal of Association Leadership, 2(3), 26−37. Kuhn, T. (1962/1996). The structure of scientific revolutions (3rd edn). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lefstein, A., & Snell, J. (2011). Professional vision and the politics of teacher learning. Teaching and Teacher Education, 27(3), 505–14. McCallin, A. (2009). Grounded theory online. Retrieved on 4 July 2012 from www. groundedtheoryonline.com/what-is-grounded-theory/classic-grounded-theory Meskill, C., & Anthony, N. (2010). Teaching languages online. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Minaříková, E., & Janík, T. (2012). Profesní vidění učitelů: od hledání pojmu k možnostem jeho uchopení [Teachers’ professional vision: from conceptual searching to seizing opportunities]. Pedagogická orientace, 22(2), 183–201. Newby, D., Allan, R., Fenner, A.-B., Jones, B., Komorowska, H., & Soghikyan, K. (2007). European portfolio for student teachers of languages. A reflection tool for language teacher education. Graz: ECML. Seidel, T., Blomberg, G., & Stürmer, K. (2010). OBSERVE: Validierung eines videobasierten Instruments zur Erfassung der professionellen Wahrnehmung von Unterricht [OBSERVE: Validation of a video-based tool for detecting the professional perception of teaching]. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 56(Supplement), 296–306. Sherin, M. (2007). The development of teachers’ professional vision in video clubs. In R. Goldman, R. Pea, B. Barron & S. J. Derry (Eds), Video research in the learning sciences (pp. 383–96). London: Lawrence Erlbaum. Sherin, M., Jacobs, V., & Philipp, R. (2011). Mathematics teacher noticing: seeing through teachers’ eyes. New York, London: Routledge. Sherin, M., & Van Es, E. (2005). Using video to support teacher’s ability to notice classroom interactions. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 13(3), 475–91. Stoll, L., & Louis, K. (2007). Professional learning communities: elaborating new approaches. In L. Stoll & K. Louis (Eds), Professional learning communities: divergence, depth, and dilemmas (pp. 1–14). Berkshire, England: Open University Press.

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Van Damme, D. (2002). Outlooks for the international higher education community in constructing the global knowledge society. Paper presented at First Global Forum on International Quality Assurance, Accreditation and the Recognition of Qualifications in Higher Education: ‘Globalization and Higher Education’. October, 2002. Paris: UNESCO. Villegas-Reimers, E. (2003). Teacher professional development: an international review of the literature. Paris: UNESCO, International Institute for Educational Planning. Wenger E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, T. (2010). Second language teacher education: review of recent research on practice. Language Teaching, 43(3), 259−96.

8

Perceptions of Humour in Oral Synchronous Online Environments Natasha Anthony

Introduction In teaching and learning that prioritize meaningful interactions and negotiation of meaning, humour and language play represent great opportunities. Humour is ‘an inextricable part of the human experience and thus a fundamental aspect of humanity’s unique capacity for language’ (Askildson, 2005, p. 45). As such, humour in face-to-face classrooms has been the subject of recent research in language education (Bell, 2005; Broner & Tarone, 2001; Cook, 2001; Tarone, 2000). However, the role of humour in the context of online, and more specifically, oral synchronous, online environments with their lack of non-verbal cues such as gaze, gestures, facial expressions and body language has yet to be addressed. This chapter examines humorous episodes in the oral synchronous portions of online Russian classes. The various roles humour plays in this embodiment-free environment are discussed from both instructors’ and students’ perspectives along with implications for professional development and future research.

Humour in language teaching and learning The theoretical framework for this study is sociocultural (Bakhtin, 1981; Vygotsky, 1978) and foregrounds the importance of active social interaction in human development. Humour, as an integral part of human interaction that distinguishes humankind from the rest of the world and ‘stands as one of the

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few universals applicable to all peoples and all languages throughout the world’ (Askildson, 2005, p. 45), is an integral component of instructional interaction. Numerous studies report that humour plays an affective role in language learning particularly in assuaging the anxiety and stresses that can negatively impact language acquisition (Askildson, 2005; Forman, 2011; Tarone, 2000). Studies examining oral synchronous environments in online language courses indicate that the specifics of this disembodied and mostly autonomous environment with often restricted turn-taking opportunities can influence anxiety levels (de los Arcos, Coleman & Hampel, 2009; Hampel, 2006; Hampel & Stickler, 2005; Hampel, Felix, Hauck & Coleman, 2005). Indeed, factors such as physical separation, with learners and teachers isolated from one another, result in deprivation of immediate reactions to humour and language play in the form of smiles, laughter, approving face expressions, nodding and other non-verbal visual cues. This is compounded by the one-at-a-time talking constraint. Even though oral synchronous might be ‘an ideal medium for collaborative learning through social interaction’ (Hampel & Hauck, 2004, p. 68), it challenges both teachers and students as regards their stress levels. Clearly, there is need for research investigating ways of reducing stress and anxiety in this medium with humour being one possibility. Some studies speculate that humour and language play have an emotional, and thereby salient impact on language acquisition (Bell, 2005, 2009; Bushnell, 2009; Cook, 2001; Wagner & Urios-Aparisi, 2011). It has even been suggested that ‘humorous language play may aid in the acquisition of L2 vocabulary and semantic fields in particular, by allowing lexical items to be processed more deeply, making them more memorable’ (Bell, 2009, p. 253). Indeed, recent studies conducted in non-language online courses demonstrate that students in humour-integrated courses have significantly better retention rates than those in no-humour courses (Fitzpatrick, 2010; Schmidt, 2002). It has also been argued that learners’ awareness of linguistic forms increases in humorous contexts thus facilitating their noticing and internalization (Belz & Reinhardt, 2004; Sullivan, 2000; Swain, 2000; Tarone, 2000). However, research on non-language classes demonstrates that humour increases learning at the comprehension level but not at the application level (Hackathorn, Garczynski, Blankmeyer, Tennial & Solomon, 2011). Humour in face-to-face language classes seems to emotionally engage learners, keeping them interested, focused on tasks and actively negotiating meaning (Askildson, 2005; Bushnell, 2009; Forman, 2011; Schmitz, 2002), while prompting them to manipulate language in creative and imaginative ways

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(Pomerantz & Bell, 2011). Further, the social role of humour is associated with contributing to a sense of social presence in online venues. While research on humour in face-to-face language classes indicates that it helps teachers and students build a sense of mutual trust and rapport and contributes to a sense of community (Askildson, 2005; Belz & Reinhardt, 2004; Hall & Walsh, 2002), research on oral synchronous online environments suggests these are not the best for social presence and community building (Yamada & Akahori, 2007). While a need for appropriate uses of humour in online courses has been voiced (James, 2004), there is scarce research on the roles humour can play in online instruction. The few existing studies confirm that, as is the case in the regular classroom, humour in online courses facilitates retention (Garner, 2006), positively affects participation and productivity in discussion forums (Shatz & LoSchaivo, 2006), adds to a sense of social presence (Goldsmith, 2001) and advances student attention and interest in the subject (Taylor, Zeng, Bell & Eskey, 2010). Humour and playfulness in online language courses, while not being directly addressed, have been suggested as essential elements for successful instructional practices (Darhower, 2002; Meskill & Anthony, 2010; Sotillo, 2000). In short, research devoted to humour and language play in language education suggests that it can play a facilitating role in the following seven respects: Affective, Mnemonic, Linguistic, Cultural, Engaging, Social and Attentional. Online language teacher and student perceptions are discussed as they align with each.

Methodology The data for this qualitative research study came from the following four sources: ll

ll

Archived oral synchronous portions of online Russian classes that were conducted via the audio-conferencing programs in Wimba Classroom, Elluminate Live and Blackboard Collaborate in three schools: online K-12, a university and a community college, all located in the United States. Interviews with three online Russian educators (Appendix 8.2) whose experiences with teaching Russian online with oral synchronous venues varied from four to nine years and whose range of language levels taught varied from high school to college and from beginning to high intermediate.

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Interviews with five former online Russian college level students (Appendix 8.1) whose expertise in Russian varied from beginning to high intermediate. These students were recruited using lists of emails provided by the interviewed instructors. Only students who had graduated from online Russian courses and with final grades issued were asked to participate in these interviews. Student participants were included based on their willingness to participate in the study. An online anonymous survey of online Russian students created with Survey Monkey www.survey monkey.com. The questionnaire contained ten open-ended questions (Appendix 8.1). Only current students from the first and second semester Russian classes over the span of three consecutive semesters of 2011–12 were invited to participate in the survey. The number of responders totalled 52.

The interviews were recorded using the Wimba recording feature and were transcribed and analysed. Each interview session lasted from 30 to 65 minutes. Participants were asked questions regarding their view of humour in the oral synchronous portions of their online Russian classes (Appendices 8.1 and 8.2). The interviews were followed up with specific questions arising as the data from the archived portions of the courses continued to emerge. These follow-on questions were addressed via emails and the text-chat portions of Skype.

Analysis The archives of oral synchronous portions of online Russian courses, student surveys and teacher and student interviews were analysed and arranged by the seven roles for humour previously discussed: Affective, Mnemonic, Linguistic, Cultural, Engaging, Social and Attentional. Each will be presented and discussed in turn.

Affective role of humour In accordance with previous research indicating that humour reduces the anxiety and stress associated with speaking foreign language in the context of a face-to-face classroom (Forman, 2011; Tarone, 2000), many students’ responses were supportive of this observation. To the question ‘Do you find the instances

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of humor in your online live sessions helpful in your learning/acquiring Russian and if yes, in what respect?’ learners responded: It helped with the anxiety levels. The times we had humor, it did kind of lighten the mood and took the pressure off. . . . Nothing necessarily has to be humorous, but humor definitely takes some pressure off and allows you to relax and concentrate on the topic at hand. (Student 3) It helps me to relax and not felt pressured. (Anonymous survey response) It makes it more fun and makes it more ok to try and make a mistake then being afraid to speak b/c you’re not perfect. (Anonymous survey response) There are a lot of misunderstandings that can easily occur when trying to learn a new language online. Making it funny helps people feel less insecure about messing up. (Anonymous survey response) I believe that teacher-initiated humor relaxes the classroom and leaves us all more willing to participate because we aren’t afraid to mess up because there is a portrayed sense of light-heartedness. (Anonymous survey response) It (humor) just makes it easier to feel relaxed and speaking in conversation is less intimidating. (Anonymous survey response)

When Student 1 was asked about the humorous comments he made in the chat area during his class’s oral tasks, his response was: ‘Learning another language especially as hard as Russian is a lot of stress. I think everyone is stressed and anxious to speak Russian. I think humour reduces stress levels and anxiety levels.’ When the student was asked whether he used a particular humorous comment to reduce his own anxiety or the anxiety of his classmates, his answer was ‘A little bit of both. I just wanted it to be less stressful for both Jonathan and me.’ The professor teaching this class commented on this situation by saying ‘The class became tedious. The students were slow to respond, and because I couldn’t see them, I wasn’t sure whether they did or did not know what or how to say . . . or maybe they were having technical troubles. Such situations are always a bit stressful. Feels like the whole class is falling apart. John’s comment really took some pressure off.’ As regards affect, then, these data suggest that the use of humour in oral synchronous environments can play an affective role by reducing levels of anxiety and stress.

Mnemonic role of humour Recent research points to humour and language play as having effects on memory in language learning (Bell, 2005; Bushnell, 2009; Cook, 2001). The memorable

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impact of humour may be influenced by the specifics of an embodiment-free environment with its lack of visual cues. When participants were asked the question ‘Do you think vocabulary items presented in humorous contexts would be more memorable?’ Many answers belied appreciation of humour as a mnemonic device. I believe every single rule should be visually represented and with humor. It will help them memorize them better. (Teacher 1) The grammar in the course was pretty intense and I thought some entertaining examples might help in making the forms stick in their heads. I hope it did help. (Teacher 2) It’s easier to remember something funny than something that is boring. . . . Words are remembered better when presented in humorous situations. (Student 1) Often humor makes the content more memorable and therefore helps to learn it faster and better. (Student 2) I tend to remember things more easily if I have a phrase to associate them with, and humorous phrases are particularly memorable. (Anonymous survey response) Students will seek to come up with and memorize witty comments which will increase their vocab and willingness to learn. (Anonymous survey response)

Some, however, were sceptical about the salience of humour: Humor would not necessarily cause help the learning process more than ease the learning experience. (Anonymous survey response) It was a section about marriage I think .  .  . and Elizabeth Taylor came up somehow. That was pretty funny but as far as helping me memorize or helping learn things easier that would not necessarily be the case for me. I think it would be about the same as if I was trying to memorize using regular ways in situations without humor but you know humor is always a good thing. (Student 3) Not really. Vocab is more just memorization to me. (Anonymous survey response) I know when I was younger we studied the multiplication table by using these silly rhymes to remember what order they were coming in. Something like that might help with languages but I don’t know. (Student 4)

One of the survey respondents wrote, ‘Certain words that sound weird like глупый [dumb; stupid] being presented as humorous makes me remember it. There was a class where we were supposed to describe a pop star as pretty/ugly

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and intelligent/dumb and it was funny.’ The teacher who taught the class did not see the above episode as humorous by saying ‘I thought it would be more engaging for them to talk about some celebrity especially notoriously famous, somebody that is from the real world they all could relate to but I don’t remember it being particularly funny and I don’t remember anybody making me think it was funny.’ Few of the students who favoured humour as a mnemonic device were able to support this belief with specific examples from the live online sessions of their Russian courses. Some, while expressing the memorable impact of humour, could retrieve only the funny parts of their humorous exchanges and/or English translations of the Russian phrases used in those but not the Russian lexical items or the grammatical structures associated with the mentioned instances of humour. The typical response to the question about whether humour helps learners remember words better was ‘Yes, but I cannot remember a specific example.’ This topic clearly calls for further investigation.

Linguistic role of humour Humour and language play arguably contribute to increased noticing of linguistic forms and subsequent internalization in language classes (Belz & Reinhardt, 2004; Swain, 2000; Tarone, 2000). However, in these data, even though form noticing occurs within episodes of humour and language play, there is insufficient evidence for a cause–effect explanation. Indeed, when asked their views of humour as supportive in noticing linguistic forms, participant responses indicate that, while playing some role in learning language or learning about language, humour may not necessarily play any significant role in acquiring language. When the teachers in the study were asked ‘Do you think grammatical forms presented in humorous contexts are more noticeable to students?’ they responded: I try to present grammatical concepts in humorous contexts and provide examples and models that I believe are quite funny. I do believe it helps them understand the notions but usually it doesn’t matter if you present it in a funny way or boring way, they make the same number of mistakes when they are engaged in an activity, especially requiring their concentration. (Teacher 2) Some students do pay attention to the endings and ask questions like ‘Why do we use Genitive case here?’ or ‘Is this Accusative case?’ but I don’t

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think humor  has anything to do with this. Some students are simply more grammar-oriented than the others. And some don’t pay attention, humor or no humor. (Teacher 3)

In response to the question ‘Have you noticed grammatical forms better if they were presented in humorous contexts?’ Student 3 responded, ‘It doesn’t matter to me at all. It doesn’t need to be humorous for me to understand; it has to be clearly spoken.’ Student 1 and Student 2 responded positively to the above question but were not able to provide specific examples. Student 4, a female, recalled, ‘I remember once I said something like “Я делал” [I did (masculine ending)], my professor said something like that I was a boy, he called on me. I think that was pretty funny.’ When asked to comment on this, Teacher 3 who taught the class said that he sometimes did tease students by making gender-related mistakes because ‘it helped them pay attention to the endings better and understand what they stand for.’ In spite of claims of direct links between humour and noticing, these data do not provide clear evidence that humorous contexts contribute to noticing linguistic forms.

Cultural role of humour Previous research on humour in language education revealed that learning culture through and with humour is beneficial (Askildson, 2005). The embodiment-free environment, however, creates the need for careful structuring of tasks and activities due to time constraints. Also because of time constraints, rarely is there sufficient time to focus on culture. During tasks, as both the archived oral synchronous portions of the online classes as well as the interviews with the teachers revealed, teachers are not inclined to deviate from their preplanned activities to make comments about culture. As a result, spontaneous discussions about various cultural phenomena were rare in the synchronous portions of these online classes. It’s all about focus. In regular class, there are many ‘by the ways’ when you just briefly describe instances of culture as they come up in the lesson. Here if we have too many ‘by the ways’, students will get distracted and it would be hard to focus them on the task again, especially if you put them into the breakout rooms where they are pretty much on their own. But if you talk about culture, you try to make it humorous so that it could grab their attention and have an impact on them. (Teacher 2)

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Responding to the question ‘Do you find the instances of humor in your online live sessions helpful in your learning/acquiring Russian and if yes, in what respect?’ many students in the study reported viewing humour as a positive element in learning about the Russian culture. To use the language effectively, there must be some understanding of the culture. Humor varies among different cultures, so I think it is helpful to include humor as part of language learning. (Student 1) It makes some of the figures of speech more obvious. Like a lot of American jokes are hard to understand for people who don’t get the double entendres. (Anonymous survey response) People use humor in everyday lives and some cultures humor is different than others. It is important to know what is considered humorous if you are learning a language. (Anonymous survey response) I like the funny comments about Russian culture. (Anonymous survey response)

Interviews with students indicate that they were able to recall instances of presenting Russian culture with humour in their online lessons. For example, Student 2, who had taken her online Russian courses three years prior to the time this research was conducted, mentioned an episode about her online Russian teacher talking about picking mushrooms in Russia and comparing it to playing Russian roulette. She commented that the humour of the story about this part of Russian culture had made her remember this for a long time. Thus, it seems humour may have a more significant memorable impact on learning about culture than, for example, on studying vocabulary.

Engaging role of humour Language acquisition calls for spontaneous, situational and purposeful use of language (Savignon, 1991). Indeed, the need for humour as a trigger for spontaneous and lively interactions is consistently voiced in the literature, for example, ‘We contend that engagement in spontaneous humorous performances can provide rich opportunities for language use and development, beyond those habitually found in more tightly controlled classrooms’ (Pomerantz & Bell, 2011, p. 157). However, the demand for careful preplanning and task design for oral synchronous environments in order to meet the challenges of this medium is also emphasized in a number of studies (Duensing, Stickler, Batstone & Heins, 2006; Rosell-Aguilar, 2005). Such forethought in structuring a lesson, coupled with the embodiment-free specifics of the medium may have both positive and

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negative effects resulting in ‘fewer student–student exchanges outside allocated tasks’ (Heins, Duensing, Stickler & Batstone, 2007, p. 292). In these data, humour appears to play a role in engaging learners and prompting them to use the target language in a more spontaneous and lively manner. Humor can encourage the participants to interact more with each other outside of just doing the exercises kind of going back and forth with the classwork. Humor possibly adds little more spontaneity and it helps feel peoples’ personalities instead of just responding to exercises each time you speak. (Student 3) Even the funny name of the activity makes the activity itself less boring. I do many things to engage students and keep them interested, for example, I do ‘a garage sale’ sometimes selling the nice items on the slide for the right answers. (Teacher 1) I try to make jokes to provoke them to use language in more personable manner and let them say whatever they think on the subject. (Teacher 2) The use of humor during Russian usually makes the activities we do in class more engaging and fun. It’s easier to learn when you’re enjoying yourself. (Anonymous survey response) I enjoy humor. It makes the class interesting and engaging. It adds a level of personality to the lessons. It makes things much more interactive! (Anonymous survey response)

It has been observed that in oral synchronous portions of language classes there is a higher ratio of teacher talk versus student output (de los Arcos & Arnedillo Sánchez, 2006; Heins at el., 2007). It is notable in the current data that humour triggered students to produce comments in Russian in the text-chat area in parallel with the oral discussion going on in class, thus raising their linguistic production. When I made a joke about students watching too many sitcoms, the students in class began chatting in Russian, laughing at each other you know with emoticons and lols. I remember somebody typed ‘Ли любит смотреть корейские драмы’ [Li likes to watch Korean dramas] about one of the students who happened to be Korean. There was lot of teasing. I remember thinking like wow, they can say so many things in Russian I even had no clue. (Teacher 3) Humor triggers me to speak in Russian or chat in Russian. (Student 4)

These observations support the notion of humour prompting spontaneous interactions in the target language and thereby increasing student output in the context of the oral synchronous medium.

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Social role of humour In language education studies, it has been observed that in oral synchronous sessions a sense of social presence is measured as low compared to classes utilizing other venues of instruction such as video conferences or text-based channels of communication (Yamada & Akahori, 2007). The need to foster a sense of social presence in oral synchronous modes is acute. The majority of the participants in the current research agreed that humour can contribute to a sense of online community. I remember each time when something funny was said, people started laughing in the chat box. We were able to laugh about something together. So it did not feel like we all were disconnected. (Student 4) I believe humor brings the classroom to a more connected level. It causes students to want to learn more words/phrases. It can be used to break the ice of some more nervous students. (Anonymous survey response) Sometimes I feel like I’m in heaven, you know, or a Purgatory with the souls roaring around with no bodies, no real people. When students react to my jokes by typing something in the chat box, I feel they are more human, like there are real people behind the screen. (Teacher 2)

When asked ‘How do you respond normally to humorous situations in your online class?’, several students in the study reported using private chat for exchanging humorous comments privately with the other students thus creating a kind of ‘underground community’ through humour. If I think it’s truly funny, I send a chat to another person. (Anonymous survey response) Usually I laugh to myself or comment privately to other students so as not to disturb everyone. (Student 4) I laugh at my computer a fair bit. And with private chat in wimba. (Anonymous survey response) It is hard for both sides to gauge each other’s reactions since we can’t see facial expressions or hear laughs or smiles  – which can make it hard to see if the humor is successful or not. Humor is clearly very language-based since there is no visual component to the classes, but I think that lends its own special kind of humor to the class  – if that makes sense haha. (Anonymous survey response)

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Humour also seems to contribute greatly to teacher presence, transforming what some students called a ‘voice in a computer’ into a real person. Because your teacher is not there, humor makes your professor more approachable. (Student 2) I think that humor in our lessons is very enjoyable without being distracting. I feel very relaxed speaking with the teacher in the classroom and she comes off more as a person than just a voice in my computer. (Anonymous survey response) It’s a little harder to respond to humor in the Wimba classroom, because nobody can hear if other people are laughing, but it’s also more important because it helps to establish the instructor as a human being, instead of just a voice over the internet. (Anonymous survey response)

Not all of the students in the study recognized humour as a social tool. Student 3 was the exception in stating a ‘sense of community would have been nice but I did not expect to form friendships in the Wimba Classroom because we are using computers and headsets and it makes it, you know, a little more difficult’. However, all the other participants appreciated humour in making social presence happen and its significance in doing so pertained to this particular environment.

Attentional role of humour The demands of attention distribution and concentration in oral synchronous environments are challenging. Humour may represent one possibility for alleviating this problem. The data from this study suggest that the specifics of an embodiment-free environment call for the attentional role of humour. Humor is important online because it grabs their attention. I always tease students when I don’t hear them typing in chat or raising hands. I’m like ‘Уилл и Джон, вы смотрите YouTube?’ [Will and John, are you watching YouTube?] (Teacher 1) I often tease students when I feel they are not paying attention because someone is too slow to respond. Just recently we were discussing what they had in their closets, and the student who was supposed to respond was not saying anything for a while. I was afraid that the others could begin wandering around the Internet instead of listening. So I said ‘Джон, что у тебя есть в шкафу? Кроме скелета?’ [John, what do you have in your closet? Besides a skeleton?] And they started typing in chat like ‘ha ha’, ‘lol’, smiley faces . . . showing they are there. (Teacher 2)

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In response to the question ‘Do you find the instances of humor in your online live sessions helpful in your learning/acquiring Russian and if yes, in what respect?’ many students in the study indicated that they appreciate humour as an attentional aid. It keeps me focused. (Anonymous survey response) Humor makes it fun and holds your attention. (Student 2) I remember once that some student was not paying attention and we were talking where we’d go after the class. And the professor said ‘Are you on your way to a bar already?’ We all laughed about it. (Student 4)

Research in language education suggests that visuals are highly valued by students in calling their attention to the focal points of instruction (Anthony, 2010; Meskill & Anthony, 2007, 2010). Oral synchronous, embodiment-free environments are the places where attention cannot be drawn by using gestures or other non-verbal cues. Humour when coupled with visuals can be effective in addressing the attentional demands of the environment. I had a situation when one of the students struggled with the task and took him a while to figure out what and how to say. He seemed to be quite stressed out and I felt sorry for him. Besides, I wasn’t sure if the others were paying attention. I drew a head on the slide with smoke coming out of the ears. They like what? What’s going on? Is somebody bored? And I said that we worked so hard that we had smoke coming out of our ears. It’s a Russian expression. Дым из ушей идёт. [Smoke comes out of the ears.] They giggled and I seized the moment to inject some grammar explanations that I thought would help to finish the activity. (Teacher 1)

Not seeing students and not being able to hear them unless they push the talk button creates an atmosphere of uncertainty. Students might be engaged in multitasking, using social networks, texting or checking emails, activity that research suggests negatively impacts learning (Reynold & Cotten, 2012). Thus, calling for attention is one of the central roles that humour may play in online oral environments.

Discussion and implications Study participants were probed regarding their perspectives on humour and its roles in oral synchronous environments. Data that address the Affective,

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Mnemonic, Linguistic, Cultural, Engaging, Social and Attentional dimensions of humour are suggestive.

Affective Participants’ responses, in conjunction with the archives of recorded oral synchronous lessons, indicate that both the teachers and the students viewed humour as instrumental in dealing with the stress and anxiety associated with speaking Russian online. The specifics of the environment with its lack of non-verbal information can lead to misunderstandings. Such situations can exacerbate the stresses of speaking Russian. Humour was reported to mitigate this.

Mnemonic While some students in the study appreciated a mnemonic role for humour, others were reluctant to identify humour as having a memorable impact on them. In addition, when asked to supply specific examples of humour that helped them remember features of the Russian language, students were only able to recall non-subject related incidents. This finding aligns with Carlson (2011) who reported inconsistent results in humour’s effect on memory. The lack of visual cues in oral synchronous modes could reduce the impact of humour on memory as well. The memorable effects of humour in the context of audio-conferencing modes of instruction should be investigated further.

Linguistic These data suggest that humour may be used as a tool to help online teachers focus on forms within meaning-focused activities. However, there was little evidence that students notice forms better in humorous contexts. The issue of salience via humour as a means to encourage learner noticing calls for substantial research.

Cultural Study participants unanimously rated humour very highly when used in the context of learning about Russian culture. This directly supports Schmitz’s (2002) call for culture presented with and through humour to be implemented at all the levels of instruction.

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Engaging The rigidity of oral synchronous environments requires tightly structured activities. Indeed, teachers work harder than in a face-to-face classes to connect with students and engage students with content. Lack of non-verbal cues does not always allow teachers to digress from the tasks at hand rendering the instruction potentially monotonous. These data suggest that humour was used to engage students in more spontaneous and lively uses of Russian while triggering them to interact in Russian more both orally and textually.

Social Establishing and maintaining social presence in oral synchronous environments have been identified as problematic in recent research (Yamada & Akahori, 2007). This study indicates that humour is an excellent tool in turning the ‘voices in the computers’ into real people and making these computer-mediated interactions more human.

Attentional Holding students’ attention in an environment devoid of most devices for doing so is not an easy task. Both the teachers and the students in this study recognized humour as a tool for securing and maintaining attention. As we have seen, five out of the seven roles that humour plays in oral synchronous environments  – Affective, Cultural, Engaging, Social and Attentional  – were illustrated and praised by study participants. The other two  – Mnemonic and Linguistic  – were not strongly evidenced. As concerns implications for professional development in online education, clearly while one cannot learn how to be funny and humorous, the ways of employing humorous elements in designing and orchestrating instructional tasks are something that can be highlighted.

Conclusion As illustrated here, humour can be a teaching tool to complement language instruction in oral synchronous environments, the disembodied nature of which presents certain challenges. Humour apparently contributes to making live

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online sessions less stressful, engages students into more spontaneous and lively uses of language, raises cultural awareness, and unites instructors and students as a community. Humour can also apparently be instrumental in addressing the attentional demands the medium carries. The parts of this research addressing memorable and linguistic impacts of humour suggest further exploration.

Appendix 8.1. Interview and survey questions for students 1. Do you find humour important in learning foreign languages? Why or why not? If yes, in what aspects? Can you give a specific example? 2. Do you find the instances of humour in the live sessions helpful in your learning/acquiring Russian? If yes, in what respect? Can you give a specific example? 3. What do you think about vocabulary items presented in humorous contexts during the live sessions? Does it help you memorize them better and retain them better? Can you give a couple of specific examples? 4. What do you think about grammar presented in humorous contexts during the live sessions? Does it help you memorize the grammatical forms better and retain them better? Can you give a couple of specific examples? 5. How do you respond normally to humorous situations in the live sessions? Laughing by yourself? Typing in the chat area your comments or emoticons (lol, smiley faces, ha ha, etc.) to the whole class or privately to some students? Commenting aloud for everybody to hear? 6. Do you have any comments about humour and language play during the live sessions? 7. What do you think about teacher-initiated humour in the live sessions? Do you think teacher humour can help you learn Russian? Why or why not? In what ways? 8. What do you think makes humorous exchanges in the live sessions difficult and/or restricted? What can be done to overcome those difficulties? 9. What would help humour in the live sessions be better perceived? 10. What makes humour in the live sessions different from humour of a traditional language classroom? How to you think the digital features of the audio-conferencing programs can make humorous exchanges more effective?

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Appendix 8.2. Interview questions for instructors 1. Do you find humour important in learning foreign languages? Why or why not? 2. Do you include/involve humour in your preparation for the live sessions? Why or why not? Do you find humour in the live sessions helpful in your teaching Russian? 3. What do you think about vocabulary items presented in humorous contexts during the live sessions? Do you think those are memorized better? 4. What do you think about grammatical forms presented in humorous contexts during the live sessions? Do you think those are more noticeable to students? 5. What do you find difficult about humorous exchanges in the live sessions? What can be done to overcome those? 6. How to you think the features of the audio-conferencing programs can make humorous exchanges more effective?

References Anthony, N. (2010). Refocusing focus on form in the context of online language teaching via audio conferences. Slavic and East European Journal, 54(1), 76–95. Askildson, A. (2005). Effect of humor in language classroom: humor as a pedagogical tool in theory and practice. Arizona Working Papers in SLAT, 12, 45–61. Bakhtin, M. (1981 [1935]). Discourse in the novel. In M. Holquist (Ed.), The dialogic imagination: four essays by M. M. Bakhtin (pp. 259–422). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bell, N. (2005). Exploring L2 language play as an aid to SLL: a case study of humor in NS–NNS interaction. Applied Linguistics, 26(2), 192–218. — (2009). Learning about and through humor in the second language classroom. Language Learning Research, 13(3), 241–58. Belz, J., & Reinhardt, J. (2004). Aspects of advanced foreign language proficiency: internet-mediated German language play. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 14(3), 324–62. Broner, M., & Tarone, E. (2001). Is it fun? Language play in a fifth-grade Spanish immersion classroom. Modern Language Journal, 85(3), 364–79. Bushnell, C. (2009). ‘Lego my keego!’: an analysis of language play in a beginning Japanese as a foreign language classroom. Applied Linguistics, 30, 49–69. Carlson, K. (2011). The impact of humor on memory: is the humor effect about humor? Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 24(1), 21–41.

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Cook, V. (2001). Using the first language in the classroom. Canadian Modern Language Review, 57, 402–23. Darhower, M. (2002). Interactional features of synchronous computer-mediated communication in the intermediate L2 class: a sociocultural case study. CALICO Journal, 19, 249–77. de los Arcos, B., & Arnedillo Sánchez, F. (2006). Ears before eyes: expanding tutors’ interaction skills beyond physical presence in audio-graphic collaborative virtual learning environments. In P. Zaphiris & G. Zacharia (Eds), User-centered computer aided language learning (pp. 74–93). Hershey: Idea Group. de los Arcos, B., Coleman, J., & Hampel, R. (2009). Learners’ anxiety in audiographic conferences: a discursive psychology approach to emotion talk. ReCALL, 21(1), 3–17. Duensing, A., Stickler, U., Batstone, C., & Heins, B. (2006). Face-to-face and online interactions – is a task a task? Journal of Learning Design, 2(1), 34–44. Fitzpatrick, R. (2010). The Impact of integrated humor on memory retention and recall aspects of adult learning. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. EPSY. Forman, R. (2011). Humorous language play in a Thai EFL classroom. Applied Linguistics, 32(5), 541–65. Garner, R. (2006). Humor in pedagogy: how ha-ha can lead to aha! College Teaching, 54(1), 177–80. Goldsmith, D. (2001). Communication, humor, and personality: student’s attitudes to learning online. Academic Exchange Quarterly, Summer, 108–12. Hackathorn, J., Garczynski, A., Blankmeyer, K., Tennial, R., & Solomon, E. (2011). All kidding aside: humor increases learning at knowledge and comprehension levels. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 11(4), 116–23. Hall, J., & Walsh, M. (2002). Teacher-student interaction and language learning. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 22, 186–203. Hampel, R. (2006). Rethinking task design for the digital age: a framework for language teaching and learning in a synchronous online environment. ReCALL, 18(1), 105–21. Hampel, R., Felix, U., Hauck, M., & Coleman, J. (2005). Complexities of learning and teaching languages in a real-time audiographic environment. German as a Foreign Language, 3, 1–30. Hampel, R., & Hauck, M. (2004). Towards and effective use of audio conferencing in distance learning courses. Language Learning and Technology, 8(1), 66–82. Hampel, R., & Stickler, U. (2005). New skills for new classrooms: training tutors to teach languages online. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 18(4), 311–26. Heins, B., Duensing, A., Stickler, U., & Batstone, C. (2007). Spoken interaction in online and face-to-face language tutorials. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 20(3), 279–95. James, D. (2004). A need for humor in online classes. College Teaching, 52(3), 93–4. Meskill, C., & Anthony, N. (2007). Form-focused communicative practice via CMC: what language learners say. CALICO, 25(2), 69–90. — (2010). Teaching languages online. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

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Pomerantz, A., & Bell, N. (2011). Humor as safe house in the foreign language classroom. Modern Language Journal, 95, 148–61. Reynold, J., & Cotten, S. (2012). The relationship between multitasking and academic performance. Computers & Education, 59(2), 505–14. Rosell-Aguilar, F. (2005). Task design for audiographic conferencing: promoting beginner oral interaction in distance language learning. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 18(5), 417–42. Savignon, S. (1991). Communicative language teaching: state of the art. TESOL Quarterly, 25, 261–77. Schmidt, S. (2002). The humor effect: differential processing and privileged retrieval. Memory, 10, 127–38. Schmitz, J. (2002). Humor as a pedagogical tool in foreign language and translation courses. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 15(1), 89–113. Shatz, M., & LoSchaivo, F. (2006). Bringing life to online instruction with humor. Radical Pedagogy. Retrieved on 20 October 2012 from http://radicalpedagogy.icaap. org/content/issue8_2/shatz.html Sotillo, M. (2000). Discourse functions and syntactic complexity in synchronous and asynchronous communication. Language Learning & Technology, 4(1), 82–119. Sullivan, P. (2000). Playfulness as mediation in communicative language teaching in a Vietnamese classroom. In J. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 115–32). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Swain, M. (2000). The output hypothesis and beyond: mediating acquisition through collaborative dialogue. In J. Lantolf, (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 97–114). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Tarone, E. (2000). Getting serious about language play: language play, interlanguage variation and second language acquisition. In B. Swierzbin, F. Morris, M. Anderson, C. Klee & E. Tarone (Eds), Social and cognitive factors in SLA: proceedings of the 1999 second language research forum (pp. 31–54). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Taylor, C., Zeng, H., Bell, S., & Eskey, M. (2010). Examining the dos and don’ts of using humor in the online classroom. Proceedings of the 15th Annual TCC (Technology, Colleges, and Community) Online Conference. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. Ed. M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner & E. Souberman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wagner, M., & Urios-Aparisi, E. (2011). The use of humor in the foreign language classroom: funny and effective? Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 24(4), 399–434. Yamada, M., & Akahori, K. (2007). Social presence in synchronous CMC-based language learning: how does it affect the productive performance and consciousness of learning objectives? Computer Assisted Language Learning, 20(1), 37–65.

9

Face-to-Face and Online EL Writing Tutorials: A Comparison Jason Vickers

Introduction This chapter investigates differences between face-to-face (f2f) and online asynchronous writing tutorials specifically drawing upon Steven North’s (1984, 1994) view that the function of tutorials in a writing centre context is to make better writers, not better writing. His vision is that better writers are made through discussion of the writing process with a piece of writing being an artefact to facilitate the conversation. In line with North’s view of focusing on a writing process through exposure and conversation is a social constructionist epistemology which focuses on dialogic interactions between the writer and tutor and subsequent knowledge generation necessary for the writer to write successfully in different culturally contextualized disciplines (Bartholomae, 1986; Bizzell, 1986; Bruffee, 1973, 1984, 1986; Faigley, 1986; Lantolf, 2000; Swales, 1988). I do not make the case that one medium is superior to another; rather, I set out to discuss how each medium contributes to a English Learner’s (ELLs) writing and how each assists in shaping them as academic writers.

A writing process A general model of the writing process often contains four areas or ‘episodes’: planning, drafting/writing, revising and editing (Gillespie & Lerner, 2008; Ryan

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& Zimmerelli, 2010). In planning writers may ask themselves their purpose for writing, what they know and need to know about the topic, and audience considerations. They may brainstorm to better understand what they know about the topic and conduct research on the topic about which they are writing. Drafting/writing entails creating an initial draft. The writer may engage in focused freewriting or outline prior to composing. Revising is where the writers review what they have written looking at higher-order concerns such as the thesis statement and its relation to the entire paper, organization of the paper, transitions and clarity, and whether detail needs to be added. The writer may merge points, reorganize paragraphs and rewrite sentences to make them clearer as well as conduct additional research to strengthen arguments. In editing, the writer typically proofreads with focus on lower-order concerns such as grammar and spelling. The writing process as described here is recursive and non-linear. Note that I use the phrase ‘a writing process’ here. This is because, as North believes, there is no one approach to the writing process. Writers and tutors will likely have their own unique process when writing. Tutors, however, will typically approach tutorials with these four episodes in mind. This was certainly true in the writing centre where I was the English as a Second Language consultant for five years. In f2f tutorials with both native and non-native speakers of English, the primary concern is talk. In this talk, tutors may request that writers explain what their papers are about as well as have them describe the process they used to arrive at the papers they bring to the tutorials. Tutors might focus on what they and the writers identified as the key issue in the papers, which is frequently organization, and talk about these points. The tutorials might progress from there with tutors asking questions to the writers in order to elicit more detail about their papers. Often, tutors will have writers read their papers aloud, which Gillespie and Learner (2008) fit into the editing episode of writing since writers may catch surface-level errors. But the talk may never go past talking about prewriting. The talk may have been exclusively used to flesh out the writer’s initial process and included things they might do differently at the prewriting stage including questions the writer may ask about what he or she knows about the topic, how the writer might brainstorm, and what research to get and where to get it. Or the talk might make it to the editing stage where tutors talk about ways a writer could edit the paper. Frequently, the tutorial is far messier than that as tutors tended to dip in and out of each episode.

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These are the types of interactions I am talking about when I discuss writing tutorials  – tutorials where there is conversation either in an f2f situation or through asynchronous email exchanges between the tutor and writer about processes the writer used and can learn to use when composing. This type of writing tutorial aligns with North’s vision of a tutorial where ‘talk-about-writing’ occurs. This is the type of tutorial capturing Bruffee’s (1984) idea that the spirit of collaborative writing work is not about editing or proofreading; collaborative writing involves conversation about the subject, assignment and writing process because writing is a conversational act between the writer and reader and, in the instance of peer tutoring using a process-based approach espoused by North, a conversation in its purest sense. This genre of peer tutorial allows for ‘unfettered conversation’ (Williams, 2005, p. 37).

Data sources Asynchronous email tutorials were taken from archived email tutorials between the author and Asian writers during the 2009 and 2010 academic years. F2f tutorials were between native English speaking tutors and Asian EL writers during the 2011 academic year. These tutorials, along with interviews with both tutors and writers, were conducted, digitally recorded and transcribed by the author as part of a larger study (Vickers, 2012).

Complications in comparing f2f and asynchronous email tutorials Comparing the two tutorial types is inherently difficult due to the nature of interaction (or perhaps it is a lack of interaction or different nature of interaction) in many asynchronous email tutorials. Admittedly, providing clear examples for each episode in email tutorials is difficult due to several factors. In most cases, writers submit either a draft or piece they consider to be a near completion to work on. This situates the tutorial in the revision or editing episodes if the paper is being presented as a complete piece. Where papers are partial, as is sometimes the case, the tutorial might logically fall in the drafting episode. Further complications that arise in comparing the two may be a result of a general lack of sequencing in comments tutors make on papers in asynchronous

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tutorials. In looking at papers in asynchronous tutorials, the paper and comments are presented as a whole with comments being linear. It is difficult to see how the tutor may have prioritized issues, especially if the tutor has made comments addressing multiple episodes. Tutor commenting on many aspects of a writer’s product is not unusual as tutors in asynchronous tutorials have a proclivity for over-commentary on writer drafts (Hewett, 2010; Rathford, 2009). In other words, tutors may feel compelled to address most, if not all, of the issues they see in writer drafts. This may especially hold true when the tutor believes that the exchange will be limited exchanges consisting of the writer sending a draft and the tutor commenting on the draft and returning it to the writer. The remainder of this chapter is broken down into three sections. In the first two sections, I present f2f tutorials and asynchronous email tutorials that are working on similar episodes of the process. The first set of scenarios focuses on a tutorial that involved a drafting, or more realistically, a (re)drafting episode. I say ‘(re)drafting’ because both writers present drafts that could technically situate each tutorial in the revising episode. In the second group of three scenarios, I discuss the editing episode and how scaffolding can occur in each. In my last section, I compare each set of tutorials and draw conclusions based on what occurred in each.

(Re)drafting in f2f and email tutorials There are some instances when writers enter into a tutorial with a paper that appears to be off-topic or where the tutor identifies serious organizational issues. In both cases, this may necessitate revisiting an earlier episode in the writing process such as the prewriting or drafting episodes. How this work is done in each tutorial medium can be very different due to interactional affordances or constraints, with writers in f2f tutorials being more active in the real-time process than feasible in asynchronous email tutorials. I present in this section two cases where the tutors identified issues in the writers’ presented papers and assisted by providing opportunities to redraft the papers. In the f2f tutorial, the tutor assisted the writer in brainstorming and outlining so the writer could continue on his own. In the asynchronous email case, the writer asked the tutor to review organization. This review resulted in the tutor identifying organizational issues in the paper and providing the writer with an outline so the writer could rework the piece.

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(Re)drafting in the f2f tutorial This f2f example is the last tutorial in a series of three tutorials between a male tutor and a male Korean writer. The tutorial began with the tutor reading a paper draft that the writer had been working on for two weeks with assistance from the tutor. We enter into the tutorial with the tutor identifying a focus issue in the draft: t I’m tr- I’m trying to figure this (pause) so you’re telling me- and this is what I’m reading – is Frost consistently shows man struggling with nature or trying to control it, right? w I think his poems . . . I don’t know about how he did in the poem ‘Out, Out’, yeah t well isn’t the poem about – er sorry, isn’t this paper supposed to be about, about ‘Out, Out’ specifically? w yeah. right. t this is- I think why we’re running into- so you need to be focused more on the poem. the individual poem w yea:h t this is – this is good. I mean it’s good research in the sense that you’re setting the contents to Frost, but you’re not telling me anything specific about this particular poem which is your primary source w yeah t so one of the things that I think you need to figure out is how is nature represented in ‘Out, Out’ w yeah t so how is it represented in ‘Out, Out’?

In this exchange, the tutor, who was reading the writer’s most current draft, identified that the writer was not writing about the primary source, ‘Out, Out’ by Robert Frost, and recommended that they look at the poem again in order to develop a claim focusing on the poem. Over the next 120 tutor–writer conversational turns, the tutor probed the writer with questions specific to the poem and recorded the notes in Figure 9.1. Figure 9.1 contains four blocks with each block representing a portion of the tutorial where the tutor elicited information from the writer. In Block 1, the tutor had the writer list elements of the poem. Block 2 represents the tutor’s discussion

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Figure 9.1  Writer/tutor generated notes

about how this information would be used to lead to a thesis statement. Block 3 was a result of the following exchange: t that perhaps he’s just not ready for – see where I’m going with all this? okay so one of the things (pause) alright do you wanna back up you look a little confused w yeah back up t back up? okay. alright. so. it seems that we have a couple of components to the poem. alright? you have as we discar- discussed. machine. nature and where I’m proposing is that there’s a third element which comes: in the very end of the poem w mhm? t it’s the commu:nity. and at the center of all of this is the boy ((tutor drawing on notes))

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w yeah t mkay so. he sees nature in the background and I remember there were portions of that poem that said eh-he wishes only to do what boys can do and that’s you know run off and play but he has to do man’s- a man’s work w yeah t alright and he’s alone doing it. he’s alone with the machine with another individual. and finally when the machine attacks the boy w m? t I think it’s pretty accurate to say attack w yeah t is . . . we’re left with no real sense of a community are we? w right t people go on- I understand that we can read it as if they’re emotionally numb but the fact is they go on with their affairs w yeah t life goes on w mhm t so, I can’t tell you exactly what to do with all that but those seem to be three very important underlying aspects to the poem itself w ng t and so you need to focus on nature. I’m sorry not focus on nature you need to focus on machinery industry and technology and what that does to our lives w so do I need to change my thesis statement? thesis statement. t you will- I would suggest that you do change it to make it more specific. so here it eventually shows how life is fragile and boyd and- VOID by juxtaposing life and death, but. there’s a cause for the boy’s death and that’s the machine

Through this complex series of exchanges, the writer identified the need for changing his thesis statement and eventually arrived at the new thesis stating ‘how life is diminishing and become fragile from alienation of human being from community and nature by machine’ (Block 4). The writer here did not specifically comment on changes in his process of outlining or brainstorming during his post-tutorial interview. Instead, he reported that he learned how to better analyse a poem through the questions the tutor asked during the tutorial. He did mention that the outlining here helped him to construct a better thesis statement, but he credited the majority of that

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construction to the conversation he had with the tutor about the poem and earlier research he did as a result of prior tutor prompting.

Email tutorial: Outlining Verbal negotiation in email tutorials is not as interactive since there is reduced ability to discuss what should or will be worked on in the tutorial. When emailing their papers, writers may include what they would like the tutor to focus on. Figure 9.3 is an example of a female Korean writer specifying what she would like the tutor to focus on. Hello. [tutor name]. It is [writer name]. However, I have to post this essay on black board until Sunday. Before I posted this essay, I would like to hear your feedback. The professor said that she will pay attention to purposeful organization this time.

Attached to the email was the writer’s paper with an outline at the beginning. Upon reviewing the paper, the tutor concurred with she needed to work on problematic organization. In his feedback he provided the writer with suggestions on how to create a more detailed outline both for the paper she had sent and in future papers (Figure 9.2).

Your outline could be a little more detailed. It seems like you’re jumping around in the paper. You should consider restructuring the paper. Here is one way you could structure your paper. You could talk about things you saw and did in America that you either can’t do (or don’t have) in Korea, differences in scenery (this includes land and architecture – and I don’t see where you develop the architecture portion), difficulties you have in America that might not occur in Korea, and differences in culture (people in Korea minding their business, things like that). You can start off with the things you did. Either that, or address the same thing in the same order (this is parallel structure). So, talk about a place and (1) what you did, (2) how it was different, (3) difficulties along the way, (4) cultural differences. So, your outline might be something like: 1. Introduction a. You’ll talk about what you did b. You’ll talk about how it was different than in Korea

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c. You’ll talk about the difficulties (easy/hard, environment, everything is larger?) d. You’ll talk about cultural differences 2. Body paragraphs a. Universal i. General info ii. How it was different iii. Difficulties along the way iv. Cultural differences b. Water park i. General info ii. How it was different iii. Difficulties along the way iv. Cultural differences c. Las Vegas i. General info ii. How it was different iii. Difficulties along the way iv. Cultural differences d. San Francisco i. General info ii. How it was different iii. Difficulties along the way iv. Cultural differences e. Grand Canyon i. General info ii. How it was different iii. Difficulties along the way iv. Cultural differences 3. Conclusion If you structure your paper similar to the outline above, your reader will be able to follow your thoughts better. One general suggestion I have is that you create more detailed outlines before you write your papers. This will allow you to see the overall structure of the paper. Figure 9.2  Tutor provided outline

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The tutor provided this possible outline along with comments in the body of the email suggesting the writer review articles and verb tenses. He stressed the need for the writer to reorganize her paper and how outlining might improve the cohesion of her papers. The writer’s response to this was: Based on your comments, I changed my oultine a little bit~ How does it look like? I selected an outlilne which is general info, what I did and cultural differences. . . . It is seven pages in totall. . . . I think it is way too much. . My professor replied back to me that I have a lot of examples, so I need to focus some examples and try to describe in depth. .I think I did but I am not positive. .

The writer’s revised paper followed the outline the tutor suggested and was a more cohesive piece. In subsequent email tutorials, this writer began to include outlines like this one: Reflections of the class which I have learned in class Outline Introduction: The thought and my career plan I have had before taking this course Body 1. Career development – Example: 1. MBTI and SII test – definition and explanation both tests and my result from the test 2. Class activities: – Informational interview, mock interview 3. Job research paper: – What did I get from that assignment? 4. Working experience as a teacher – Working as a Korean teacher in America Conclusion What changes do I have throughout the semester? Did I develop my career planning? Reflections of this semester about taking EPSY course.

While the outline the writer presented here was not as detailed as the outline the tutor provided in the earlier asynchronous tutorial, it reflects a change in the writer’s drafting process. In a follow-up conversation, the writer expressed that outlining assisted her in writing what she considered to be better papers.

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As seen in the two examples, work in the f2f setting was more of a back and forth. This was necessary interaction as the writer did not realize that his thesis statement was somewhat off-topic. In the asynchronous tutorial example, the writer identified the potential for organizational issues in her writing. This allowed the tutor to suggest an outline without first having to discuss the reason for doing so.

Scaffolding the editing episode Many times, EL writers visit the writing centre and request that the tutor work on grammar and editing. Grammar and editing as a primary concern for EL writers attending tutorials has been consistently identified in research (Blau, Hall & Sparks, 2002; Carter-Tod, 1995; Ritter, 2002; Williams, 2004, 2005). There is, though, a difference between a tutor serving as an editor and making corrections in writers’ texts and a tutor serving as a peer who is more experienced with the editing episode of the writing process. In cases of editing as a process, the goal typically is to equip writers with editing skills that will allow them to become better self-editors in all papers. It is a part of the writing process that may be very difficult to address in any tutorial situation. Assisting writers in being better editors is difficult because it entails the writer learning how to identify surface errors and knowing how to make the corrections. Grammar correction or, more specifically, assisting writers in becoming more fluent in self-identifying errors and making the corrections, has been a long-standing conversation in second language composition research (Ferris, 1995; Truscott, 1996; Truscott & Hsu, 2008). Feedback may be direct by crossing out unnecessary words, inserting missing words or providing the correct form (as in verb tense). Also included in this corrective method is providing explanation of grammatical features (Bitchener, 2008; Ferris, 2003). Indirect corrective feedback occurs when errors are identified by circling, highlighting or underlining the error, marginally noting that an error is present in a sentence and indicating the type of error, and, more broadly, simply indicating that an error is present in the sentence (Ferris, 2003; Ferris & Roberts, 2001). Truscott (1996) asserts that writers need to be provided with both written and oral feedback on treatable, rule-governed errors such as tense and definite/indefinite article use. Truscott and Hsu (2008) additionally recommend that focus be limited to one or two grammatical features in order to make the task manageable.

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While tutor training manuals typically recommend delaying grammar work until the end of tutorials (Bruce & Rafoth, 2009; Gillespie & Lerner, 2008; McAndrew & Reigstad, 2001; Murphy & Sherwood, 2008; Ryan & Zimmerelli, 2010), Blau, Hall and Sparks (2002) believe that simultaneously working on grammar and other writing issues addresses legitimate concerns EL writers bring to the tutorial. In the spirit of process-based approaches, working on grammar allows tutors to focus on the editing episode of the process. Making a better writer does not mean correcting a writer’s grammatical mistakes. In fact, in my previous research (Vickers, 2012) writers expressed a desire to learn how to edit versus having the tutor correct their errors. One method for assisting writers in developing editing skills is through scaffolding. Weissberg (2006) reasons that a writing tutorial is a ‘unique opportunity to address the needs of individual L2 writers through dialogic scaffolding’ (p. 262). Scaffolding, as discussed by Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) allows a novice to ‘carry out a task which would be beyond his unassisted efforts’ (p. 90). In writing centre tutorials, tutors can assist writers in becoming more proficient and independent in isolating and correcting grammatical errors by providing cognitive and motivational scaffolding. Cognitive scaffolding occurs by tutors asking open-ended questions, breaking the problem into smaller, more manageable tasks, and prompting. Motivational scaffolding happens when tutors reinforce successful task completion by the writer (Cromley & Azevedo, 2005; Thompson, 2009). How scaffolding manifests in each setting can be different because of delayed or absent bidirectional interaction of asynchronous communication. Below I describe how scaffolding can occur in both f2f and asynchronous settings.

F2f scaffolding grammar correction in f2f tutorials During f2f tutorials, tutors may be better able to gauge the level of success a writer has with completing certain tasks and can immediately reinforce successful task completion accordingly. In my prior research, I explored how tutors scaffold lower-order concerns in the form of grammar work with EL writers. Typically, the tutor can introduce one or two grammatical elements for the writer to work with. Take the following f2f tutorial exchange in between a male tutor and female Chinese writer: t u:m . one th- two things that- two things tuh tuh: really pay attention to . one is articles . so u:m so-and-so the, a– you know uh-um you know that type of thing you know w yeah

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t so one is articles another one is, um, is tense. So like here she, um, so. ((reading writer’s paper)) Willa found that in the end of ((stopped)) okay so ((reading)) following the bible uh: wrote by Luwana Packerville .Willa found that in the ((stopped)) so this is past tense . so Willa found this. Willa found– so found is the verb of that Wi- ((inarticulate utterance)) found is the action that Willa is performing here w m. t so ((reading)) so Willa found (·h) that in the end of her life. she. lose her faith and even said there can be no god ((stopped reading)) so in this case it would actually be lost (0.44) because it- it’s the past so it’s– w oh yeah– t referring back to the- the original – you know – tense of the sentence. so those are: those are basically eh: two things I think to look for is like the use of articles and making sure that that your: your tenses match up you know w yeah. t so you know the present and past tense

In this instance of cognitive scaffolding, the tutor identified two things for the writer to work on: articles and tense. He indicated a and the as being things the writer could look for. He also provided an answer with ‘so this is past tense.’ The tutor went through and initially provided direct correction over several conversational turns. He moved on to providing alternatives to the writer and eventually turned the grammar correction over to the writer and employed motivational scaffolding as seen below: w ((reading)) the novel presented the society who was- which was dominated by men. wo- women . was in the role of serving the foil to . men ((stopped reading)) t r:ight okay. so. so here we’ve got um . um this one is w oh: t yeah:

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w were t you got it! see? yeah. it just takes a little bit of a: you know just a little bit of time with it you know . . .

In this exchange the tutor identified an error, the writer made the verb tense correction (‘were’), and the tutor followed up with reinforcement. He also discussed how error correction takes time. As the tutorial continued, the writer began to identify tense changes on her own; these instances were positively reinforced by the tutor. In addition to the tutor providing this scaffolding, the tutor tied line-by-line error identification and correction back to the writing process. In addition to mentioning elements such as articles and verb tense, the tutor identified that the writer needed to pay attention to her future editing and use his personal writing process for editing as illustrated in the following exchange: t you know, like we were talking about your thesis and then your supporting evidence you know that type of thing . . . and then I’ll go back later and read it for grammar and make sure I’ve got all my tenses matched up so i- I may read my same paper maybe ten times, you know, before I turn it w ten times! t yeah. yeah-yeah. yeah. it- it’s a- I mean I won’t- you know, I won’t read it for grammar ten times but by the from the time I start writing until the time I turn it in I will probably have read it maybe ten times

The scenarios just described illustrate how f2f scaffolding and subsequent redirection to the writing process can be a quick exchange; these scenarios, for example, occurred within a 30-minute time frame. The post-tutorial interview with the writer revealed that the writer appreciated the time the tutor spent on showing her how she might go about editing. She came out of the tutorial with a better understanding of editing as a process, how to identify and work on one or two grammatical features, and indicated that she saw how looking for grammar early in the process of writing her paper might prevent her from focusing on global concerns such as organization.

Scaffolding grammar correction in asynchronous email tutorials Addressing editing in asynchronous tutorials more often uses direct and indirect error identification with the tutor initially providing direct correction and slowly moving towards more indirect methods of error correction. Take, for instance, the work seen in Figure 9.3.

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In this exchange, the tutor indicated three grammatical issues: comma usage, pronoun use and verb tense. Ideally, the writer would subsequently begin to identify patterns in writing such as consistent use of verb tense. Asynchronous tutorials also allow for more focused and detailed teaching moments. In a later tutorial with the same writer, a female Korean, the tutor explained the difference between precede and preceded by after encountering the sentence, ‘Social obligation and nor should be preceded by comfort and fascination.’ Because the tutor was uncertain about whether the writer was conveying her thought correctly, he highlighted the sentence and provided the text seen in Figure 9.4.

Figure 9.3  Direct feedback to writer’s product

Note on ‘precede’ versus ‘preceded by’ When using ‘precede’, the word ‘by’ changes the meaning; meaning is also changed when you include a modal verb. Look at the following three sentences: A) The dog precedes the cat. B) The dog is preceded by the cat. C) The dog should be preceded by the cat. In the first sentence (A), who is first? The dog. The sentence means the dog came first, and then the cat came (or went) . . . Now, the second sentence (B) means the opposite. The cat came before the dog. The sentence is written in passive voice and basically means ‘The cat came before the dog.’ The third sentence (C) does not actually mean that one came before the other. The modal ‘should’ changes the meaning in a couple of way (depending on context). For instance, it might mean that you anticipate the cat coming before the dog. Or, you might mean that the correct (appropriate) order of things is that the cat comes before the dog – a rule of sorts.

Figure 9.4  Explanation of grammatical feature

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This technique prevented the tutor from taking over the writer’s text, which is something Ferris (2003) cautions against when using direct and indirect error correction. Note that mini-lessons of this form have been identified by Hewett (2010) as being weak because they do not require further writer action. Ideally, the forms of scaffolding just mentioned are modified to provide more indirect methods of error identification and correction. Figure 9.5 illustrates an example of this type of error identification. In Figure 9.5, we see how direct identification of grammatical issues has been replaced with highlighted, marginal notations that an error has occurred by directly stating ‘error’ or prompting the writer to look at the highlighted area again. The scaffold of meta-linguistic information on the error type is slowly replaced with this more general error identification in an effort to have writers become more proficient at proofreading and self-identifying errors. The writers in the samples above reported that the type of correction here was beneficial since they had time to think about and research the error (Severino, Swenson & Zhu, 2009). Ferris’s (1995) findings indicate that increased time may contribute to a reduction in writer error because of the increased time for editing. In situations where time for editing was limited, writers’ writing tended to contain more surface errors.

Figure 9.5  Indirect feedback to writer’s product

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Discussion and conclusion All five scenarios above illustrate ways f2f and asynchronous tutorials can address writers’ concerns within a writing process framework. While there is a noticeable difference in the type of interaction that occurs, with f2f tutorials containing more tutor–writer talk, both modes can result in significant change in writers’ reported processes. The exception here is the first f2f tutorial presented where the writer was working on the poem ‘Out, Out’. The tutor indicated that one of his goals in that segment of the tutorial was to teach the writer better outlining skills. The writer, however, indicated that the major changes in his process were the need for research on the poem as a result of the tutorial process. Through his conversations with the tutor, he also became aware of how to approach analysing poetry. In the asynchronous tutorial dealing with outlining, the tutor provided a model outline to the writer and suggested that she create more detailed outlines in the future prior to writing her papers. She indicated that this was beneficial. Although the f2f tutorial contained more interaction between the writer and tutor, that the writer in the asynchronous tutorial picked up on the process change of outlining the tutor targeted may reflect Rathford’s (2009) suggestion that streamlined comments in asynchronous tutorials are better than attempting to address multiple issues in the text. The tutor in this case largely ignored grammatical issues and focused on having the writer outline prior to writing. In the f2f tutorial, the tutor modelled how to take notes and loosely outline, but the majority of the dialogue in the session targeted the writer’s generation of ideas. In the second section of this chapter, I provided scenarios illustrative of how scaffolding can occur in editing episodes. While all of the writers reported a better understanding of how to edit, the writer in the f2f tutorial was more vocal about the impact the tutorial had on her because of the tutor’s description of his own editing practices. This tutorial also allowed for the tutor to monitor the writer’s performance in editing. A constraint in online asynchronous exchanges are that the only way to determine if the writer understood the comments and made changes would be through follow-up email exchanges, analysis of subsequent drafts and analysis of other writing where targeted forms were used correctly. In tutorials typical of writing centres, analysis of revisions or new drafts is unlikely, especially if the writer has only one or two writing tutorials. If an asynchronous email tutorial consists only of one exchange where the writer emails the tutor and the tutor provides assistance with grammatical features and suggests ways for the writer to improve as a self-editor, it is virtually impossible for the tutor

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to know how beneficial suggestions were. This concern is greatly assuaged in f2f tutorials since there is consistent interaction. Even in a single tutorial, the tutor is able to somewhat gauge whether and how the writer has benefited from the scaffolding. The type of interaction in both f2f and asynchronous email tutorials changes the way the tutorials progress and changes what is possible for writers and tutors to accomplish. Extended time is one benefit of asynchronous email tutorials because writers are presented with the chance to repeatedly read and refer back to tutor comments until the comments are fully understood (Severino et al., 2009). Conversely, this same extended time can also be enjoyed by the tutor, yet in a different way. The tutor can spend more time reading and digesting a writer’s text instead of taking a quick minute to skim the text and deciding on where to begin the tutorial. Regardless of tutorial medium, tutors ultimately need to be selective with their comments and, in a process-based model, directly tie the tutorial back to the different process episodes if their goal is to make better writers, not better writing.

References Bartholomae, D. (1986). Inventing the university. Journal of Basic Writing, 5(1), 4–23. Bitchener, J. (2008). Evidence in support of written corrective feedback. Journal of Second Language Writing, 17(2), 102–18. Bizzell, P. (1986). Composing processes: an overview. In A. R. Petrosky & D. Bartholomae (Eds), The teaching of writing (pp. 49–70). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Blau, S., Hall, J., & Sparks, S. (2002). Guilt-free tutoring: rethinking how we tutor non-native-English-speaking students. Writing Center Journal, 23(1), 23–44. Bruce, S., & Rafoth, B. (Eds) (2009). ESL writers: a guide for writing center tutors (2nd edn). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers. Bruffee, K. (1973). Collaborative learning: some practical models. College English, 34(5), 634–43. — (1984). Collaborative learning and the ‘conversation of mankind’. College English, 46(7), 635–52. — (1986). Social construction, language, and the authority of knowledge: a bibliographical essay. College English, 48(8), 773–90. Carter-Tod, S. (1995). The role of the writing center in the writing practices of L2 students. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. United States – Virginia.

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Cromley, J., & Azevedo, R. (2005). What do reading tutors do? A naturalistic study of more and less experienced tutors in reading. Discourse Processes, 40(2), 83–113. doi: 10.1207/s15326950dp4002_1 Faigley, L. (1986). Competing theories of process: a critique and a proposal. College English, 48(6), 527–42. Ferris, D. (1995). Can advanced ESOL students become effective self-editors? CATESOL Journal, 8(1), 41–62. — (2003). Response to student writing: implications for second-language students. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Ferris, D., & Roberts, B. (2001). Error feedback in L2 writing classes: how explicit does it need to be? Journal of Second Language Writing, 10(3), 161–84. Gillespie, P., & Lerner, N. (2008). The Longman guide to peer tutoring. New York: Pearson Education. Hewett, B. (2010). The online writing conference: a guide for teachers and tutors. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers. Lantolf, J. (Ed.) (2000). Sociocultural theory of second language learning. New York: Oxford University Press. McAndrew, D., & Reigstad, T. (2001). Tutoring writing: a practical guide for conferences. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers. Murphy, C., & Sherwood, S. (Eds) (2008). The St. Martin’s sourcebook for writing tutors. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins. North, S. (1984). The idea of a writing center. College English, 46(5), 433–46. — (1994). Revisiting ‘The idea of a writing center’. Writing Center Journal, 15(1), 7–19. Rathford, B. (2009). Responding online. In S. Bruce & B. Rathford (Eds), ESL writers: a guide for writing center tutors (2nd edn, pp. 149–60). Portsmouth, NH: Boyton/ Cook. Ritter, J. (2002). Negotiating the center: an analysis of writing tutorial interactions between ESL learners and native-English speaking writing center tutors. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Ryan, L., & Zimmerelli, L. (2010). The Bedford guide for writing tutors (5th edn). New York: Bedford/St Martins. Severino, C., Swenson, J., & Zhu, J. (2009). A comparison of online feedback requests by non-native English-speaking and native English-speaking writers. Writing Center Journal, 29(1), 106–29. Swales, J. (1988). Discourse communities, genres and English as an international language. World Englishes, 7(2), 211–20. doi: 10.1111/j.1467–971X.1988.tb00232.x Thompson, I. (2009). Scaffolding in the writing center: a microanalysis of an experienced tutor’s verbal and nonverbal tutoring strategies. Written Communication, 26(4), 417–53. doi: 10.1177/0741088309342364 Truscott, J. (1996). The case against grammar correction in L2 writing classes. Language Learning, 46(2), 327–69.

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Truscott, J., & Hsu, A. (2008). Error correction, revision, and learning. Journal of Second Language Writing, 17(4), 292–305. Vickers, J. (2012). Anatomy of process-based writing center tutorials with NNES writers: what writers take away. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. State University of New York at Albany, NY. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/103 2674778?accountid=14166 Weissberg, R. (2006). Scaffolded feedback: tutorial conversations with advanced L2 writers. In K. Hyland & F. Hyland (Eds), Feedback in second language writing: contexts and issues (pp. 246–65). New York: Cambridge University Press. Williams, J. (2004). Tutoring and revision: second language writers in the writing center. Journal of Second Language Writing, 13(3), 173–201. doi: 10.1016/j.jslw.2004.04.009 — (2005). Writing center interaction: institutional discourse and the role of peer tutors. In K. Bardovi-Harlig & B. S. Hartford (Eds), Interlanguage pragmatics: exploring institutional talk (pp. 37–65). Mahwah, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum. Wood, D., Bruner, J., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17(2), 89–100. doi: 10.1111/j.1469–7610.1976. tb00381.x

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Rapport Management and Online Learning: L2 Socialization in Livemocha Adrienne Gonzalez

Introduction In traditional language classroom contexts, pragmatics instruction often takes a backseat to more ‘teachable’ aspects of language (Bardovi-Harlig & Mahan-Taylor, 2003). While it is widely accepted that effective language learning requires meaningful communicative experiences, including actual experience with intercultural communication (e.g. Belz and Thorne, 2006; Canale and Swain, 1980; Kramsch and McConnell-Ginet, 1992), language learners often suffer an omission of the context-rich, high-stakes interactions that are not just important to second language pragmatic development, but also to online learning in general. Web 2.0 tools have become a valuable resource for learners, since they represent opportunities for connections between individuals, both experts and novices. This paper is a case study that examines how one student leverages the power of a social networking site (SNS), Livemocha, to build rapport, and relationships, online. I will begin with a discussion of previous work on language socialization and SNSs, followed by a description of the study’s methodology, the results and, finally, the conclusions, including a discussion of the pedagogical implications of participation in Livemocha for language learning.

Language socialization and rapport management Gaining aptitude in the contextual complexities of language use is crucial in the process of language learning. As Belz and Kinginger (2002) state, ‘learning

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to use the forms and to understand their meaning is as much a function of language socialization as of rule-based language acquisition’ (p. 208). Language socialization is a notion that ‘draws on sociological, anthropological, and psychological approaches to the study of social and linguistic competence within a social group’ (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986, p. 163). This linguistic competence within social contexts is crucial to successful second language acquisition. The process of acquiring language cannot be separated from the process of becoming a competent member of a given society, an accomplishment that is realized to a large extent through language, by acquiring knowledge of its functions, social distribution and interpretations in and across socially defined situations (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984). The idea that becoming a competent member of society is also greatly tied into the principles of situated learning. Gee’s (2004) assertion that ‘people learn best when their learning is part of highly motivated engagement with social practices which they value’ (p. 77) spans across disciplines and is relevant for learners of any subject matter. As many scholars have suggested, a language socialization perspective is particularly valuable for examining socialization into new literacy practices, identities and communities in new media such as SNSs (e.g. Black, 2007, 2008, 2009; Lam 2000, 2004, 2009; Reinhardt & Zander, 2011). One highly important aspect of language socialization is politeness. While there have been many models attempting to explain politeness (e.g. Brown & Levinson, 1987; Fraser & Nolan, 1981; Leech, 1983; Scollon & Scollon, 1983, 2001), rapport management is one that is particularly useful when examining how learners become socialized into new educational spaces. Rapport management is ‘the management of social relations’ (Spencer-Oatey, 2000, p. 12). Rapport management strategies include speech acts, such as requests, expressions of gratitude, apologies and refusals. A number of factors can influence strategy choice, such as rapport orientation (rapport enhancement, rapport maintenance, rapport neglect or rapport challenge), contextual variables (such as power, distance and number of participants), pragmatic conventions (both sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic) and interactional wants (Spencer-Oatey, 2000, 2005). In situations of cross-cultural rapport management, as is often the context for language learners, speakers must consider additional elements including contextual assessment norms, sociopragmatic conventions, pragmalinguistic conventions and fundamental cultural values in their rapport management strategies. Members of more than one community of practice must learn to move fluidly between different cultural

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conventions in order to maintain successful communicative interactions. One type of community in which participants must learn to navigate and manage their social relations is SNSs.

Social networking Thorne and Black (2011) discuss early participation by language learners in open internet environments, primarily newsgroup discussions (Cononelos & Oliva, 1993) and public internet discussion (Hanna & de Nooy, 2003). Today this has extended to include gaming and social networking. The result of participation in these internet spaces is the newly emerging literacy practices of said environments. Participants in Black’s (2007, 2008 and 2009) studies learned to employ transcultural knowledge in fan fiction in order to develop identities as authors, while Lam’s participants (2000, 2004, 2009) created transborder networks to more comfortably and confidently participate in fan communities. In such environments, language learners are immersed in not only the target (or heritage) language, but specific contexts of new environments with language reflecting newly evolving norms for participation. Here they leverage their own personal strengths and experiences to become socialized into the target context. Since 1997 and the launch of the first SNS, social networking via the internet has become a mainstream practice. These web-based platforms allow individuals to ‘(1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system’ (Boyd & Ellison, 2007, p. 211). An 80–90 per cent of digital natives – those people who have grown up and interacted with digital technology from an early age – have profiles on SNSs (Lampe, Ellison & Steinfield, 2007; Tufekci, 2008). Still, experience growing up communicating and receiving information in new ways, however integral to their lives and learning styles, doesn’t necessarily imply that contemporary students will readily adapt to SNS. Students of this generation often require a lengthy training period (Jones & Bissoonauth-Bedford, 2008; Kolaitis, Mahoney, Pomann & Hubbard, 2006) and show diminished enthusiasm when engaging in language and culture activities through computer-mediated communication (CMC) (McBride & Wildner-Bassett, 2008; Thorne, 2003). Other studies, however, indicate that integration of internet social networking communities into higher education courses has a positive effect on motivation,

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affective learning and classroom climate (e.g. Mazer, Murphy & Simonds, 2007). Since SNSs are so popular in students’ personal lives, McBride (2009, p. 38) suggests that they are an ‘obvious possibility to consider’ in terms of finding computer-assisted language learning activities with which students are familiar. Research has suggested many benefits of social network communities for language learning, such as providing exposure to authentic language (e.g. Arnold and Paulus, 2010; Blattner and Fiori, 2009). SNSs are easily accessed environments that learners can participate in and thereby increase their awareness of new pragmatic territory as well as develop multiliteracy skills. Blattner and Fiori (2011) assert that meaningful connections with NSs are essential for learners to become familiar with different conventions and cultural aspects of the second language (L2). In addition, as McBride explains, ‘if students gain skills in communicating and connecting with others through SNSs in the L2 through a class, they will be well poised to establish relationships with other speakers of the L2 via SNSs in the future and to become autonomous, lifelong learners’ (2009, p. 35).

Livemocha The purpose of Livemocha is twofold: (1) to provide users a space in which to practise their target language and (2) to build new relationships with speakers of their target language, making it unique among many other SNSs. In this study, data was collected in Livemocha. This internationally used, online social network connects native speakers (NSs) and language learners, emphasizing the interaction required in language development. Livemocha has designed a place in which people from all over the world meet with a common goal: communication. Livemocha users share a conscious awareness of the importance of connections to other language learners, particularly with those who are NSs of another’s target language. This unique, user-driven collaboration provides language learners with a new platform to acquire both linguistic and cultural competencies. Because of the reciprocal, collaborative nature of Livemocha, participants were encouraged, but not required, to seek out chat partners who were NSs of Spanish, learning English, rather than learners of a language other than English who may have less to gain from the collaboration. The text-chat function in Livemocha offers a number of tools and resources for learners to enhance their conversational experience. Each chat window has a translator, a keyboard to enter special characters and diacritics, suggested conversation topics and scenarios, and a bank of emoticons. The chat window (see

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Figure 10.1) also provides information relevant to the status of the conversation. Notifications appear in the text of the conversation itself when a potential chat partner is connecting, has opened the chat window, and closed the chat window. An icon also appears when an interlocutor is currently entering text, and an audio notification sounds when new text has been entered. Other important elements of the Livemocha learning community include learner profiles containing personal information and photos, language lessons, activities for peer submission and video chat. These additional features and venues for communication serve critical roles in the formation of the social network as a whole by motivating and supporting the relationships built on the site. The host of tools and features included in SNSs are additional elements through which learners can manage rapport  – through friending, sharing, posting, joining groups, and so on (Reinhardt and Zander, 2011). Stevenson and Liu (2010) discuss various social networking features of foreign language learning websites, including Livemocha, Palabea (www. palabea.com) and Babbel (www.babbel.com), to examine both pedagogical and technical usability of the sites (Melis & Weber, 2003). Of the programs evaluated, Livemocha was the overall preferred site by potential users, though they did express mixed opinions regarding technical usability. The usability issues did not

Figure 10.1  Livemocha chat window

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negate the users’ interest in the potential of collaborative language learning in conjunction with more traditional content (Stevenson & Liu, 2010). The following section will discuss the questions addressed in this study, describe the participant in question and the methodology for both data collection and analysis.

The inquiry In order to begin to investigate rapport management among language learners via SNSs, this study addressed the following question: What rapport management strategies does a Livemocha participant employ in his text-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC)? While the original study examined seven Spanish learners, this chapter focuses on the Livemocha interactions of one participant: Vincent. Of the original participants, Vincent was one who showed notable success in building rapport with his interlocutors and was the only participant who had multiple conversations with the same interlocutor. As such, this chapter will examine his conversations to determine what rapport management strategies he and his interlocutors employed. At the time of data collection, Vincent was a 21-year-old junior at a large public university in the United States. He grew up in Houston, Texas, but had also lived in Belgium and France. He had travelled recreationally to both Mexico and Spain for one-week periods, but his exposure to Spanish comes strictly from school. Vincent was a serious and focused Spanish language learner. During chat sessions he put on headphones with music and often maintained several chat conversations for the duration of the class period. This solitary approach was unique to Vincent, since many of the other students in the group would collaborate and communicate with each other in order to understand their chat partners, form utterances or navigate the website. He did not log into Livemocha outside of class, but he did attend department-organized extra credit sessions, which involved chatting in Livemocha. Although he had never studied Spanish formally, Vincent’s mother was from Belgium and so he grew up in a French-speaking environment. Vincent was an experienced user of both SNSs and online chatting programs. Before the study, he had used Facebook and Skype to chat daily with friends and family and had used Facebook daily for networking. He was very open to the

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idea of using these tools in the classroom and thought that chatting in Spanish would be a good use of his internet time.

Data Although there are common concerns about longitudinal studies, such as time demands, heightened mortality of the initial sample and complex data, the collection of longitudinal data can yield important insights. Through the use of this ‘underpracticed’ but ‘necessary’ methodological approach in SLA (Markee & Kasper, 2004, p. 495), studies can chart growth and development, analyse change at the individual/microlevel and show how changing properties of individuals fit into systematic change (Kasper & Rose, 2002). The data in this study consist of one participant’s natural, authentic discourse with NSs of Spanish in a textual SCMC environment. Natural data has been shown to best depict realistic language use, whereas elicited data, such as discourse completion tasks, does not inform actual language use. Rather, this elicited data can only provide insight into speakers’ own intuitions about the language (Bou Franch & Lorenzo Dus, 2008). Most non-native speaker authentic discourse has been collected in institutional settings, such as academic advisement or writing tutoring sessions (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1996) or oral proficiency interviews (Young & He, 1998). In addition to being rich sources of conversational data, interactions in these particular contexts are comparable, interactive and consequential, while displaying ‘authentic language use by speakers who are speaking as themselves, in genuine situations, with socioaffective consequences’ (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1996, p. 13). Some have argued that data collection in these institutional environments solves the numerous methodological issues that can arise when examining natural discourse, including unpredictability, lack of control variables or potential scarcity of the feature in question in a given sample (Beebe, 1994; Beebe & Cummings, 1996). However, the fact remains that much human communication occurs in spontaneous, natural contexts, and as such, analysis of language use in uncontrolled, spontaneous contexts is key in understanding communicative practices and L2 development in the real world. Furthermore, Livemocha conversations provide an excellent opportunity to explore rapport management between language learners in an SNS. A conversation analytical (CA) method was used to interpret the transcripts of Vincent’s online interactions. This method was chosen because it ‘has

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accrued the largest and most coherent cumulative body of research, lending high credibility to its theoretical foundations and methodology’ (Kasper, 2006, p. 283), and this approach to data analysis is particularly well suited for analysis of interaction within SCMC, given its highly contextual nature (González-Lloret, 2007). Analysis aims to discover recurrent patterns in the data and describe how participants orient to these patterns, the goal being to ‘describe how participants create social order by understanding the ways and structures in which social practices are configured and what they can achieve’ (Pallotti & Wagner, 2011, p. 3). This microanalytic, case-study approach facilitates close examination of the data of one learner in terms of the sequential organization, conversational inference and non-verbal components of his interactions with the NSs. Kasper and Rose (2002) explain that ‘the combination of microanalysis with an ethnographic perspective makes interactional sociolinguistics and ethnographic microanalysis particularly powerful approaches for the analysis of intercultural interaction’ (pp. 67–8). Doing a conversation analysis relies on ‘unmotivated looking’, since it requires being open for discovery rather than searching for hypotheses and according to Seedhouse (2004) involves the following steps: 1. Locate an action sequence or sequences. 2. Characterize the actions in the sequence or sequences. In the case of this study, the primary action being analysed is the conversation closing, including the smaller actions that constitute these closings. Seedhouse explains that a major advantage of CA is that it can ‘portray the multiplicity of actions performed’ by a single utterance (p. 40). 3. Examine the action sequence(s) in terms of the organization of turn taking. 4. Examine the action sequence(s) in terms of sequence organization. 5. Examine the action sequence(s) in terms of the organization of repair. 6. Examine how the speakers package their actions in terms of the actual linguistic forms which they select from the alternatives available and consider the significance of these. This is essentially a form–function analysis, focusing on the forms which are used to manifest the functions. This is particularly interesting when analysing the conversations of language learners, as they may not yet have acquired the desired functions and are working with a limited repertoire. 7. Uncover any roles, identities or relationships that emerge in the details of the interaction. 8. Attempt to locate this particular sequence within a bigger picture.

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The data analysis yielded interesting trends regarding this language learner’s rapport management practices in Livemocha.

Online rapport management Vincent’s Livemocha conversations rely heavily on laughter, humour, emoticons, and small talk as rapport management strategies. As Glenn states: Laughter has been part of the human communicative repertoire for a very long time, probably even predating speech, and our higher primate cousins also enact behaviors that look and sound like laughter and serve similar purposes. It appears to be a universal in form and function across diverse human languages and cultures. Plenty of evidence suggests that plenty of laughter provides significant physical and psychological benefits that contribute to individual well-being. (2003, p. 1)

This section will examine the forms and functions of laughter and humour in intercultural and multilingual interactions between language learners in Livemocha. Previous work has pointed out the importance of humour and laughter in the management of social relations, discussing how these two components of language can serve to create solidarity, enhance self-esteem, gain approval, manage embarrassment or stress, and express opposition (e.g. Anthony, this volume; Collinson, 1988, 2002; Coser, 1959; Haakana, 1999; Jefferson, 1984; Meyer, 2000; Mulkay, 1988; Vinton, 1989). Specifically within the mediums of CMC, humorous performance is a tool that is used for the creation of group solidarity, group identity and individual identity (Baym, 1995), since humour is embedded in shared knowledge (Chiaro, 1992; Oring, 1992; Palmer, 1994). Humour and laughter manifest in a number of ways in these data. Many scholars have discussed the nature of CMC and its potential for disrupting the cues used for humour in face-to-face interaction, such as tone of voice, facial expression, laughter, and so on (e.g. Dresner & Herring, 2010; Palmer, 1994). However, these data indicate that language learners adopt a number of methods for expressing humour and conveying laughter in their written conversations. One common way in which Vincent and his interlocutors express humour or acknowledge humour is to convey laughter textually and explicitly, as Hubler and Bell (2003) describe, by writing out indicators such as ‘Nice one!’, ‘Hilarious!’, or most commonly in these data ‘lol’ (laugh out loud) or variations of ‘hahaha’.

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(1) 20 Interlocutor: Tienes un nombre maravilloso. You have a marvelous name. 21 Interlocutor: Asi se llama mi hermano.xD That’s what my brother is named.xD

22 Vincent:

lol (14 October 2009, #2, 20–2)

Example 1 shows Vincent expressing laughter after his interlocutor states that he has a marvellous name and that her brother shares the same name. This reaction to her statements may also be a response to her use of the smiley emoticon (xD) as a way of showing appreciation for or acknowledgement of her attempt to establish rapport through the use of light-hearted joking and establishing something in common. As also seen in Example 1, participants also use emoticons to express joking or humorous intent. As Dresner and Herring (2010) describe, emoticons can serve one of three functions: (1) to express emotion, mapped directly onto a facial expression, (2) to express non-emotional meaning, mapped conventionally onto facial expressions and (3) to indicate illocutionary force that does not map conventionally onto a facial expression. In line 21 of Example (1) above, the interlocutor’s emoticon serves to express non-emotional meaning: to imply that the statement made is of a sarcastic or joking nature. Likewise in Example 2, Vincent’s smiley emoticon in line 80 might function as a way for Vincent to modestly acknowledge the light-hearted or joking complement that his interlocutor delivered. (2) 76 Vincent:

estudio los negocios internationals I study international business

77 Vincent:

y tambien español, frances, y economía and also Spanish, French, and economics

78 Interlocutor: wwooooww que muchacho tan estudioso! :D wwooooww what a studious boy! :D

79 Interlocutor: jejejej



80 Vincent:

:) (27 January 2010, #3, 76–80)

Vlahovic, Roberts and Dunbar (2012) refer to emoticons and laughter indicators in text as ‘symbolic laughter’ and explain how ‘emoticons can elicit positive affect, and that emoticons are used is a similar way to laughter’ (Derks, Bos &

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von Grumbkow, 2008; Provine, Spencer & Mandell, 2007; Walther, Loh & Granka, 2005). Their study concluded that, in CMC, laughter has a greater effect on levels of interlocutors’ happiness than the duration of the conversation. As such, the high occurrence of laughter and emoticons in his conversations might explain how Vincent was able to build positive rapport with his interlocutors in spite of the short amount of time spent conversing with them. Vlohovic et al.’s (2012) study also suggested that this tendency is not limited to particular types of relationships and can be applied across all types of social relationships. This suggests that, as with speakers of the same language, laughter promotes positive affect and prosocial behaviour in novice/expert conversations, particularly in newly forming intercultural relationships. It is true, however, that not all instances of laughter stem from humour or humorous situations in these data. Dresner and Herring (2010) discuss how in CMC a standard smiley can serve mitigating functions by downgrading an utterance to be less face-threatening for the interlocutor. In CMC between language learners, Reinhardt (2008) showed how what he calls ‘textualized paralanguage-like laughter’ (p. 228) is a task-appropriate solidarity move that can also be used to indicate lexical appropriateness to an interlocutor. Some computer-mediated forms of laughter between language learners in Livemocha serve similar functions, such as in Example 3. (3) 29 Vincent:

hablo ingles y frances, y deseo mucho aprender espangol. I speak English and French, and I really want to learn Spanish.

30 Interlocutor: Pero ya estas hablando perfectamente. But you are already speaking perfectly. 31 Vincent:

todos mi amigos hablan espangol . . . pero mi. lol all my friend speak Spanish . . . but me. lol (14 October 2009, #2, 29–31)

In these cases, laughter is not directly related to humour of any type, but regardless, the case above is still significant to rapport management. By saying that he is the only one of his friends who does not speak Spanish, Vincent places heightened importance on his conversation with the interlocutor and in his involvement in the Livemocha community since these will help him learn his target language. Small talk can be defined as a discourse strategy used to manage social interactions (Holmes, 2000). While this type of talk may be ‘non-obligatory talk in terms of task requirements’ (McCarthy, 2000, p. 84), it can serve important

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social functions, such as ‘constructing, expressing, maintaining, and reinforcing interpersonal relationships’ (Holmes, 2000, pp. 47–8). Pullin (2010) defends the function of small talk, explaining that transactional or goal-oriented aspects of language and interactional functions of language are ‘intrinsically linked as all goal-oriented talk is dependent to some extent on the establishment of relations’ (p. 458), and as such, this type of language use is closely related to Spencer-Oatey’s (2000, 2002, 2005) concept of rapport. In Vincent’s conversations, he did not have a pre-existing relationship with his interlocutors, so small talk is prevalent. In these cases, the small talk serves to establish the relationship and possibly set the tone of relationship maintenance and the potential for future communication. One very common way in which Vincent connected with his interlocutors through small talk was through shared cultural references. As Pullin (2010) discovered in her study on small talk, topic selection in conversation appears to be important for rapport management. She discusses how certain topics, such as music and food, promote the creation of common ground that ‘not only transcends international borders but also allows non-face threatening discussions that may still reflect individual tastes and aspects of identity’ (p. 469). The creation of common ground through shared cultural references is an important strategy that Vincent and his interlocutors employed to establish rapport. While the ability to reflect individual taste and identity is still important in the building of their relationships, careful or strategic topic selection is also an opportunity to identify with each other and establish ‘understanding and affective links between staff [or in this case language learners] of very different cultures and hence nurture solidarity’ (p. 464). Example 4 illustrates how Vincent employs the use of a shared cultural reference, the phrase ‘hasta la vista’ (line 170), into his conversation closing. The interlocutor both recognizes Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous line from Terminator 2: Judgment Day and builds on this now established common reference by completing the initial phrase ‘hasta la vista baby’ (line 173) and working in an additional phrase from the prequel The Terminator: ‘i’ll be back’ (line 177). Both participants in this conversation are amused, to say the least, by the discovery and evocation of this reference when their laughter progresses from the written expression (i.e. haha) to the acronym indicating outwardly verbal expression (i.e. lol, the acronym for laugh out loud). (4) 161 Interlocutor: bueno amigo well friend

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162 Interlocutor: tengo que salir I have to leave 163 Vincent:

yo tambien. voy a mi clase de espangol me too. I’m going to my Spanish class

164 Interlocutor: fue un placer hablar contigo it was a pleasure talking with you 165 Vincent:

mucho gusto, [name of interlocutor]! nice to meet you, [name of interlocutor]!

166 Interlocutor: el gusto es mio the pleasure is mine 167 Interlocutor: te cuidas take care 168 Interlocutor: hablamos otro dia we’ll talk another day 169 Vincent:

si! hasta pronto yes! see you soon

170 Vincent:

hasta la vista (es mejor) hasta la vista (is better)

171 Interlocutor: claro of course 172 Interlocutor: jajaja hahaha

173 Interlocutor: hasta la vista baby !!



174 Vincent:



175 Interlocutor: lol

176 Vincent:

lol ciao bye

177 Interlocutor: ill be back

178 Interlocutor: ciao bye

179 *** Interlocutor ’s IC window is closed (28 October 2009, #2, 161–79)

In this example, both participants co-operatively construct their closing by employing some of the most famous closing components in US and international popular culture. As mentioned above, humour can be used for the creation of

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group solidarity; the fact that this occurs during the conversation closing is significant, since closings are the last opportunity for speakers to set the tone of the interaction and establish the possibility for future interaction. It is clear that in this example, Vincent and his interlocutor connect with one another and build rapport. While shared cultural references work to strengthen the bond between interlocutors and assist in building and maintaining positive rapport, interlocutors in Livemocha also rely on discussing and sharing elements of their own culture. In Example (5), Vincent asks whether many people in Colombia have cars. As he learns something about the culture (in this case, that many Colombian people do have cars), he also learns something about his interlocutor and works to build rapport by identifying with this. (5) 65 Vincent: tienes un coche? hay mucha gente que tienen coches a columbia? do you have a car? are there many people that have cars in Colombia? 66 Vincent:

(yo no tengo un coche, pero no me importa) (I don’t have a car, but I don’t care)



67 Interlocutor: jajaja



68 Interlocutor: Aquí sí hay mucha gente que tiene coche, infortunadamente no me

69 puedo incluir en ellos. Here there are many people who have a car, unfortunately I can’t include myself among them. 70 Interlocutor: Pero tengo moto. But I have a motorcycle. 71 Vincent:

aprendí a manejar la moto hace dos semanas I learned to drive a motorcycle two weeks ago

72 Interlocutor: Qué bien, y te has caido? How great, and have you fallen? 73 Vincent: no fue tan dicícil pero estaba muy divertido! no it was difficult but was very fun! (31 March 2010, #1, 65–73)

As seen in previous work (e.g. Pullin, 2010), Examples 4 and 5 illustrate how Vincent’s small talk served to help him build, maintain and reinforce rapport

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between his language learner conversation partners in Livemocha. This was primarily done through trying to identify with his interlocutors and searching for commonalities as a rapport management strategy.

Discussion and conclusions It is clear from Vincent’s interactions that participants in the Livemocha space make a concerted effort to establish positive rapport with their interlocutors. As discussed in the previous section, it appears that learners in this community heavily rely on laughter and small talk to assist in managing rapport. Because this is a self-motivated learning environment, it is in the best interest of every participant to care for his or her network of language partners. These relationships are paramount to learning in this online space, since it is founded on learning as socially manifest. Access to native speakers is an invaluable asset to any language learner, and Vincent’s interactions in Livemocha confirm the importance of the social elements of language learning, particularly online. Livemocha is essentially based on a rewards system for those participants who successfully navigate the social aspect of the community. Those learners who build and maintain relationships with other participants have more access to the resources that those participants provide such as conversation partners, activity reviewers, sources for cultural information, and so on. Inability to adapt to the social norms of this space would result in a less rewarding experience for the learner. In this sense, Livemocha is a perfect microcosm for the real world. For classroom learning, Livemocha might be a useful tool if incorporated well into the curricular flow. As Reinhardt and Zander (2011) suggest, more guidance and structure of the activity would be required to assist students to utilize the SNS and take advantage of their newfound connections. For example, students could be guided to use Livemocha as a data source by gathering information about various topics from NSs from various countries and then using this information for class discussions or compositions. Students might also use Livemocha as a venue for practicing specific tasks and forms by engaging in conversation and attempting to follow conversation prompts that direct them to practise specific forms within the context of real, meaningful conversation. Still, there is something to be said for the 100 per cent self-motivated approach. González-Lloret (2011) argues that the use of SCMC outside of class could promote autonomous learning and encourage students to engage in more

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interactions with more interlocutors, allowing them to build relationships and experience a wide range of pragmatic rules. This idea could be applied to online learning in any discipline; if learners are provided the freedom to establish their own social identity online, their relationships with both the subject matter and their fellow learners will carry more significance and flourish.

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‘We don’t have to always post stuff to help us learn’: Informal Learning through Social Networking in a Beginners’ Chinese Group Marie-Noelle Lamy

Introduction The notion of exploiting social networking sites (SNSs) for learning and teaching has invoked Messianic responses from the language education community. However, empirical evidence is often limited to descriptions of conventional online projects, for example, telecollaborations. Yet to be explored are differences between instructed activities online which are instructor-directed and non-instructed participation on SNSs. Lamy and Zourou (forthcoming) argue that there is a difference between interacting (characteristic of online language classes since the early 1990s) and networking (characteristic of what occurs on SNSs). If participants are meeting on an SNS rather than on a conventional discussion board, then following what we have learnt from task design scholarship over two decades (Hampel, 2006), they should engage the specific affordances of such sites. This chapter addresses the need to better understand the nature of adjunct networking for language learning practices. To frame the inquiry, two schemes are used: (1) criteria for identifying SN practices (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008a; Musser, O’Reilly & O’Reilly Radar Team, 2006) and (2) tools for analysing social learning in informal settings (Fenwick and Tennant, 2004; Schugurensky, 2000, 2007).

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Informal learning It is helpful to distinguish between formal/informal learning, and formal/ informal settings. Formal learning can take place in a formal setting (e.g. instructor-anchored courses) or an informal one (e.g. Facebook adjuncts to courses). Informal learning (IL) too can occur in formal settings or informal ones. SN websites can be either formal spaces where participation is dependent on being registered with an institution, or informal spaces where the minimum prerequisite for participation is to have set up one’s profile. This study deals with IL in informal settings. Despite its substantial roots in adult and citizenship education going back to Paulo Freire, research into IL is scarce. Schugurensky (2000, 2007) explains this by the difficulty of evidencing any type of learning, compounded by the fact IL data is difficult to track down. IL can be intentional but can also be non-intentional and non-conscious, becoming conscious long after exposure to the learning event. He conceptualizes three forms of IL. First, self-directed learning refers to ‘learning projects’ undertaken by individuals (alone or as part of a group) without the assistance of an educator (teacher, instructor, facilitator). It is intentional because the individual has a purpose for learning something even before the learning process begins, and it is conscious, in the sense that the individual is aware that she or he has learned something’ (Schugurensky, 2000, p. 3). Secondly incidental learning ‘refers to learning experiences that occur when the learner did not have any previous intention of learning something out of that experience, but after the experience she or he becomes aware that some learning has taken place.’ (p. 4). Finally, socialization ‘refers to the internalization of values, attitudes, behaviors, skills, etc. that occur during everyday life, [for example] some people may not be aware that they have learned something in a particular experience until they have a conversation with a person who asks questions about their learnings, eliciting retrospective recognition’ (pp. 4–5). Fenwick and Tennant (2004) propose the following four lenses on adult learning, warning that these should not be viewed as discrete or mutually exclusive but as synergistic, having the potential to ‘illuminate learning processes and suggest educative responses in particular pedagogical situations’ (p. 56). ll

ll

Learning as acquisition: this lens considers knowledge as substantive and something an individual obtains through learning experiences Learning as reflection: this lens focuses on learners as active constructors of knowledge, creating new meanings and realities rather than ingesting pre-existing knowledge

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ll

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Practice-based community: this lens focuses on human ability to participate meaningfully in everyday activities within particular communities of practice Learning as embodied, co-emergent processes: sees learning as emerging via relationships that develop among all participants in a given context and includes participants, ‘spatial arrangements and movements, tools and objects’ (p. 56).

Table 11.1  Three examples of IL processes in the beginners Chinese SNSs Acquisition

Reflection

Student KC, 15 September Student OS, 3 September 2011, 10:36 2011, 19:11 So has anyone else found Alright guys – quick question: Looking at the de their Mandarin starting shihou verb construction – to ‘click’ recently? I think I’ve reached a do you need to use ‘Le’ kind of tip-over point after the state verb to show where previously I that the action is past had difficulty thinking tense?So to say – ‘when i in Mandarin (I kept was in London i was very resetting to German for busy’ would you say: some reason) I find that 我在伦敦的时候，我很忙了 I can now unconsciously Wo zai lundun de shihou, translate a lot more, and wo hen mang le? I can better remember Or words and phrases. 我在伦敦的时候，我很忙，。 I’m also finding myself Wo zai lundu de shihou, wo leaning less on Google hen mang? translate when I have [There follow 8 posts text conversations expressing various views (although my character and joking] recognition is still Student OQ, 15 September terrible.) 2011, 23:59 i like to argue . . . either would I’ve still got a lot of work to do on my speaking be OK IMO. If you are confident and able enough and listening, but overall I’m feeling a lot more to add several ‘le’ markers, I confident, and I’m really think they are OK. enjoying it, rather than Language wise . . . its not actually trying to avoid wrong, its just that you Mandarin conversations dont need to repeat time now and time again as its already assumed. Student KC, 17 September 2011, 17:07 Checked with tutor last night, no need for a Le.

Community orientation Student ZX, 8 June 2011, 18:46 Eeek [Assignment] 5 already ! Only two more to go :o/ Student OS, 8 June 2011, 18:57 Yep, but at least this isn’t a speaking one! Student KC, 8 June 2011, 19:30 Jesus – i’ve just listened to the mp3 for [assignment] 5. Woosh – straight over me head. Student ZX, 8 June 2011, 19:32 Oh no ! I’m still behind too. I’m scared ! Student PH, 8 June 2011, 22:13 The next one is a speaking one though :( I really panic with sending the files together after what happened in [assignment] 1 :( x Student OS, 9 June 2011, 14:43 Well, I’ve done Part A! Student ZX, 9 June 2011, 14:44 Well done you ! I’m yet to brave looking at the paper :o/ Student OS, 9 June 2011, 14:51 Part A (listening) is more intimidating than part B (writing) Student PH, 9 June 2011, 14:52 I agree O !! The listening terrified me and took me ages of repeating and repeating to get even a guess at the answer !! This time though I really enjoyed the writing

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Table 11.1 shows how the first three lenses are employed to examine forms of IL on the SNSs. Explicit in the student posts,1 these illustrate acquisition (Student KC’s acquisition of a grammatical rule), reflection (Student OS’s review of his progress) and community orientation (students bonding and reflecting on shared experiences of study anxiety). The fourth IL feature, the co-emergent process, can be understood in reference to rich online learning environments being co-built up by the learners through their social networking, as illustrated in Figure 11.1. Inside the black

Figure 11.1  An example of the co-emergent IL process

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frame is the overall learning environment. Inside the speckled grey shape are the environments that have been created or included by students as their learning needs emerged, including the two Facebook groups, a range of spaces (top of the figure), as well as digital learning objects (bottom of the figure).

Learning mediated through social networking The mid-2000s saw the publication of work from a range of disciplines that converge in general consensus on ways to distinguish between web 1.0 and web 2.0 (or the social web) on the basis of an industrial and post-industrial characterization. Originating in an analysis of trends in internet and software commerce, O’Reilly’s (2005) account saw web 1.0 as embodying an industrial view of products and production, where value is a function of scarcity, while the web 2.0 reflects a service-oriented, post-industrial ethos where value is a function of dispersion and relies on collective expertise. Within the scholarship of new literacies meanwhile, Lankshear and Knobel (2006) structured their analysis of digital literacies for web 1.0 and web 2.0 through contrasting a physical-industrial and a digital take on literacies. In the second of these two mindsets, web 2.0 is not a collection of material artefacts but a network of enabling services; the focus is no longer on software firms and companies publishing and disseminating websites but on leverage and non-finite participation. Tools are no longer for producing but are for ‘mediating and relating’ (p. 38). The authors add that ‘the more a literacy practice can be seen to reflect the characteristics of the [second] mindset and, in particular, those qualities . . . that internet commentators like Tim O’Reilly have associated with the concept of Web 2.0, the more it is entitled to be regarded as a new literacy’ (p. 60, italics in original). In line with this, Lankshear and Knobel (2008b) note that participation in web 2.0 social software applications involves work that ‘gets done by means of encodification that is significantly different from more familiar literacy practices in physical-print space (e.g., letter writing) as well as in digital media spaces like weblogs, email clients, conventional websites, and so on’ (p. 275). They go on to point to the way that users of conventional spaces make meaning primarily through text manipulation, while users of SNSs enjoy easier, faster ways of entering into negotiations with others due to (1) the SNSs’ many automated processes for meaning making – for example, ‘liking’, ‘poking’, gift-sending, and so on, (2) the one-click facilities for adding applications and sharing complex multimedia objects such as images, audios and videos and (3) a preference on SNSs for abbreviated textual material

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(e.g. status updates or Tweets). This leads Lankshear and Knobel (2008b) to concentrate on SN spaces that ‘require specialized interfaces that help participants manage information about themselves, facilitate connections with selected others through quick links to their profiles and automated updates etc, and help them manage diverse interpersonal interactions with others (e.g. text, image, video and audio messaging systems; testimonial spaces; song clip sharing facilities; interactive games; quizzes; photo sharing and tagging)’ (p. 250). The current study researches uses of these SN-specific features as they arise in Facebook and a more conventional online discussion format with some SN enhancements (full visual and textual profiles, linked blogs and wikis, and RSS feeds). Building on Musser et al. (2006), Zourou (2012) identifies these authors’ three criteria of user participation and re-use, openness and network effects as key to seeing whether possibilities for learning differ between the pre-social web and post-social web eras of language education. The first criterion, user participation and re-use, has been researched in web 1.0 forums in language classes (Lamy and Hampel, 2007, p. 18). In web 2.0, however, these are augmented forms of participation that include remixing of digital objects (hence we name this category re-use throughout the chapter) through aggregating, combining, tagging or annotating them. For example, in language learning, re-use of digital content might involve ‘embedding it in the social networking routines that learners develop outside formal learning settings rather than reporting it formally on class blogs, as happened in earlier telecollaboration projects’ (Zourou, 2012). Figure 11.2 is an abbreviated discussion thread that illustrates re-use from the Beginners Chinese data. The topic is a public YouTube video created by a Westerner speaking Chinese well posted by a student that draws comments from 13 others. The conversation includes unplanned character-writing and reading practice in response to this re-use. In this example, the initial learning object (the video) is appropriated by the group as a stimulus for conversational exchange. This exchange in turn is used as a learning object by student KC in Post 13, prompting him to reflect (self-deprecatingly) on his own proficiency, and leading student ZX in Post 14 to provide linguistic assistance. Openness refers ‘to the conceptual change between creating in closed spaces (for instance: creating software with exclusive copyright and no editing possibilities for a private software company) and doing so with the community using an open, participatory method’ (Zourou, 2012), one example being the user-created dictionary bab.la. In our data, openness is illustrated when students

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Figure 11.2  An example of re-use

open blogs for their study mates, inviting them to add to photo collections on free photographic repository sites, or creating free study aids for sharing among their peers. The third feature, network effects, occurs ‘when a product or service becomes more valuable as the number of people using it increases’ (Musser et al., 2006, p. 13). Examples include word-of-mouth dissemination, viral phenomena and ‘other no-cost mechanisms’ (p. 13). Figure 11.3 illustrates this with respect to the Chinese Beginners corpus. Here again the initial learning object on offer is a video whose potential value to the viewers is enhanced by additional documentation (wikipedia link)

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Lion Dance Student SP Post 1, 7 February 2011, 21:50 This is a video of my Wing Chun Kung Fu club performing the Lion Dance at [name of hometown]. The Lion Dancers are all members of the club and it was the Yellow and the White Lions first year of participating, really they have only been practicing for the dance for about two months so they did really well. I took my daughter to see it in the end so I didn’t end up drumming but I am going to be doing the drumming for the next event that we have in [name of neighbouring town] next weekend if anyone is about :) http://www ...... Student KA, Post 2, 7 February 2011, 22:08 excellent – i love the waggling tail on the blue one. Also love the way they drum on the big static drum – almost like they’re drumming in reverse (so instead of hitting the skin down your hitting the skin on teh way up).... what’s the story behind the lion dance – what does it represent? Student ZX, Post 3, 7 February 2011, 22:18 Brilliant video. I liked the red lion. The drummer was excellent. If your drumming is as good then I’m very impressed ☺ Here is the story – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_dance Student LX, Post 4, 7 February 2011, 23:03 Like the dragons dance but not the racket! I’d need earplugs! Student TW, Post 5, 8 February 2011, 07:05 ☺ Thank you for sharing – I’ve downloaded both to share with the kids in my school! ☺

Figure 11.3  An example of network effects

and enhanced again by becoming a learning object for a wider audience (the student’s own school students) and thereby as a means for the student to add no-cost value to her professional practice.

The terrain and population of the study In their formal programs, good distance teaching institutions try to take account of the socialization needs of students, recognizing this as key to student achievement in non-campus-based learning (Lamy, 2013). To assist social contact and compensate for isolation from peers, the Open University provides staff-moderated forums, with participation optional though institutionally

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encouraged. In these forums students are under no formal learning constraints. Instructions for the use of these informal spaces typically declare: This forum is open to all students in this module. It is similar to a Café area where you can meet other students in the module and chat about general matters of interest to you related to the module (emphasis added). You can draw help and support from each other.

However in the Chinese module under study here, the staff moderator decided to complement this general forum with another informal space entitled Culture, with this more specific instruction: This forum is for you to share and discuss your thoughts raised by the Culture Notes and in particular the 想一想xiǎng yi xiǎng ‘have a think’ sections in the [module’s] books.

Thus the one forum, henceforth OUGeneral, was designed for ‘study-related exchange’ (Wodzicki, Schwämmlein & Moskaliuk, 2012, p. 9) or, expressed in terms of Schugurensky’s IL model, study-related socialization. The latter, henceforth OUCulture, was aligned more closely with the formal course although no set tasks were associated with it. This study’s data come from adult Chinese learners’ interactions in these two spaces, plus another two on Facebook. Shortly after the opening of OUGeneral, a student decided to create a Facebook group. This having been greeted enthusiastically by peers, she opened a public group (henceforth FBPublic). A few weeks later another student suggested on FBPublic that the cohort might like to use a private Facebook group. This idea also met with approval, and she created a second FB Group (henceforth FBPrivate). About 30 of the students took part in all 4 spaces during the period September 2010 to August 2011. The data in this chapter comprises posts contributed by these users during that period, corresponding to the formal study year.2 The corpus consists of 5,372 posts, of which 4,016 were collected from both OU forums (the OU subcorpus) and 1,356 from both Facebook groups (the FB subcorpus).

Whole-corpus quantitative analysis: How students use SN features On first reading, it was clear that to the three features of SN suggested by Zourou, – user participation, openness and network effects – a fourth needed to

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be added: link-display. A prevalent rhetorical move in digital meaning-making is when users display a link, thereby inviting others to visit it. In this study, the category link-display contains all occurrences of such invitations when they are met with no responses. Link-display refers to a prevalent rhetorical move in digital meaning-making, in which users display a link, inviting others to ‘go and see’, yet there is no follow-up from peers. The OU forum software allows researchers to see which posts have been read, and by whom (a facility not available on Facebook). Many of the (by definition unanswered) link-display items in the data were in fact ‘seen’ by other participants. Link-display is therefore an ambiguous category in that communication may have taken place or may not. From a methodological point of view, it requires a different treatment, since SN cannot be evidenced in the posts alone. However, acknowledging the statistical importance of link-display, even if this category cannot be qualitatively analysed here, is a step towards a useful (negative) characterization of SN, since ‘although they carry and amplify messages, networks are not primarily broadcast channels’ (Pegrum, 2010, p. 348). It also prompts socio-educational questions about the inequalities in digital skills that lead large numbers to reduce their SN input to pasting links rather than engaging with creation or transformation of digital objects. Using posts as units of analysis was problematic as this method risked inflating category statistics: for example, a user may post data for re-use, which does get taken up by others in a thread consisting of, say, 12 other posts about the same topic. While this might count as an example of networking on the part of each of the participants, the messy reality of human interaction means that not all 12 posts are likely to be entirely focused on re-use of the initiator’s data. Some posts will be only partly concerned with it, others may initiate a new topic within the same thread. For these reasons, entire threads were chosen as units of analysis. In other words a thread of whatever length that contains at least two interacting posts instantiating re-use counts as one instance of that category. Similarly, threads with two or more posts in the categories openness or network effects count as one instance of the relevant category. Threads of whatever length which fit none of the four categories, for example, discussions about exams or workload, are excluded from the analyses. On the institutional spaces OUGeneral and OUCulture combined, out of a total of 187 threads, the top category was re-use, with 68 threads (36% of all posts), followed by link-display with 54 threads (29%), then openness and network effects with 3 threads (3%) for each category. Figure 11.4 summarizes these findings.

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40 35 30 OU forums (both)

25 20

Facebook forums (both)

15 10 5 0 User Link participation display

Openness

Network effects

Figure 11.4  Percentage of threads in each SN category in all spaces

Subcorpus quantitative analysis: Differences and similarities in SN use Next, the two institutional forums were examined to assess different SN practices. OUGeneral had 64 (34 %) threads from the category re-use, 41 (22%) from the category link-display, 3 (3 %) from openness and 3 (3%) from network effects. In OUCulture, on the other hand, link-display was the most frequent category, totalling 13 threads (7%), while 4 threads (2%) were from re-use, with no data in the other two categories. In the Facebook subcorpus, most of the threads (120 out of 129) did not involve dedicated SN features but were limited to text-based exchanges. The only SN category found in FBPublic was the non-interactive category link-display: 7 (5%) instances. Using this category scheme, it appears that Facebook was not being used as an SN space. One possible reason is that the period when FBPublic was active (September–December 2010) was when the new cohort was not yet socialized as a group, having freshly enrolled. In contrast, FBPrivate seems to have picked up where FBPublic left off: two of the SN categories were substantially represented: out of 1,227 (100%) posts, threads belonging to the category re-use represented 3 per cent, while 2 per cent were from link-display and 0.2 per cent contained instances of openness. Network effects were not evidenced. Finally, qualitative analysis suggests that exchanges in FBPrivate were broadly similar to those in the OU forums in terms of category distribution, although there was a difference in the volume of interaction with the institutional forums generating more. Re-use was the main form of SN practice in the OU forums. In the Facebook groups it ranks above link-display. The second-ranking category on

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the OU forums, with equal top-ranking on the Facebook groups, was link-display. Openness and network effects were not very productive categories on the OU forums, and they were respectively negligible and non-existent on the Facebook groups. These low frequencies are interesting, or disappointing, depending on perspective, because openness and network effects are seen as integral to the idea of social networking in web 2.0. Yet, based on this quantitative analysis, students appeared to underutilize the SN affordances of specialized SNSs. To the extent that they engaged with SN practices, they did so more frequently on the enhanced forum provided by the institution.

Qualitative analyses Re-use The dataset was broken down into two subsets: one where students found existing resources on the internet, and the other where the resources were student created. Threads in the category re-use typically involved a mix of elements from all four categories of IL. An elaborated example will be presented at the end of the section (Figure 11.5).

Re-use of found resources Students typically shared links to existing, third-party resources such as poems, magazine articles, songs, photographs, videos and audios. They discussed, reviewed and sometimes modified them. Contents varied widely, ranging from news items (Li Na’s tennis victories) to art and entertainment (Chinese performers of Western classical music, Chinese pop songs, Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds installation, Chinese circus and dance, or China-relevant Western products such as John Adams’ opera Nixon in China or a Chinese dubbed version of the English children’s cartoon Postman Pat, or the popular automobile television program Top Gear in Chinese). The category also includes exchanges concerning Chinese-learning software, including character recognition applications, applications for transcribing Mandarin into Pinyin, speech-slowing and tone-recognition aids, and other aids for use on computers, games consoles and mobile devices. Students also discussed the educational merits of various free educational Chinese websites. The most popular genre of site featured a humorous or transgressive import, such as websites about social etiquette in China or about swearing in Chinese.

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Re-use of student-generated resources Students also generated their own resources, typically creating linguistic and/or cultural stimuli that peers then used as a basis for independent study. Created stimuli could be personal photographs or videos, for example, items filmed by students in China or in the United Kingdom; for example, a Chinese New Year dance in a student’s hometown in the United Kingdom, or a UK student’s Chinese wife preparing a favourite Chinese recipe. One imaginative example bringing together the found and the created categories was a homemade video of a student singing along to a Chinese pop song karaoke-style posted with an invitation to peers to enjoy the song and comment on the pronunciation. The most popular created resources were designed for mutual help with culture, vocabulary, tone and character-writing, as well as cultural learning. Students’ responses to the found and created materials suggest that peers worked with these materials either at the invitation of the initial poster: ‘Got any good Chinese recipes or tips for eating out? Post them here’, or of their own accord: ‘I was reading with great interest the thread about idioms that Kim started. Whilst reading some on the internet, I stumbled upon some Confucius quotes and thought a similar thread would also be fun and possibly inspiring.’ They constructed for themselves, bearing in mind that their formal course commitments were running in parallel, what amounted to mini extension projects. Some of these took an issue from the formal course and explored it further; for example, an informal group debrief after the completion of an assignment, or the use of wikipedia and a travel blog to solve a long debate about a sociolinguistic topic that came up in their formal course. Other such projects were supportive of study across the course modules; for example, the sharing of aids for tone work, or vocabulary memorization in preparation for assignments. Others yet had no direct relationship to the course other than in enhancing students’ exposure to Chinese language and culture generally. An illustration of the way the four indicators of IL structured the qualitative analysis of SN practices is offered in Figure 11.5. It represents one thread from OUGeneral that falls into the category of re-use. The thread, condensed here, contains 27 posts by 18 students contributed between 12 October and 9 November 2010. The trigger was a section of the formal course about the importance of lucky numbers in Chinese culture. Representing the build-up of information during the life of the thread, the curved arrows represent the co-emergence of a new learning object (a composite resource for thinking about lucky numbers) created and shared by the group to support their formal study which, together with the forum contents, make up the student-enhanced learning environment.

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co-emergent process

acquisition, reflection community

acquisition reflection reflection acquisition

community

community

community

reflection community

community community

Figure 11.5  Analysing the IL features of an example thread

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Openness On FBPrivate, four short threads can be seen as examples of openness: a student created a blog and dedicated it to discussing the marks that the group received for its formal assignments. Four times over three weeks she invited peers to avail themselves of this open resource. In spite of her persistence, only two posts were made: the student’s brief presentation of her blog and one reply. On OUGeneral the following three instances of openness were found: Thread 1 (2 posts, 2 participants): a student posted to say that he had used nciku (an online Chinese pedagogical wiki) to create 2 vocabulary learning sessions for his course mates. The post received 1 response on the forum, but each of the original poster’s vocabulary items on nciku displayed numbers of visits between 7 and 47, which may indicate that peers read them and/or listened to the pronunciation audios. However, it may also indicate that the original poster made repeated visits to his own items, and/ or that his nciku page was visited by random internet users. Thread 2 (9 posts, 5 participants): a student posted personal photos taken in China. Following positive comments from peers he invited the group to visit an open-source photographic repository where he kept more photos, suggesting they might add their own. There is no evidence whether the peers used the external open-source site. Thread 3 (24 posts, 8 participants): a student posted to say that he had created ‘a small flashcard program/application that will eventually test people on the key vocabulary [in the course]’ and invited others to test it. The thread developed over 16 days, with 7 students testing and reviewing the user-generated open product offered by the original poster. While Threads 1 and 2 illustrate community-minded creation of open access digital resources, no evidence transpires from the posts that any IL came from these student-led initiatives. In contrast, Thread 3 meets two of the conditions for IL in that the created object was used by peers who reflected on it and enhanced its potential future value to their community and beyond by providing feedback to its creator.

Network effects There are only three examples of network effects, all on OUGeneral. Thread 1 is the Lion Dance thread already seen in Figure 11.3. In Thread 2 (11 posts, 5 participants including 1 tutor) a tutor posted a link to a pedagogical website. Student A posted her positive review of the site. Student B recommended the

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tutor’s blog. Student C posted his positive review of the tutor’s blog. Student D reported on her visit to the blog and what she has learnt there: ‘I found out from Tutor J.’s blog I’m a 外曾祖母 wai zeng zu mu.’3 In Thread 3 (6 posts, 3 participants) Student J invited reviews of the Nintendo DS Chinese Learning Game to see whether he should buy it as a study aid. Student K posted an 81-word review of a similar product (an iPhone application). Student L asked for more information. Student M responded with 3 links to external reviews. Finally Student N posted a 201-word review of the Nintendo game. We can interpret the elements of IL in Thread 1 (Lion Dance) by reference to the co-emergent process: the final poster, Student TW, was able to benefit from the input of Student SP (who posted the video), Student KA (who reflected on the video and asked a question) and Student ZX (who provided a resource relevant to the question). Student TW synthesized these posts and used the information to enhance her professional activities. The co-emergent dimension of IL is apparent in Threads 2 and 3 where participants co-create a new learning object, distribute this across these spaces and their reflective work (reviews) provides organizing principles for using this new resource.

Discussion In all four spaces, students favour link-display and re-use. A smaller number of users create open resources (openness) and very few are involved in building network effects. The qualitative analysis suggests some reasons for this. The practice of openness is least successful where the core institutional culture goes against it: it is likely that the blog for discussing marks failed because the OU does not have a culture of open discussion of assignment marks; conversely, it is possible that the nciku vocabulary sessions failed because the formal OU course offers students opportunities for structuring their vocabulary building and students may be unwilling to replicate this in the time that they spend on SNSs. In the data, network effects involve small groups of students reflectively collaborating on multiple sites. Although the complexity of this practice is well managed by the participants, examples of this feature are very few, suggesting that managing complexity is either a rare skill among the cohort, or is too time-consuming for most students in the process of completing formal coursework. Finally, the success of the SN feature of re-use may be explained by the possibility that students use social networking to compensate for the gaps that they perceive in the provision available through the institutional environment, and to bring to each other the benefits of the student-enhanced environment; for

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example, sharing cultural knowledge through a variety of digital resources. The data offers examples of students declaring acquisition, reflecting on resources and processes, offering community-oriented inputs and, although much less frequently, co-creating resources, which indicates that all four elements in the IL model are represented. These SN participation patterns carry implications for practitioners. The study suggests that when SN opportunities are made available for adjunct learning, participation can falter depending on how the opportunity is cast. A first example is that OUCulture has only 4 threads in the category re-use, suggesting that students may be hesitant to contribute to a forum headed by the possibly intimidating instruction to ‘have a think’ about specific sections of the formal materials. This is in contrast to OUGeneral, a very productive forum, with its friendly rubric inviting students to treat it as a Café. A second example is the failure of more directive students to persuade their peers to join in structured activities; for example, the group’s reluctance to use their peer’s blog for discussing marks, or the unanswered plea by one student to a peer who had clicked ‘Like’ when he suggested collaborating: ‘don’t just like it R., tell me if you’re up for it.’ Most popular, instead, are personal contributions. Personal photos or videos on Chinese themes were enthusiastically commented on for their content as well as for what they reveal of the personality of the poster. In these cases, SN is seen principally as dedicated to study-related socialization. The current study suggests that even teachers who are keen to go beyond a transfer of conventional activities to an SNS, and are intent on drawing from dedicated SN functionalities and designing specific medium-relevant tasks, may find factors working against them. For example, bearing in mind that the interpersonal dimensions of SN-mediated learning are strong attractants and that the culture of SN is characterized by casual frequentation, then teacher-fronted invitations to join in prescribed talk or tasks may be experienced as going counter to SN practices and may thereby induce more restricted forms of interaction such as answering the teacher or halting the interaction altogether. Earlier work on teacher intervention in online conferencing (Lamy and Goodfellow, 1999; Lamy and Shield, 2001; Jiang and Meskill, 2000) would seem to support the transfer of this trend to SN-mediated educational settings. Finally, the study suggests some ideological issues for students, teachers and researchers working in SN. The Facebook groups included content that was not found in the institution’s spaces, likely due to the fact that the Facebook groups are not moderated. On FBPublic, for example, one intrusive advert for a slimming cure appeared. This caused complaints by members and swift suppression by the student administering the group. Another example was the appearance

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alongside a student’s photograph of a meal he was served when visiting China of insulting comments about Chinese cuisine. Because of the design and access protocols of public pages on Facebook, it was not possible to ascertain whether the anti-Chinese postings originated from a student, or from a non-student member of the public. Pedagogical and ideological issues are raised by this type of occurrence but the swift deletion of the offensive comments by an unidentified person made this incident unavailable for archiving as part of the research (a typical drawback of research on non-institutional SNSs). FBPrivate was less vulnerable to this kind of disruption, but by the time the site was archived, some videos posted by the students were listed as ‘Now unavailable’, removed by an unidentified party. Copyright reasons may explain these deletions. In some cases political motives for deletion were possibly involved.

Limitations Among the limitations of the study was the instability of primary data on SNSs mentioned above. Secondly, the multimodal nature of the data (texts, audios, videos, images and Likes) was not aptly represented because the chosen analytical frameworks were inherited from text-based research traditions. More work should be done in future to adapt multimodal discourse analysis methods to the research topics (IL and SN) addressed here. Finally, this chapter has relied on a purely observational methodology for identifying participation patterns for informal learning. Collection of instructor reports was by definition impossible (SN activities being informal) and student self-reporting of IL was deemed unreliable (Schugurensky, 2007). However, as that author also suggests, there are possible counter-strategies which could be employed in future research of this type such as asking respondents for narratives rather than survey answers or interviews, and pooling narratives so respondents may use each others’ stories as critical recall points for their own IL experiences. Such techniques could help determine in what ways common but apparently non-interactive practices such as link-display contribute to community building and to learning.

Conclusion The research presented in this chapter suggests that social media’s specific web 2.0 affordances are not deployed evenly by student users: those affordances with

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more intimate, personal dimensions (e.g. working with someone else’s proposals or personal artefacts) are more favoured than those with a more abstract purpose (e.g. building an open resource). However, those SN practices that were observed were conducive to IL as an adjunct to formal course activities. It also appears that sites specifically designed for SN such as Facebook do not serve the interests of those engaging in study-related socialization any better than traditional sites such as forums enhanced with multimodal functionalities. Finally, although some forms of interaction may be implicitly inhibited on institutional sites for commercial or ethical reasons, public SNSs are prone to forms of constraint too, ideological or political. Finally, it seems the question of how SN can be harnessed to support language education is the wrong one to ask. More relevant to an understanding of learning opportunities, perhaps, is the question of how language students’ prior learning cultures – including their language learning and IT literacy antecedents – may prepare them to recognize and avail themselves of the different features afforded by SNSs.

Notes 1 All names and initials in the chapter have been changed. Spellings of student posts are as found. 2 I obtained permission from the creator of FBPrivate to join the group after the end of the study year, thus protecting the data from contamination by the display of my name on the members list during the research period itself. Due to its public status, FBPublic did not display the names of observers. 3 Maternal great-grandmother.

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Lamy, M.-N. (2013). Distance CALL online. In M. Thomas, H. Reinders & M. Warschauer (Eds), Contemporary computer-assisted language learning (pp. 141–58). London and New York: Continuum. Lamy, M.-N., & Goodfellow, R. (1999). Supporting language students’ interactions in web-based conferencing. Computer-Assisted Language Learning, 12(5), 457–77. Lamy, M.-N., & Hampel, R. (2007). Online communication in language learning and teaching. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lamy, M.-N., & Shield, L. (2001). Deux types de téléconférences pour l’apprentissage des langues. Proceedings of Usages des Nouvelles Technologies et Enseignement des Langues Etrangères. Vol. 3. Bibliothèque de l’Université de Compiègne. Online publication. Retrieved on 13 September 2012 from www.utc.fr/~untele/volume3.pdf Lamy, M.-N., & Zourou, K. (Eds) (forthcoming). Social networking and language education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2006). New literacies: everyday practices and classroom learning. London: McGraw Hill. — (2008a). Digital literacies: concepts, policies and practices. New York: Peter Lang. — (2008b). Digital literacy and participation in online social networking spaces. In C. Lankshear & M. Knobel (Eds), Digital literacies: concepts, policies and practices (pp. 249–78). New York: Peter Lang. Musser, J., O’Reilly, T., & the O’Reilly Radar Team (2006). Web 2.0 principles and best practices. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly. O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is web 2.0?: design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Online publication. Retrieved on 29 September 2012 from http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html Pegrum, M. (2010) ‘I link, therefore I am’: network literacy as a core digital literacy, E-Learning and Digital Media, 7(4). Schugurensky, D. (2000). The forms of informal learning: towards a conceptualization of the field. New Approaches to Lifelong Learning (NALL) Working Paper 19. Online publication. Retrieved on 10 October 2012 from https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bi tstream/1807/2733/2/19formsofinformal.pdf — (2007). ‘Vingt mille lieues sous les mers’: addressing four challenges of informal learning. Revue Française de Pédagogie: Recherches en Education, 160, July– September, 13–27. Online publication. Retrieved on 1 October 2012 from http://rfp. revues.org/583 Wodzicki, K., Schwämmlein, E., & Moskaliuk, J. (2012). ‘Actually, I wanted to learn’: study-related knowledge exchange on social networking sites. Internet and Higher Education, 15, 9–14. Zourou, K. (2012). On the attractiveness of social media for language learning: a look at the state of the art. Apprentissage des Langues et Systèmes d’Information et de Communication (ALSIC), 15(1), 2–15. Online publication. Retrieved on 10 October 2012 from http://alsic.revues.org/2436

Index action research  142, 147, 152 activity theory  83 anonymity  69, 72 assistance  4, 5, 6, 68, 86, 94, 100, 104, 105, 106, 108, 112, 181, 193, 220, 224 audio conferencing  13, 102, 159, 170, 172, 173 avatar  61, 62, 67, 69, 70

Facebook  204, 220, 223, 224, 227, 228, 229, 230, 235, 236, 237 Folksonomy  138

blended learning  151

identity expression  42 immersion  34, 64, 65, 66, 70, 71, 72 instant messaging  65, 67 instructional conversation  13, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 110, 112 intercultural communication  ix, 11, 23, 25, 36, 199 internalization  6, 7, 119, 158, 163, 220 Internet Communication Technology (ICT)  viii, 75, 137, 142, 143

chat  41, 62, 65, 66, 67, 102, 103, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 140, 141, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 160, 161, 166, 167, 168, 172, 202, 203, 204, 205, 227 collective cognition  viii, 78, 80, 81, 85 Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)  31, 32 communities of practice (CoPs)  84, 138, 221 computer mediated communication (CMC)  vii, viii, 40, 41, 51, 139, 201, 204, 207, 209 Confucian approach  24, 27 corpora  141 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)  11, 39, 42, 44, 53, 55 cultural capital  53 dialogism  80 digital literacy  10 digital resources  233, 235 discussion forum  159 distance education  ix, x, 66, 152 English as a foreign language (EFL)  vii, ix, x, 27, 28, 31, 32, 43, 49, 52, 54, 61, 72, 73, 75, 79, 84, 85, 89, 91, 95, 143 English as a second language (ESL)  viii, ix, x, 13, 17, 31, 32, 54, 61, 72, 73, 75, 178, 217 English Learner (EL)  65

Google  80, 221 grounded theory  141 holodeck  67

learner agency  3 learner development  99, 100, 105 learner identity  8 lifeworld  11, 79, 80, 86, 91 Livemocha  14, 199, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 209, 212, 213 Moodle  40, 42, 43, 49, 56, 140 multimodal activities  67 multiple discourses  36 multivoicedness  80 new literacies  80, 223 online course  vii, ix, 9, 11, 13, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 32, 34, 44, 49, 120, 121, 122, 130, 131, 132, 158, 159 online discourses  10 online identity  10, 21 online teaching  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 39, 53, 56, 104, 113

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podcast  150 praxis  77, 103 pre-service teacher  13 prezi  149 process, writing  177, 178, 179, 180, 187, 190, 193 professional development  ix, 11, 13, 34, 73, 113, 152, 157, 171 professional learning community  138 real life  61, 62, 65, 70, 71 scaffolding  13, 68, 92, 94, 100, 101, 107, 180, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194 Second Life  11, 61, 62, 63, 70, 71, 74, 140 Skype  140, 150, 160, 204 social media  80, 81, 87, 236 social networking  viii, 14, 52, 199, 201, 203, 219, 222, 223, 224, 230, 234 social presence  63, 130, 133, 159, 167, 168, 171 Socratic approach  24 Survey Monkey  160 synchronous audio conferencing  13, 102

target language  68, 110, 139, 143, 166, 202, 219 task design  79, 101, 165, 219 teacher development  137, 139, 140, 143, 152 teacher epistemologies  12, 139 teacher know-how  152 Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL)  vi, 143 Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)  ix, x, 22, 26, 31 teleporting  70 triangulation  141 Twitter  138 video games  138 virtual world  12, 61, 63, 71 Voicethread  140 Web 2.0  51, 87, 199, 223, 224, 230, 236 Wikipedia  225, 231 Wiki  12, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 149, 224, 233 Wimba classroom  99, 102, 108, 115, 159, 168 Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)  68, 100