This presentation is concerned with communication in an online learning environment and attempts to shed light on community building strategies used by students in the asynchronous online discussion forums. The material for this study was collected from text-based asynchronous discussion forums which constituted part of the compulsory course work for a course in English proficiency at second semester university level in Sweden. The students were divided into three separate groups and all three had the same course material and were taught by the same instructor. The instructor had no discussion forum input besides the initial instructions for how the students were expected to use it. The students’ task was to ask questions and answer others’ questions. Instructor feedback was given at a later date in a seminar. All three groups had other course activities, such as real time seminars, besides the discussion forums. Two of the groups studied online exclusively while the third group studied had their real time seminars in the same physical environment on campus. In order to determine how and to what extent students used community building devices in their communication, Lapadat’s (2007) model of discourse devices used for community building was adapted. The study revealed that disclosure, asking for and offering help, inviting comment and alignment were used by all three groups. There were however discourse devices used for building community the two online groups used but that were not used by the campus group, that is, the group that met in the same physical environment for seminars. Those that studied on campus rarely used greetings, social remarks and nor did they employ closings adapted from the genre of letter writing and email. All three of these were commonly used by participants in the exclusively online groups.
One of the challenges of using discussion forums in a computer-mediated learning environment is getting students to contribute. Some discussion threads develop while others do not. The present study concerns factors affecting response rate. This presentation deals with response patterns and the strategies that teachers and students may consider using in order to increase the chance of getting a response to a message posted in an asynchronous discussion forum.
Interaction involves people communicating and reacting to each other. This process is key to the study of discourse, but it is not easy to study systematically how interaction takes place in a specific communicative event, or how it is typically performed over a series of repeated communicative events. However, with a written record of the interaction, it becomes possible to study the process in some detail. This thesis investigates interaction through asynchronous written discussion forums in a computer-mediated learning environment.
In particular, this study investigates pragmatic aspects of the communicative event which the asynchronous online discussions comprise. The first case study examines response patterns to messages by looking at the content of initial messages and responses, in order to determine the extent to which characteristics of the messages themselves or other situational factors affect the interaction. The second study examines in what ways participants use a range of discourse devices, including formulaic politeness, humour and supportive feedback as community building strategies in the interaction. The third study investigates the role of the subject line of messages in the interaction, for example by examining how participants choose different types of subject lines for different types of messages. The fourth study examines to what extent features serving a deictic function are drawn on in the interaction and then compares the findings to both oral conversation and formal academic discourse.
The overall findings show a complex communicative situation shaped by the medium itself, type of activity, the academic discipline and topic of discussion and by the social and cultural aspects of tertiary education in an online learning environment. In addition, the findings may also provide evidence of learning.
Much of online learning has consisted of text-based communication, but as broadband connections improve and become more widespread, the promise of multimodal synchronous communication becomes a real possibility for many language teachers and learners and not just a dream. Being informed and prepared and developing skills that can be adapted and applied in different situations can help prevent the dream of multimodal teaching and learning from becoming a nightmare. The technical issues that arise may not always be the hindrance we might imagine but in fact may contribute to a stronger sense of social presence and contribute to learning outcomes. Polychronic communication (multicommunicating) is described as “managing multiple conversations at once within a given time period” (Turner & Tinsley, 2002). Multicommunicating is made possible by technologies which have features that allow interactions to be compartmentalised in a way that f2f or telephone cannot do and therefore allowing for flexibility in tempo. There are two features of multicommunicating are divided attention and delayed responses. (Turner &Tinsley 2008). However, other features are also present. Compartmentalisation means the text chat does not interrupt the oral conversation.
A large part of what instructors to at university is give feedback on the written work of students. This is particularly true for those teaching languages and the process of reading and responding in writing a time-consuming process. The feedback given can concern aspects of language proficiency, sentence structure, grammatical correctness and lexical choice. Feedback is often given on content and textual issues such as paragraphing, effectiveness of arguments and level of critical analysis. As teachers, we hope that he feedback will result in an improvement in the student's revised work but also other subsequent written work. This paper investigates how one cohort of ESL univeristy students experience teacher feedback. The responses of this questionnaire-based survey show that students appreciate the feedback they get but do not always understand what it is they are expected to to.
A number of factors may affect student interaction in an asynchronous online discussion forum used in learning. This study deals with student preferences for the subject line of messages and in what ways the choice of subject line contributes to coherence and interaction reflected in the textual and interpersonal functions of the linguistic items used. The study also attempts to determine what affects the choices made by participants. Nine separate discussion forums from three different undergraduate courses in English at a Swedish university were used in the study. A total of 98 students and 435 student messages were examined and a number of trends appeared. The functions of the subject line may be summarized as contributing to coherence by reflecting message content in a number of different ways. In addition, the subject line can perform other tasks such as maintaining social relationships among the participants. It is not clear in what ways the subject line contributes to interaction with regard to increasing the reading rate. The trends observed indicate that other factors than subject line content may contribute to whether students are inclined to access a message or not, such as when a message is posted and where it is displayed on the screen. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Ansvar har både juridisk och etisk betydelse och är ett nyckelord i högre utbildning. I den högre utbildningen förekommer en rad olika roller med olika juridiskt ansvar såväl som olika förväntningar på etiskt ansvar. I sammanhang där flera roller är sammankopplade för att lösa en komplex uppgift finns potentiellt olika syn på ansvarsfördelning. Det gäller i synnerhet handledningssituationen, där etiskt ansvar och ansvarsfördelning kan vara särskilt omgärdade av gråzoner, särskilt vad gäller nyckelrollerna student och handledare. Studien behandlar studenters syn på ansvar i kandidatuppsatsprocessen. En enkätundersökning med studenter från examensarbeteskursen inom två språkämnen vid ett svenskt lärosäte (Högskolan Dalarna) visar att majoriteten anser sig ha fått processen förklarad vid kursstart, men att en relativt stor andel inte håller med om det. Några pekade på skillnader i beskrivningar och praxis. Studenterna anser att student och handledare har ett gemensamt ansvar för flera aspekter av uppsatsarbetet, men att studenten har större ansvar för t.ex. att uppsatsen är fri från plagiat och att den blir klar i tid och handledaren större ansvar för t.ex. att forskningsfrågan är relevant för ämnesområdet och att metoden och materialet är lämpliga. Svaren pekar på en viss variation i synen på ansvar. Ser man exempelvis närmare på exakt vilka aspekter av uppsatsprocessen man anser att studenten respektive handledaren bör ha ansvar för, så är bilden inte samstämmig. Resultaten pekar på ett behov av att diskutera ansvar och därmed medvetandegöra de bilder vi bär med oss in i uppsatshandledningen.
The supervision of degree theses is one of several institutional practices in higher education that are regulated by various systems of rules. However, the social roles involved in the practices may still be largely based on interpretation, negotiation and personal choice. Research on supervision has primarily targeted the doctoral level, but the present study targets the Bachelor level. Existing inventories of roles are based on supervisor roles, but the present study also includes student roles. Existing inventories are not always based on empirical data, but the present study uses focus group discussions with supervisors and responses to open-ended questions from a questionnaire to students as a basis for extracting supervisor and student roles. The supervisor and student participants came from two language departments at a Swedish university. The local guidelines relevant to supervision underspecify roles. The findings show a considerable complexity and a broad repertoire when it comes to roles attributed to supervisors as well as students. Some roles may be plotted along a scale, where stakeholders may have different preferences and needs, such as along transactional and interactional types, or between support and management; or between seeing the thesis primarily as a process or a product.