Class Activities for Online Language Learning and Social Presence

Explore the class activities used in this PhD research on online language learning, interactivity, and social presence. This chapter of the methodology examines four key activities: argue for/against, photo scanning, collaborative writing, and round table discussions. It explains how synchronous and asynchronous communication, peer assessment, learner autonomy, critical thinking, and negotiation of meaning were integrated into a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) program to promote collaborative knowledge construction and meaningful participation in a private online learning community.

Video of Class Activities to Promote Social Presence

Class Activities

In this study, several activities were designed and implemented by the researcher with the aim of enhancing the level of interactivity and social presence among the participants. A detailed account of these class activities will be provided in the following paragraphs. It is important to note that among all our class activities, round table was centralized by the researcher because it could have the potential for growing social presence in our language learning blog.

Argue for/against Activity

In our argue for/against activity, the participants were supposed to argue either for or against a challenging question or statement vis-à-vis the specified topic in each session and correspondingly enter either I agree or I disagree voice channel on Discord. The participants were given approximately two minutes to brainstorm over their claims in collaboration with their partners in their own voice channels. They were supposed to come up with as many cogent reasons as they could to convince the opposing group that they were right in the argument.

After two minutes of collaborative brainstorming, the participants would come back to the English Conversation voice channel on Discord to have a heated argument with each other, as illustrated in Figure 1. In this group-based activity, which was implemented in the second phase of the investigation, the researcher intentionally did not take a firm position to the statement unless all of the participants unanimously entered one specific sub-voice channel. In this case, to play devil’s advocate, he, regardless of his true personal beliefs, entered the opposing sub-voice channel.

This relatively neutral position of the researcher in our argue for/against activity was adopted from Palloff and Pratt’s (2003) tips on boosting critical thinking and reflectivity among virtual students, according to which the instructor is advised to act as a facilitator, and the students should be encouraged to take charge of the learning process themselves so that the participants could perceive that “knowledge creation occurs mutually and collaboratively online, leading to increasing critical thinking abilities” (Palloff & Pratt, 2003, p. 7).

The argue for/against activity was based on small-group tasks, which according to Palloff and Pratt (2005), encourage learners to assume active and responsive roles in collaboration with their peers or group members in response to a topic or theme. In addition, applying small-group projects in online courses can “demand self-assessment on the part of individuals to determine the quality of their contributions to the group” (Palloff & Pratt, 2005, p. 78). Moreover, dividing the class into small groups can stimulate the students to experience more enjoyable and inspiring discussions (Chapelle & Jamieson, 2008).

Photo Scanning Activity

The Argue for/against activity was followed by another one, which was called photo scanning. As its name indicates, in this activity, the participants were supposed to scan a photo about the theme of the class and attempt to come up with as many evidentiary reasons as they could to bear out a claim that was stated in the caption of the photo on the corresponding post. Photo scanning –  as a WebQuest-based activity –  according to Chapelle and Jamieson (2008), required the participants to use the computer to solve a problem both individually and in partnership with each other. Figure 2 is intended to cast light on what was actually happening in our photo scanning activity. In this session, we focused on the topic of habits. As illustrated below, the boy has two food alternatives (an apple and a piece of cake). The statement in the photo scanning activity of this session on habits was The boy fails to break his destructive eating habits.

Collaborative Writing Activity

In our collaborative writing activity, which was implemented in the second phase of the investigation in a paid class, the participants as the essayists were expected to compose an argumentative essay interactively by asynchronously referring to a post created by the researcher with a topic on top and a comment form at the bottom.

In this activity, the first essayist would develop the first paragraph as the introductory one, and the subsequent essayists were expected to complete the entire essay by first reviewing the previous paragraphs, and then developing their own paragraphs. The participants could also perform peer-assessment both linguistically and semantically or ask for clarification through replying to the previous paragraphs in a nested or threaded fashion, which was quite distinctive from the main paragraphs as comments.

Round Table Activity

The core of our English conversation class was an activity labeled round table. The rationale for calling this activity round table was that the participants were expected to raise an appropriate question about the topic of the next session determined by themselves through voting on Fridays, and place it in the comment form at the bottom of the corresponding post that was created by the researcher with regard to the topic.

Then the participants had plenty of time (from Friday to Wednesday) to refer to the specified comment form asynchronously, posing questions to each other, editing their own questions (self-assessment), replying to or voting for/against the other participants’ questions (peer-assessment), receiving feedback from the researcher (teacher-assessment), and preparing themselves for giving appropriate answers to each individual question synchronously in the class as the poser of questions would determine to whom each question should refer unpredictably. In other words, the participants were free to choose who should answer their questions among their existing classmates in each session.

Among various activities in our round tables, raising one proper question in conjunction with the topic being discussed and replying to one of the questions developed by the other participants asynchronously in our comment forms (Stanley, 2013) were obligatory assignments. The deadline for completing the assignments was Tuesday, 9:00 pm, i.e. 24 hours before our main discussions in the form of voice conferences on Skype and Discord. The dominant type of questions that the participants, including the researcher, left in our comment forms was open-ended.

Palloff and Pratt (2005) maintain that “open-ended questions can stimulate interaction in an online discussion” (p. 70) as this type of questions can encourage the learners to examine almost any aspect of a question, and in so doing, the online course would become more dynamic by nature. In this regard, Lee (2004) proposes that open-ended questions in a mutual exchange of ideas among the students are quite a meaningful practice because the learners are encouraged to use specific vocabulary and structures to engage in the conversation successfully.

The participants’ questions were supposed to have the following characteristics:

1. Grammatically correct; otherwise, the ungrammatical question would receive negative points through our rating application
2. Semantically unique, not repeated by other participants
3. No question = no participation in the conversation section as question development was the most important contribution that the participants could make to the course
4. Being numbered by the participants in a chronological order to refer to them faster and easier, with the first question being numbered 1, the second question being numbered 2, and so on

The participants and the researcher were required to give sufficient consideration to the assigned themes in preparation for an informed exchange of ideas in order to genuinely experience an online round table. In our round tables, our main priority was to have collaboration and negotiation of meaning on selected topics synchronously and asynchronously, which does not conform to the mechanical repetition of the Initiate-Response Feedback Model proposed by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975, as cited in Arcos & Sánchez, 2006).

Another point that can make a distinction between sheer interactivity in the participants and another more mature state of mind, i.e. social presence, is that in our round tables, the participants developed a sense of privacy (Tu, 2002) in all of the online activities, namely commenting, replying, voting for/against, polling on favorite topics for discussion, private messaging, chatting, and in one word, systematized socialization because the researcher had already created a private network and community in which only academically approved members could participate. As a consequence, by supplementing pure interactivity with awareness, privacy and autonomy, the participants could experience social presence in our online community.

In our CBI-based round tables, we technically arranged a flipped classroom in which the participants were required to utilize web-based resources as their assignments and undertake initial instruction of the lesson content on their own in response to specified topics (Bender & Waller, 2013). Then we utilized the participants’ comments and replies as the main content of the course in our online synchronous classes.

Figure 3 is aimed at describing the students’ collaborative and interactive activities in our round tables to account for social presence in our CALL-based program. As illustrated below, through commenting, posting, replying, voting for/against other comments (peer-assessment) and even editing their own comments (self-assessment), the participants might be able to engage in enlightened negotiation of meaning in a CBI approach, which per se might lead to the establishment of social presence.

In our round tables, the researcher played the role of a participant observer through becoming “a part of the community by living and working there for a considerable period of time or by regular engagement with the group/community over an extended period of time” (Pauwels, 2006, p. 725). That is to say, the participatory essence of this activity in which all of the participants (including the teacher) were expected to give thought and consideration to the assigned themes before the class and make a social contribution to each session literally transformed our English conversation class into an intellectual round table to practice an exchange of ideas democratically but evidentially.

In so doing, the level of the teacher’s directiveness would become normalized and the students could develop a sense of autonomy in their language learning even in a truly interactive fashion as Blin (2004) has wisely stated the development of learner autonomy can be regarded not only as the growth of individual autonomy, but also as the development of a social autonomy (not only independency but also interdependency) through which a group of learners would collectively take responsibility for controlling their learning.

In our synchronous and asynchronous negotiation of meaning, the researcher strived to stay as nonjudgmental and unbiased as possible – depending on the topic being discussed – unless misleading information was about to be spread on factual topics, for example, AIDS. Negotiation of meaning in our round tables according to Mackey (2007), can provide the learners with great opportunities to request clarification and receive modified input to fine-tune their input for a more understandable output.

In addition, our round table activity was a sociocultural approach to learning in which, according to Vygotsky (1978), the participants’ social experiences and speculations together with their dependent, independent and interdependent inquiries about the challenging and intellectual topics were crucial in constructing, reconstructing and internalizing knowledge socially and interactivity with their peers and more capable teacher, a phenomenon which is technically referred to as zone of proximal development.

As it is clear, our round tables were literally based on the needs and interests of the students and they could even determine the topics for our discussions. According to Richards (2001), a learner-centered curriculum stresses the individual needs of learners, the role of individual experience, and the need to develop awareness, self-reflection, critical thinking, learner strategies and other qualities and skills that are considered to be significant for learners to develop. Accordingly, ample opportunities were given to the participants to democratically select the topics for discussions on the basis of their needs and interests by means of our polling system.

Then without the directiveness of the teacher/researcher, the participants would make a self-discovery in response to the themes so that they could ruminate over the subjects and raise the level of their awareness to develop appropriate questions in our comment forms on the ground of their own personal experiences and information. Consequently, in an interactive and constructive manner, during the week, the participants would refer to our online community, making further social contributions in the form of comments, replies, and forums. Eventually, in our virtual classes, the participants would discuss their own findings and thoughts in relation to the topic from various points of view.

Reaching a Conclusion

The last five minutes of each synchronous voice-based class prior to our call for feedback sessions, was called reaching a conclusion. In this concluding section of the class, summary and synthesis questions were raised in our online discussions to reflect upon and evaluate our collaborative activities (Palloff & Pratt, 2005). The participants were encouraged to take notes during each session to raise the level of their awareness about our collaborative activities in response to the didactic and inspiring topics so that they could come to an informed conclusion based on sensible arguments.

From this point of view, student interactivity was differentiated from their sense of social presence (Gunawardena, 1995) because the participants were expected to add awareness to their sheer interactivity in our round tables in order to objectify a sense of academic satisfaction through developing a sense of belonging to the community and reaching a conclusion (Gunawardena, 1995; McMillan & Chavis, 1986; Picciano, 2002). Our reached conclusions, as stated by Palloff and Pratt (2005), helped the participants to evaluate what they had accomplished in their collaborative activities and determine where there might be some gaps in their learning and what they could do to fill in such gaps.

Call for Feedback

The last five minutes of each synchronous class was labeled call for feedback in which the participants were given this carte blanche to express their feedback in response to the research questions and hypotheses immediately after participating in our virtual classes and activities in the form of 41 semi-structured interviews. The researcher recorded, transcribed (Appendix H) and analyzed the interviews in which 14 open-ended questions (Appendix B) were written on the posts of our classes (each session, one question in a cyclical manner) on Fridays so that the participants could have enough time to reflect upon them in advance.

Four of the 41 interviews were conducted individually (i.e., between the researcher and the interviewees) as requested by the participants, and the other 37 ones were held en masse. According to Nation and Macalister (2010), parts of the curriculum design can be negotiated between the teacher and the learners. This may include negotiation of classroom activities, some of the goals of the course, and some assessment procedures. This negotiation is a kind of evaluation with immediate effects on the course.

References

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