Social Networking for Language Education ||

Social Networking for Language EducationISBN: 9781137023384DOI: 10.1057/9781137023384Palgrave Macmillan

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Social Networkingfor Language Educaon

Marie-Noëlle Lamy

Katerina Zourouand

Social Networking for Language Education

10.1057/9781137023384 - Social Networking for Language Education, Edited by Marie-Noëlle Lamy and Katerina Zourou

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New Language Learning and Teaching Environments

Titles include:

Hayo ReindersDIGITAL GAMES IN LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING

Fred Dervin, Marie-Noëlle Lamy and Katerina Zourou (editors)SOCIAL NETWORKING FOR LANGUAGE EDUCATION

New Language Learning and Teaching Environments Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0230–28249–0 hardback 978–0230–8250–6 paperback(outside North America only)

You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above.

Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England


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Social Networking for Language Education Edited by

Marie-No ë lle Lamy The Open University, UK

and

Katerina Zourou Sør-Trøndelag University College, Trondheim, Norway


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Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Marie-No ë lle Lamy and Katerina Zourou 2013 Individual chapters © Respective authors 2013 Foreword © Carla Meskill 2013

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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v

Contents

List of Tables vii

List of Figures viii

Foreword x

Notes on Contributors xi

Introduction 1 Katerina Zourou and Marie-No ë lle Lamy

Part I The Wider Ecology of Language Learning with SNS

1 An Ecological Analysis of Social Networking Site-mediated Identity Development 11 Jonathon Reinhardt and Hsin-I Chen

2 Architecture Students’ Appropriation of Avatars – Relationships between Avatar Identity and L2 Verbal Participation and Interaction 31 Ciara R. Wigham and Thierry Chanier

3 Online Reading Groups and Network Dynamics 56 Chris Lima and Marie-No ë lle Lamy

Part II Pedagogies and Practitioners

4 Bridging Design and Language Interaction and Reuse in Livemocha ’s Culture Section 77 Katerina Zourou and Mathieu Loiseau

5 Profiles in Social Networking Sites for Language Learning – Livemocha Revisited 100 Richard Harrison

6 It’s Not Just the Tool: Pedagogy for Promoting Collaboration and Community in Social Networking in CMC 117 Carolin Fuchs and Bill Snyder


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vi Contents

Part III Learning Benefits and Challenges

7 A Study of the Use of Social Network Sites for Language Learning by University ESL Students 137 Min Liu, Matthew K. Evans, Elaine Horwitz, Sunjung Lee, Monica McCrory, Jeong-Bin Park and Claire Meadows Parrish

8 Online and Offsite: Student-Driven Development of the Taiwan–France Telecollaborative Project Beyond These Walls 158 Meei-Ling Liaw and Kathryn English

9 Formative Assessment within Social Network Sites for Language Learning 177 Paul Gruba and Cameron Clark

Part IV Overview

10 Social Media-Based Language Learning: Insights from Research and Practice 197 Marie-No ë lle Lamy and Fran ç ois Mangenot

References 214

Index 235


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vii

List of Tables

1.1 Sue’s total SNS use from March 2009 to May 2011 20 1.2 Comments from and to Sue by group, including

unreciprocated 23 1.3 Percentage of posts according to identity indexed 27 2.1 Classification of communication acts in SL 40 3.1 Structural changes to the ORG since 2007 62 3.2 Time as a member 64 3.3 Reasons for joining the Group 65 3.4 Time as member related to posting – c ross-tabulation 66 3.5 Participation in other online networks and posting

activity – cross-tabulation 67 4.1 Thread concerning Georgia 89 4.2 Three thread examples 93 5.1 Postgraduate class schedule 108 7.1 Participants’ demographic information 141 7.2 When adding a friend, what factors did you consider? 142 7.3 How long did you use Busuu/Livemocha/English Caf é over

the past week outside class? 143 7.4 Outside of class, how did you use Busuu ? 144 7.5 How will you use Busuu.com in the future? 145 7.6 Which do you prefer for practicing English? 146 7.7 When adding a friend, what factors did you consider? 146 7.8 Outside of class, how did you use Livemocha ? 147 7.9 If yes, how will you use Livemocha in the future? 148 7.10 When adding a friend, what factors did you consider? 150 7.11 Outside of class, how did you use English Caf é ? 151 7.12 If yes, how will you use English Caf é in the future? 151 8.1 Textalyser output of students’ postings on the official

project website 165 8.2 Summary of Facebook data 167 8.3 Examples of speech functions 172 9.1 Dominant metaphors of language learning

and assessment 181


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viii

List of Figures

1.1 Increase in Sue’s use of Facebook over two years 21 1.2 Sue’s SNS use over two years 21 1.3 Sue’s shifting from posts to comments over two years 22 1.4 Sue’s comments to new friends and old friends over

two years 24 2.1 Learning design of the Building Fragile Spaces course 36 2.2 SL environment configuration for the group

reflective sessions 37 2.3 Students’ previous use and frequency of this use of

online multiuser environments 39 2.4 Communicating through an avatar (movements,

gestures, appearance) allows you to engage more in L2 interaction with other SL users 41

2.5 Avatars with human-like morphology and avatars with changed morphology 45

2.6 Terms of address for students whose avatar name was different from their first name 45

2.7 Female student participant Emmegi88 changes her avatar body shape between day one and day three of course 46

2.8 Avatars with a scripted appearance – a light rotating around an avatar’s head – and an avatar carrying an object which scripts the kinesic act of drinking 47

2.9 Evolution of students’ avatar appearances 47 2.10 Verbal acts for students in workgroups GA, GL and

GS during slrefl sessions day 2 49 2.11 Number of verbal and nonverbal acts by participant

for workgroup GS during slrefl day 2 51 2.12 Number of verbal and nonverbal acts by participant

for workgroup GA during slrefl day 2 51 2.13 Identification of independent verbal and nonverbal acts 53 3.1 ORG membership worldwide 58 4.1 Home of the Livemocha Culture section (threads

presented in order of recentness) 81 4.2 Mean number of new threads per day, computed

per trimester 83


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List of Figures ix

4.3 Difficulties in identifying timing through the use of periods. 85

4.4 ‘Social filters’ in Facebook and lack thereof in Livemocha 87 4.5 Examples of isolated comment, reply and explicit

interaction 90 5.1 Screen capture of the profile headings in Livemocha 107 6.1 Screen capture showing the ‘Technology in Teaching’

wave interface 121 8.1 Example of student’s self-introduction 168 9.1 Babbel review manager 184 9.2 Livemocha bar review 185 9.3 A Busuu certificate 186


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x

Foreword

At this moment in the relatively brief history of online social networking (SN), careful attention to the structures that are simultaneously evolving, shaping and constraining human interactions is critically important. Here, while attending to the wider ecology of language learning with SNs, this group of authors examines the particularities of pedagogies and practices as they influence these human interactions along with their concomitant learning benefits and challenges.

Social networking currently presents as online activity that features particular kinds of community-building tools. These lend themselves to particular forms of interaction that are in constant development. One clear consequence is a fluidity with digital norms and practices between and within these conversational affiliations. These multi-role, multi-cultural and multimedia traversals are continually evolving rules that guide and constrain interaction so that ongoing felicitous membership can be realized. Given the diversity of participants in these conversa-tions as globalized learning expands, the evolution of well-functioning communicative norms speaks to our common human dispositions and our desires to learn new information and, concomitantly, about ourselves in the world. The community dimension renders this a satisfying, even pleasurable, activity. Indeed, if, as this volume proposes, learning occurs through felicitous social interactions with others, then social networking for education can be viewed as a gift from the gods of learning. The imper-ative for language education researchers thus becomes to understand how these conversations happen so that learning can be properly orchestrated in ways that meet institutional, societal and individual needs. Examining the unique features of digital connectivity and the conditions these afford for learning is precisely what is emphasized in this text.

There is no question that social networking is changing the way we spend our time with others. When it comes to the linguistic/semiotic spaces and tools we use to do so, we are simultaneously shaping these as our commu-nicative patterns evolve. The question remains, how do we make sense of evolving human activity online and how can our developing understand-ings contribute to the advancement of the field of language education? This collection represents a vital stride in that direction.

Professor Carla Meskill State University of New York, Albany


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xi

Notes on Contributors

Thierry Chanier is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Universit é Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France. His main research interest over the past 20 years has been CALL and, since 1999, online learning in telecol-laborative situations. He coordinated the MULCE project which devel-oped an open-access repository of Learning and Teaching Corpora.

Hsin-I Chen is Assistant Professor in the Foreign Languages and Literature Department at Tunghai University, Taiwan. Her research interests include technology-mediated language learning, intercultural communication, language and identity and multiliteracies.

Cameron Clark is an English language teacher currently working for the British Council in Singapore. He also has experience teaching in South Korea, Australia, Japan, England and Indonesia. Cameron’s interest in SNLL and assessment began when undertaking postgrad-uate study in Applied Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Kathryn English is a Ma î tre de conf é rences at the Universit é Panth é on Assas, Paris II and the École Polytechnique, France. She has designed, co-authored and participated in cross-cultural, computer-mediated language teaching projects based in the USA, France and Taiwan since 1995. In addition to research she coaches her university debating team, winning the national championship twice. She also works as a confer-ence interpreter for the European Union and the French National Assembly and Senate.

Mathew Evans discovered his passion for developing new learning tech-nologies for the classroom from teaching ESL. His current research inter-ests include using fanfiction and Web 2.0 tools to teach Shakespeare. He is also completing a creative non-fiction project on contemporary Chinese history.

Carolin Fuchs is Lecturer in the TESOL/Applied Linguistics Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, USA. Her research interests include technology-based language teaching, multiliteracies and language play. She has conducted cross-institutional telecollabora-tions for language learning and teacher education involving numerous countries in Europe and Asia.


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xii Notes on Contributors

Paul Gruba is Senior Lecturer in the Applied Linguistics program at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Paul teaches a range of subjects to do with the intersections of language, media and technology and the focus of his research concerns media literacy, computer-mediated communi-cation and listening in second language contexts.

Richard Harrison is Professor of Japanese Language and Linguistics at the International Student Center, Kobe University, Japan. He has taught Japanese as a foreign language and second language acquisition in the UK, Australia and Japan for the past 20 years. His current research themes focus on social interaction in second language acquisition, with a focus on the design and implementation of virtual language learning environments.

Elaine K. Horwitz is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Director of the Graduate Program in Foreign Language Education at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Her research focuses on second language learners and the experience of language learning. She is well-known for her research on language anxiety and student and teacher beliefs about language learning. She is the author of Becoming a Language Teacher: A Practical Guide to Second Language Learning and Teaching and co-editor of Language Anxiety: From Theory and Practice to Classroom Implications.

Marie-No ë lle Lamy is Professor of Distance Language Learning at the Open University, UK. With more than 15 years of experience of developing learning and teacher-training materials for multimodal tutoring environments, she has taught and trained groups online in English, French and Italian. Her research focuses on the implications of using multimodal tutoring environments for language learning and teaching, specifically in the distance mode. She has co-authored Online Communication in Language Teaching and Learning , now considered a key read for researchers and postgraduate students. She currently serves as Associate Editor of Language Learning and Technology Journal .

Sunjung Lee is a PhD candidate in the Foreign Language Education Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include technology in language learning, second language reading development and vocabulary acquisition.

Meei-Ling Liaw is Professor and Chair of the English Department at the National Taichung University, Taiwan. Her research focuses on telecol-laboration, intercultural learning and teacher education and her publi-cations have appeared in professional journals. She has been serving on


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Notes on Contributors xiii

the editorial board of Language Learning and Technology since 2008 and is the chief editor of Taiwan International ESP Journal .

Chris Lima is currently a final year doctoral student at the Open University, UK. She has been an English language teacher and TESOL teacher training for over 15 years. Her research focuses on professional online interaction and on the role of English literature in teacher educa-tion. She is the former coordinator of the Critical Literacy and ELT Project and winner of the 2007 British Council Innovation Award. She was also a nominee for the 2010 British Council/Macmillan Education Award for Innovative Writing. She is currently the coordinator of the ELT Online Reading Group, developed with the support of the British Council; a board member of the Extensive Reading Foundation; and a committee member of the IATEFL, Literature, Media and Cultural Studies Special Interest Group.

Min Liu is Professor in the Learning Technologies Program in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Her teaching and research interests center on educational uses of new media and other emerging technologies, particularly the impact of such technologies on teaching and learning; and the design of new media-enriched inter-active learning environments for learners at all age levels. Her current projects include studying the design and effectiveness of immersive, rich media environments on learning and motivation, examining the affordances and constraints of using mobile devices in instruction for English Language students and use of Web 2.0 tools in teaching and learning, for example, researching the use of social network sites for language learning by college ESL students.

Mathieu Loiseau is currently a post-doctoral fellow in the SILEX team of the LIRIS laboratory in Lyon, France. He is working on the Janus project in the context of the ‘Intelligence des Mondes Urbains’ Labex. The project aims at providing a prototype for a social serious game directed towards the learning of the scientific method in archaeology. His inter-ests also cover language technologies and language learning, on which he has worked both as a member of the LSE and LIDILEM laboratories in Grenoble (France).

Fran ç ois Mangenot is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Grenoble 3 University, France and a member of the research unit Lidilem , where he coordinates the branch ‘Foreign Language Education and ICT’. He has authored software, two books ( Les aides logicielles à l’écriture and Internet et la classe de langue ), papers about the Internet in Foreign Language


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xiv Notes on Contributors

Education and he has co-coordinated two journal issues about online exchanges ( Le Fran ç ais dans le monde, Recherches et applications ). He is the founder of the EPAL (‘Echanger pour apprendre en ligne’ – ‘Learning through online exchange’) Conferences, Grenoble, June 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013 (http://w3.u-grenoble3.fr/epal/).

Monica McCrory is an ESL instructor at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. She combines her passion for teaching adult ESL learners with her instructional technology interests. Her research interests include uses of Web 2.0 technologies for developing language skills.

Jeong-Bin (Hannah) Park is ESOL adjunct faculty at Austin Community College, USA. Her research interests focus on various pedagogical uses of computer-assisted language learning, affordances of social network sites and Web 2.0 for language learning, computer-mediated communication (CMC), discourse analysis and second language writing.

Claire Meadows Parrish is Assistant Instructor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Her teaching and research interests include second language acquisition, learning technologies, heritage language learners, learner autonomy and interaction.

Jonathon Reinhardt is Assistant Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Arizona in Tucson, USA. His research interests are in technology-enhanced L2 teaching and learning, espe-cially via digital gaming and social media. He has published widely in edited volumes and journals, including CALICO Journal , English for Specific Purposes and International Journal of Applied Linguistics and most recently co-authored ‘Language at Play: Digital Games in Second and Foreign Language Teaching and Learning’.

Bill Snyder is Director of the MA TESOL Program of Teachers College, Columbia University’s Japan Campus in Tokyo, Japan. He uses Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Theory to explore engagement in language learning and teaching as well as language teacher education. He is inter-ested in exploring how engagement relates to instructional and curric-ular design for both traditional and online learning environments.

Ciara R. Wigham is an English language teacher at Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France. Her recently awarded PhD focused on how multimodal pedagogical communication is organized within synthetic worlds and investigated the interplay between verbal and nonverbal interaction which supports verbal participation and


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http://w3.u-grenoble3.fr/epal/

Notes on Contributors xv

production in a foreign language. She is a member of the Laboratoire de Recherche sur le Langage.

Katerina Zourou is Senior Researcher at the Sør-Trøndelag University College, Tronheim, Norway on network-based peer learning systems. Her research interests involve the role of computer tools in foreign language education as well as telecollaborative practices online. Katerina is editor of books and journal special issues, as well as author of peer-reviewed articles and other scientific publications. She is the initiator and project leader of two European Commission funded projects, the network “Language learning and social media” (2010–2012) and the project “Improving Internet strategies and maximizing social media presence of LLP projects” (2012–2013).


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1

What is the relationship between social media-based networking and language learning and teaching? How does socialization in networked spaces, as a working, playing, or interacting activity undertaken with a person or a group, pertain to language education? This book approaches these questions through a collection of chapters offering theoretical insights and empirical evidence examined through a variety of meth-odological lenses. The originality of the book comes from its emphasis on the networking dynamics that arise in the social web.

Social media are artefacts with a networking dimension, which are designed so as to make that dimension central to their use. They attract language learners, teachers and language learning providers for a variety of reasons, although their use in language education is controversial as there is a lack of evidence whether and how they may promote language learning. Despite sizeable differences among types of social media appli-cations and the certainty that technologies will continue to evolve apace, the editors of this volume believe that the networking dimen-sion will remain. In this book we focus on how language learners and teachers engage with the feature that all social media share: their social networking dimension, for which an interpretation is given in the next section.

Although the social networking component was at the core of Internet-based activity from its very start, through forum discussions, chat possi-bilities and email exchanges, this dimension has expanded so much that it is becoming a sociotechnical phenomenon. This is emerging clearly from the growing amount of research in the field of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and in other fields such as Ethnography of communication or Computer-mediated communication and Internet studies.

Introduction Katerina Zourou and Marie-No ë lle Lamy


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2 Katerina Zourou and Marie-Noëlle Lamy

Whether and how social networking promotes language learning is an underresearched and controversial issue. In this volume, we aim to fill this gap in both research and practice by exploring the reasons behind the controversies, by identifying three priority areas for researchers, teachers and learners and by critically examining the language learning afforded to learner groups in network-based environments.

The book builds on and expands knowledge that has been developed in useful reviews of social media in the area of CALL (Guth and Helm, 2010; Lomicka and Lord, 2009; Thomas, 2009) and more recently by Warschauer (2011); Grosbois (2012); Thomas, Reinders and Warschauer (2012) and Thorne, Piet and Cornillie (2012). The social media and their relationship to CALL at large are also discussed in Stockwell, 2012; Meskill (in press); Ollivier and Puren (2013) and Reinhardt and Sykes (in press).

In assembling this collection, it has been our choice not to pre- define the types of social media that would be addressed, but to leave the authors the freedom to identify the artefact(s) that, put into context, would form a meaningful learning setting in which the role of social networking in language learning would emerge.

Some key issues

The social web, social media and Web 2.0

In this book we opt for the phrases ‘social media’ and ‘social web’ (used synonymously) instead of the phrase Web 2.0, which we see as refer-ring to the technical platform on which social media applications evolve (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). In addition, we share Berners-Lee’s (2012) viewpoint that the social web is a natural evolution for the web through time. Situating social media in the evolutionary trajectory of the Web also serves to point out the need to lose the phrase ‘new technologies’, which has become outdated, as tracing the ‘new’ from the ‘newer’ or the ‘less new’ has become meaningless. For the same reason, we will avoid the use of ill-defined terms such as Web 1.0 (why not 1.5 or ... 2.8?), thus ensuring that we do not misrepresent far-reaching socio-digital changes in human activity through forcing them into small interpretative boxes. In our fast evolving socio-digital landscape, we feel that to look at an early sign of change and to create labels on this basis is a dangerous game.

Social networking: literature review and definition

A literature review of CALL studies focusing on social media (Lloyd, 2012; Clark and Gruba, 2010; Harrison and Thomas, 2009; Lomicka and Lord,


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Introduction 3

2009; Rheinhardt and Zander, 2011; Stevenson and Liu, 2010) reveals that although the social networking dimension is not completely absent, it is often conceptualized in very general terms and is rarely linked to the affordances of the technologies of the social web. For some studies (Lomicka and Lord, 2009; Clark and Gruba, 2010; Rheinhardt and Zander, 2011), social networking means ‘community building’ or ‘interaction through social networks’, both of which are features that pre-date the social web. Features that exclusively belong to networking via the social web (for example, liking, friending, tagging, or community recommendation and awards systems) are not fully elaborated in this literature nor are their implications for language learning and teaching. Likewise, for Harrison and Thomas (2009), social networking pertains to ‘complex layers of interaction’ (2009, p. 115); however, the nature of this complexity is not further developed. Stevenson and Liu (2010), who analyze three language learning communities ( Livemocha , Palabea and Babbel), say that ‘all three websites contained some social networking tools and user-created content, as well as static, site-created content’ (Stevenson et al., p. 236), but the authors offer no further explanation regarding the conditions of interaction and how they may relate to language learning. This book offers these authors and others space for an updated conceptualization of social networking as well as opportuni-ties for cross-fertilization.

The meaning of ‘social networking through digital technologies’ may confuse, as could perhaps be expected of an emerging concept. In the field of CALL where interaction is considered as core to the development of the L2, the distinction between social interaction (especially through Internet technologies) and social networking through social media may lead to misunderstandings. For instance, some may consider that peda-gogical interventions or experiments in online forums, online groups, or online classrooms can be labeled ‘social networking for language learning’. In these types of situations, teachers set up tasks and students work on these tasks by interacting with each other and with their instruc-tors. Sometimes the pedagogical set-up also includes interactions with ‘invited others’ (for example, experts, native speakers of the L2). These online interactions are comparable with interactions within the walls of a face-to-face classroom. The audiences in this case are formally defined by the institution (enrolled students, invited externals, designated teacher) and the tasks, however ‘authentic’, offer learners the possibility of interacting within the constraints of the task scenarios only.

For it to be possible to claim that ‘social networking’ is going on, we argue that it is necessary to embrace the interactional dynamics


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occurring in unrestricted situations, beyond formal, institution-led forms of interaction, including those offered through or as adjuncts to pedagogical scenarios. Although other interpretations of social networking are available, ours envisages the social web as a vast space open to any possible configuration of interaction and constructed on the principle of Musser et al.’s (2006) three pillars of the social web: user participation, openness and network effects. Importantly, these three components reflect the fundamentally open character of Internet-based interaction, that is, in contrast to social exchanges occurring in formal learning environments where interaction, rich and compelling though it may be, is designed to occur within a closed circuit.

Better understanding the social networking dimension leads us to briefly discuss its linkages to the three pillars of the social web. First, for their definition of user participation, Musser et al. stress that ‘the key to web 2.0 is not just user participation, it is participation leading to reuse’ (Musser et al., 2006: 30). Based on this assumption Zourou has stated that: ‘[r]euse facilitated by web 2.0 tools takes a completely different slant when considering applications and interfaces making interac-tion between applications possible (especially open APIs, Application Programming Interfaces), services, widgets and tools (among others: RSS feeds and mashups) that give users the freedom to handle content, there-fore to modify, multiply and (re-)mix content’ (Zourou, 2012, § 17). The second pillar, openness, is mainly defined by the horizontal structures of social networks and the third, network effects, refers to value of infor-mation (or data) that increases with the number of users appropriating it. The three pillars of the social web defined by Musser et al. (2006) illustrate an understanding of social networking as occurring in an open and unrestricted manner. It is this understanding that we share in the edited volume.

To return to the meaning of ‘social networking’ in CALL, it is worth mentioning a study by Antenos-Conforti (2009). The author analyzed the manner in which, when asked to carry out an L2 task on Twitter , a group of users taking Italian classes within a formal language learning context unexpectedly interacted through this tool with Twitter users outside the project, in a way not foreseen in the telecollaborative scenario of the language tutor. To our knowledge Antenos-Conforti’s study is the first evidence-based study of the use of social networking tools in a self-motivated and open manner in a language learning context and of the analysis of boundaries between a closed group of learners and general users in social networking sites.


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Introduction 5

Structure of the book

When issuing our call for chapters for this volume, we had originally invited potential contributors to address four areas, which we called Challenges. Challenge 1 was concerned with understanding how digital social networking practices can contribute to the wider ecology of language learning. In Challenge 2, we hoped to gather work that would assess the role of digital social language learning in formal and informal contexts, focusing on pedagogies and practitioners. Challenge 3 was about determining the extent of language learning benefits and disadvantages afforded within these environments. And finally, we had envisaged a Challenge 4, which would concentrate on work helping to understand learner motivation. Readers will immediately see by glancing at the Table of Contents that the first three challenges were taken up by our contributors, but that Challenge 4 remained unaddressed. While we have not formed a clear idea why, this gap certainly provides a clue for those seeking topics for future research. Accordingly then, the volume is structured into three Parts, with Part I bringing together three contri-butions that seek to understand how digital social networking practices can contribute to the wider ecology of student learning as well as of the learning that teachers engage in. Part II has a guiding theme around practitioners, be they teachers, or designers of both teaching scenarios and sites, including social networking sites (SNS). With Part III , we follow three different inquiries into the learning benefits and disadvan-tages of the social media for language learning, including assessment, while Part IV offers a critical overview of the collection.

Each part comprises three chapters. Using what they have called an ‘ecological framework’, Reinhardt and Chen open Part I with a study ( Chapter 1) of intercultural identity development in a student of English with L1 Chinese, through her social networking practices in Facebook and RenRen . Chapter 2 sees Wigham and Chanier venture into SecondLife . Their study of nonverbal communication among students of architecture who are learning that subject through their L2, focuses on the way that identity construction, through avatar appearance and other nonverbal means of communication, influences students’ verbal interactions in a networked space. Chapter 3 by Lima and Lamy looks at the networking practices of a global reading group for EFL teachers. Whether the online networking tools of today afford the same bene-fits as social reading in the past and how the network dynamics of the online reading group relate to ELT teachers’ professional development are two of the main questions in the chapter.


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Part II starts with Zourou and Loiseau’s piece ( Chapter 4 ) on the ‘ Culture ’ section of the language learning community Livemocha . Their examination of how design choices in that space affect language inter-action and its reinvestment from a language learning perspective leads to a set of recommendations for techno-pedagogical design develop-ment. In Chapter 5 Harrison scrutinizes the ‘user profile’ feature that many SNS have in common, showing how it plays a central role in interactions between learners and ‘peer experts’, with consequences for the language learning process. Students in a post-graduate course at a Japanese university, interacting in Livemocha , provide the population for this study. Chapter 6 , by Fuchs and Snyder, explores the extent to which pre-service language teachers in the USA and Taiwan used the SNS Google Wave beyond their pedagogical tasks. The authors discuss the design implications of their findings.

Finally Part III opens with a study by Liu, Evans, Horwitz, Lee, McCrory, Park and Parrish ( Chapter 7 ). They examine the communities Busuu , Livemocha and English Caf é in settings where these are used as tools for classroom and off-site language practice and they ask how ESL students use them for language development. Chapter 8 has Liaw and English reporting on a telecollaborative project between Taiwanese and French students learning English via joint tasks posted on a university website, to which the students soon added a Facebook group of their own creation. Framing their exploration within social semiotics, the authors contrast student production in both settings. In Chapter 9 Gruba and Clark take a wider view of the phenomena under study in the book by concentrating on formative assessment in SNS for language education. Through an autoethnographic survey of their experiences as learners in Busuu , Livemocha and Babbel , they explore mechanisms and processes related to initial placement, progress and interaction

In Part IV, a reflective piece by Lamy and Mangenot ( Chapter 10 ) closes the collection by reviewing all nine contributions from a learning and teaching viewpoint as well as a research-methodological one.

Finally, it is worth devoting a few words to the genesis of this edito-rial project. In October 2010, as part of the activities of the European Commission’s co-funded network ‘Language learning and social media: 6 key dialogues’ (LS6), coordinated by Zourou, a webinar was hosted by the University of Luxembourg with the title ‘Language resources and Web 2.0 – the latest hype or new perspectives?’, aiming to provide insights into the challenges of production and sharing of language learning content in the social media landscape. Lamy took part in the webinar as expert panellist. During post-webinar exchanges with


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Introduction 7

panellists and partners of the network it became apparent that the 2010 webinar was only the tip of the iceberg and that further research into the potential of social networking technologies for language learning was needed, particularly investigations supported by empirical data.

One outcome was the symposium ‘Web social et communaut é s autour des langues é trang è res: la part de l’informel et du formel’ (the social web and language learning communities: formal and informal dimensions) that took place during the conference ‘EPAL’ (Echanger Pour Apprendre en Ligne/Exchanges and interactions for online learning and teaching) at the University of Grenoble in Spring 2011. Fran ç ois Mangenot, also a partner of the LS6 network, co-hosted the conference, which had financial support from both the host university and the European Commission network LS6 and which also contributed to the sympo-sium. As leading members of the symposium Lamy and Zourou felt that an edited book would be a good way of making the most of all these discussions. They would like to thank both Fran ç ois Mangenot and Fred Dervin (who helped shape the scope and purpose of the book) for their invaluable contributions.


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Part I

The Wider Ecology of Language Learning with SNS


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11

Introduction

There is no doubt that students abroad make use of social networking sites (SNS) to connect to old friends at home and new friends in their new contexts. SNS like Facebook have boomed in popularity in recent years – according to the Facebook Newsroom Key Facts page in November 2012, over 1 billion people around the world use the service, with over 580 million using it daily and 81 percent of its users outside North America. Observing this ubiquity, applied linguists have claimed that social networking holds great potential for second language (L2) learning (for example Blattner and Fiori, 2009; McBride, 2009; Reinhardt and Zander, 2011; Stevenson and Liu, 2010), but have not yet undertaken much research grounded in empirical data on how L2 learners actually use SNS outside the classroom. Moreover, little research examines SNS practices from a longitudinal, developmental perspective (although see Reinhardt and Zander, 2011; Choi et al., 2011) in the context of a study abroad experience.

Examining SNS use in experiences abroad may provide insight into how L2 users adjust to and are socialized into, new communities and situations. Language socialization (Duff, 2008; Ochs, 1988) has been used as a framework for examining the interrelationship between social, linguistic and identity practices in face-to-face communities (Pavlenko and Norton, 2007). Several scholars (for example Black, 2008, 2009; Lam, 2000, 2004, 2009; Thorne and Black, 2007) have combined sociali-zation with a social-constructivist framework to examine online activity

1 An Ecological Analysis of Social Networking Site-Mediated Identity Development Jonathon Reinhardt and Hsin-I Chen


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12 Jonathon Reinhardt and Hsin-I Chen

by L2 users, in order to capture its intentional, agentive aspects. In this post-structural conceptualization, online activity involves literacy prac-tices that afford (Gibson, 1979; van Lier, 2000) the development of new identities and affiliations. Other scholars have followed with analyses of SNS use, noting that ‘within a particular site like Facebook participants can choose among diverse socially recognized ways afforded by the site for accomplishing self-identity presentation and interaction with friends by generating, communicating and negotiating meanings with others’ (Knobel and Lankshear, 2008, p. 269). Going further, because the traditional concept of ‘community’ does not allow for the agency of the SNS user, some have found a more commensurable concept in Anderson’s (1991) ‘imagined community’ used in conjunction with the concept of ‘investment’ (Kanno and Norton, 2003). In this framework, social symbolic activity can be understood in terms of ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu, 1991). For L2 users, ‘an investment in the target language is in fact an investment in the learner’s own identity’ (Norton and Gao, 2008, p. 110).

In step with this research, we undertook an analysis of the SNS practices of a Chinese student completing her doctoral work in applied linguistics in the USA, over a two-year period from when she first arrived. 1 Because a SNS is ‘a symbol system of unprecedented scope, sophistication and complexity’ (Knobel and Lankshear, 2008, p. 258), we frame our analysis in an ecological perspective, where mediated social and symbolic activi-ties are seen in terms of potentials for action, or affordances (Gibson, 1979). We combine quantitative focus on longitudinal frequency of use with qualitative analysis of SNS posts that index the dynamic and interactional development of an intercultural, multilayered identity. By means of the analyses, we seek to provide insight into how students abroad might use SNS to socialize into new identities and affiliations. We first present a literature review of the theoretical and methodological frameworks used, followed by a description of the participant, the data and the procedures used. We then present the results with interpretation and discussion interspersed.

Literature review

In the following section, we first review the literature on language socialization, investment and imagined communities. We then discuss how these concepts have been applied to studies of L2 use and learner development. Finally, we focus on studies using these concepts in online contexts.


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An Ecological Analysis 13

Language socialization, investment and imagined communities

With origins in anthropological traditions, language socialization conceptualizes language learning and enculturation as inextricably intertwined activities (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984; Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986). From this perspective, linguistic and cultural knowledge are mutually co- constructed and are mediated by linguistic and symbolic activity. Language use is thus both the means and end of the socialization process (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984). Second language (L2) socialization acknowledges that additional languages are also learned via socializa-tion (Duff, 2012; Watson-Gegeo, 2004). Duff (2012, p. 564) describes L2 socialization as the processes involved when L2 learners ‘seek compe-tence in the language and, typically, membership and the ability to participate in the practices of communities in which that language is spoken’, although they ‘may not experience the same degrees of access, acceptance, or accommodation’ (Duff, 2007, p. 310) in the new commu-nities as normally experienced in first language (L1) socialization.

Because ‘socialization’ is a broad theoretical rather than a methodolog-ical concept, others have developed and used commensurable constructs in conjunction with it. For example, inspired by Bourdieu’s (1977) work on social capital, Norton Peirce (1995) proposed the notion of ‘invest-ment’ to capture the socially and historically constructed relationship of the language learner to the target language and the changing social world (Norton Peirce, 1995; Norton and Gao, 2008). Learners, as active social agents, invest themselves in the target language and project multiple desired selves and identities in the communities for positive return that increases the value of their social and cultural capital (Norton, 2000). According to Norton (2000), the two main driving forces for learner investment are present agency and envisioned future identities.

In conjunction with investment, the notion of ‘imagined community’, first proposed by Anderson (1991), refers to ‘groups of people not immedi-ately tangible and accessible, with whom we connect through the power of the imagination’ (Kanno and Norton, 2003, p. 1). Imagination, according to Wenger (1998), is a form of engagement in communities of practice and a mode of belonging to a community. ‘Imagined community’ thus captures the complex, dynamic relationship between language learners, identity and community and foregrounds the role of learners’ actual and desired affiliations, current self-positioning, choices of investment and ways of engagement in the community (Pavlenko and Norton, 2007). Consequently, ‘the people in whom the learners have the greatest invest-ment may be the very people who provide (or limit) access to the imagined community’ of the learner (Pavlenko and Norton, 2007, p. 671).


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L2 users, investment and imagined communities

Several studies have discussed the complex interrelationships between the learner’s imagined communities and his/her language learning prac-tice. For example, Chang (2011) examined how two non-native English speaker (NNS) international graduate students made various investments in their current and future learning practices. These included seeking funding opportunities, developing social networks, overcoming language barriers and strengthening different kinds of disciplinary competences. Chang concluded that the two NNS students took active roles in making investments by engaging in varying English learning practices that depended on their personal academic trajectories before, during and after their doctoral study in the USA, their respective learning goals and the disciplinary culture of their immediate and imagined communities. Gu (2008) examined three Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners and their identities in two communities in China: a commu-nity of urban dwellers and a Christian community. Gu concluded that while the three learners exercised their own agency and appropriated English language use in the two communities, they responded to and participated in the same community in different ways depending on their personal histories and identities as English learners, which in turn contributed to their negotiation and conflict between self-identification and being positioned in the communities.

Haneda (2005) examined the literacy practices and engagement of two university students in an advanced Japanese literacy course and found that the two students invested themselves in various writing/speaking activities differently, according to imagined identities and memberships in imagined past, present and envisioned future communities. Jim, a Japanese heritage learner, engaged in Japanese literacy practices with the desires to align with his imagined community of high school English teachers in a local community, while Edward, a native English-speaking student, participated in literacy activities with the career goal of being a successful business executive in an international, multilingual commu-nity. In a study of immigrant parents in Canada and their attitudes towards bilingual French-English education and French immersion programs, Dagenais (2003) found that the parents viewed multilin-gualism as a valuable resource, an investment and a means of securing their children’s access to various imagined language communities, both locally and globally and to maintain economic and political power.

While these aforementioned studies provide evidence for the inter-connectedness among learner investment, identity and language practice, little research explores Internet-mediated communities and


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examines language learners’ learning trajectories, envisioned identities and memberships and participatory patterns in these virtual communi-ties of practice. As mentioned above, imagination, a mode of belonging to a community (Wenger, 1998), can exist independently of ‘territo-rial context’ (McMillan and Chavis, 1986, p. 247) and an imagined community can be formed virtually as with the four qualities/condi-tions: (a) membership, (b) the community’s influence on members and vice versa, (c) reinforcement of the individual’s identity by community membership and (d) shared affective connections. In this view, virtual participation in online communities can be seen as a form of investment that individuals make by extending their imagination in order to access imagined communities. It should also be mentioned that the increased role afforded to the imagination in social life by the processes of globali-zation complicates our understanding of the concept of community (Ryan, 2006). Technology, as Norton and Kamal (2003) argue, provides crucial access to a larger imagined community. The increasing capacity and ubiquity of communication technology have influenced the scope of imaginable communities. Individuals can extend their imaginations into virtual communities that go far beyond physical spaces (Kanno and Norton, 2003).

L2 users in online communities

While much attention has been focused on the learner involvement and enculturation process in face-to-face communities, Internet-mediated communities that go beyond immediate face-to-face social networks such as SNS have not been extensively explored for their potential in shaping the interdependency of learner identity, socialization and language learning (Pavlenko and Norton, 2007). With the growth of the Internet and computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools, Web 2.0 technologies (for example blogs, wikis and social networking) have altered the ways in which language is used and how information is presented (Williams, 2009). The Internet and digital tools have chal-lenged the traditional view of literacy and literacy learning as acquiring fixed, rule-governed, monomodal, static linguistic products and rede-fined ‘literacies’ as sociocultural, multimodal, dynamic, fluid social prac-tices (Reinhardt and Thorne, 2011).

In order to understand socialization and participation in imagined online communities, it is important to investigate issues of whether and the extent to which, new digital literacy practices promote new forms of identities through hybrid linguistic practices in online environments. For example, Lam (2004) studied the language used by two adolescent


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Chinese immigrants to the USA in a bilingual Chinese and English chat room. Lam found that the two Chinese youth used a hybrid form of English and romanized Chinese to represent their dual linguistic identi-ties and differentiate themselves from monolingual speakers of either language. A new form of identity thus emerges in the online community through their literacy practices, indicating how they identify themselves as ‘neither the social categories of English-speaking Americans nor those of Cantonese-speaking Chinese communities’ (Lam, 2004, p. 45).

This linguistic negotiation of learner identity and community membership in multiple communities as pointed out in Lam’s (2004) study of the two teenage immigrants in the USA has been shown to have a great impact on L2 learning from an L2 socialization perspective. Websites provide communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991) or affinity spaces (Gee, 2004) that afford learners opportunities to take on particular social roles and participate through varying social practices in these online affinity spaces. Yi (2008), for example, examined Korean adolescent learners of English and their participation in relay writing in a localized online community created and shared by approximately 25 Korean students in the USA. She observed that through engagement and participation in this web community, these adolescent English language learners (ELLs) created social bonds with members in a joint community and invested themselves in literacy practices in which they negotiated their conflicts and struggles.

In a similar study, Black (2008), using an online ethnography approach, examined three adolescent ELLs’ literacy and social practices in an online fanfiction community. She concluded that new media and technologies like fanfiction sites create online narrative and social spaces that afforded learners different opportunities to practice English, improve writing skills, develop fluency and represent shifting identities in relation to audiences. Yi (2008) and Black (2008), in line with Gee (2007), Lam (2004) and other scholars, demonstrate that Internet tech-nologies not only provide linguistic affordances that English users and learners can draw on to improve their English writing and learning, but also offer social affordances for socialization into imagined communi-ties by providing spaces for identity development.

Methodology, participant and data

In the following section we present the hybrid methodology we used for the study, as well as a description of the participant, data and procedures used.


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Methodology

In step with the above research, we ask how expert, non-native English users studying outside their home countries might make use of social networking technology to invest in new identities that afford sociali-zation into imagined communities. To investigate this question, we adopted a series of methodological approaches that we broadly label ecological. An ecological approach examines development longitu-dinally and may use frequency data to identify trends over time (for example Johnson, 2008; Vatrapu and Suthers, 2006). Development is understood to be complex and is seen to happen in a dynamic, adap-tive, non-linear fashion (Larsen-Freeman and Cameron, 2008; van Lier, 2004). A key concept in an ecological approach is the ‘affordance’, which is understood as a potential for action. An SNS presents affordances to the user, who may or may not perceive or act upon them, for a variety of reasons. In our study, we show how one user made use of SNS-presented affordances for the purpose of identity investment and socialization.

Another methodology we adopt is a qualitative approach that analyzes an SNS page as a dynamic, multimodal hypertext reflective of the user’s identity. For example, Knobel and Lankshear (2008) used a multimodal analysis approach to examine the ‘socially recognized ways’, ‘mean-ingful content’, ‘encoded texts’ and ‘participation in Discourses’ evident in the Facebook profiles of two individuals – an academic (Knobel herself) and a music aficionado. They examined their use of ‘Wall posts’, ‘status updates’, collocations with other technologies and applications like quizzes. The authors looked at the number and diversity of friends and groups to which the two individuals were networked, arguing that their ‘respective network memberships help constitute them in socially identifiable ways within the Facebook universe’ (Knobel and Lankshear, 2008, p. 261).

SNS profile analysis has precedence in sociology and communica-tion studies. Donath and boyd (2004) argue that a user’s SNS friends can serve as ‘identity markers’ just as the proverb claims, that one is known by the company one keeps – except that on an SNS, users can choose their friends and therefore carefully create and craft their online identity. Tufekci (2008) applied Dunbar’s notion of social grooming to SNS use, where presentation of self and the impression one makes are complementary aspects of the construction of the social self. SNS are ideal places for the virtual construction of self since the users can manipulate their profiles and thus the impression they would like to make. Zhao, Grasmuck and Martin (2008) looked at how Facebook users present their ‘hoped for possible selves’ by ‘showing rather than telling’,


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that is, by making indirect rather than direct statements of affiliation or preference. They argue that the SNS technology affords certain ways of self-presentation and affiliation, like ‘liking’ or posting photos and that users make use of these affordances strategically and implicitly.

Participant

The participant for this study, Sue (a pseudonym), was a (mainland) Chinese female in her late 20s working towards her PhD in applied linguistics at our university. Her first language is Mandarin Chinese and although her English was advanced enough for admission into an English-medium US American doctoral program in applied linguistics, she had never been to an English-speaking country before she started the program in August 2009. Before coming to the USA, Sue had received a bachelor’s and Master’s degree in English Literature in China. For two years, Sue had taught English grammar and listening to Chinese high school students in a private language institution in China part-time. As time went by, she became interested in language pedagogy and decided to pursue a doctoral degree in applied linguistics in the USA because of the standing of various US American doctoral programs in the field.

Data and procedures

Sue’s SNS use until March 2009 involved RenRen, a Chinese-language SNS designed for the mainland Chinese market, although it is accessible from outside China. Sue began using Facebook five months before she came to the USA, but only sporadically, since access to Facebook from mainland China, which is often blocked by the Beijing government, is difficult and requires manipulation.

On Facebook , each user has a ‘Wall’ on which he or she can post a variety of information. These postings can be status update posts , which are simple statements or questions written by the user, or shared link posts , which are links to outside websites that the user wishes to share with his or her Facebook friends. Once a user posts a status update or shared link, his or her friends see it on their own ‘newsfeeds’ and can then post a comment about it, which then appears on the user’s Wall under the corre-sponding post. Similarly, the user can see his or her friends’ status and share posts and comment on them if he or she desires.

Data for the study were gathered with Sue’s permission by the second author, her friend and fellow student. Every Facebook status update and shared link post Sue made during the data-gathering period on her Facebook Wall was archived, including the comments received on those posts from her Facebook friends. In addition, because Facebook notes a


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user’s activity in commenting on other people’s posts, we were able to document the comments that Sue made to her Facebook friends. With regards to RenRen, we were only able to collect RenRen status update posts, not shared link posts or comments, because of access restrictions.

Data collection was split into three periods: pre-arrival (March 2009 to July 2009), first academic year (August 2009 to May 2010) and second academic year (October 2010 to May 2011). These divisions were made based on observations that Sue started Facebook in March 2009 and made a few posts there that month, only to take a short hiatus until a few months later. Except for that March, during the pre-arrival period she used only RenRen. The second split was between her first and second academic years. Between the end of May 2010 and the middle of October 2010, Sue made no posts on either Facebook or RenRen, because she had returned home to China and upon return to the USA in August 2010, did not start using Facebook again for a few months. The periods are illustrated in the charts presented in the results.

Data were collected and counted for quantifiable results. Status and share posts were then analyzed using a grounded method to iden-tify what sorts of identities Sue was presenting in the content of her posts and how they reflected her investment in imagined communi-ties. While the content was primarily linguistic, Sue also posted photos and shared links which embedded visual graphics. In those situations, the identity indexed by the image was noted and counted. The results presented below are based on only a selection of all the available data, which included interview data and are interpreted in a larger project (Chen, 2012).

Results

In this section, we present a quantitative analysis of the posts and comments Sue made in the data collection period, focusing on frequency of activity. We then present a mixed method analysis of the content of Sue’s posts, focusing on indexed identities.

Quantitative analysis of posts and comments

Table 1.1 provides a count of total SNS posts and comments in the three data collection periods.

When Sue started using Facebook in March 2009, she had already been using RenRen and was using it about 5.4 times per month. During her first academic year, Sue averaged 8 Facebook posts (status and share) per month and during her second year, 5.8 per month. Sue’s use of Facebook


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comments increased from her first to second year. This illustrates that Sue switched from mostly using RenRen to mostly using Facebook upon coming to the USA, perhaps as a practical response to the limits China places on the use of particular SNS tools, but also, we propose, because she perceived the affordances Facebook offered for socialization into new communities and investment into new identities. As illustrated by Figure 1.1 , Sue’s use of Facebook slowly increased in frequency over the two academic years, although there were definite trends up and down. We interpret this as evidence that Sue increasingly saw Facebook as a legitimate practice in the communities in which she was investing new identities.

Figure 1.2 illustrates Sue’s use over the two academic year periods for which we collected data. The chart shows several noteworthy trends. First, Sue’s cumulative number of Facebook posts overtakes her cumula-tive number of RenRen posts after five months in the USA. While she occasionally returns to RenRento post, most of her energy focuses on Facebook after that point. In addition, of all 70 RenRen posts, 6 were in English, while of 159 Facebook posts, only 1 was in Chinese. We interpret this to mean that in Sue’s understanding, RenRen was a way to interact with her Chinese friends in China and maintain her Chinese identity, while Facebook was a way to invest in new, international identities and professional communities that used English.

Second, Sue begins her Facebook use by making status update posts primarily and then starts posting shared links after two months. While she regularly posts shared links after that, she more frequently posts status updates. We interpret this to mean that status update posting is an initial and perhaps most obvious affordance in SNS use and that the affordances of various SNS tools may be perceived and used differently,

Table 1.1 Sue’s total SNS use from March 2009 to May 2011

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July 09

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May 10

Year 2: Oct. 10 to

May 11

RenRen posts 27 29 14

Facebook status posts 6 57 31 Facebook share posts 0 23 16 Facebook comments

to others2 100 153

Facebook comments from others

1 81 104


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at different rates and for different purposes among users. This observa-tion is confirmed when analyzing Sue’s commenting behavior over time as well.

Third, Sue begins to use comments more frequently than posts after five months, meaning she comments on the status update and shared link posts made by her friends on their Walls, as they appear on her newsfeed. By illustrating how the ratio of posts to comments slowly decreases over time, Figure 1.3 shows how Sue shifts from favoring posts to favoring comments as a means of SNS use. In other words, over time she increasingly perceived the interactional affordances that

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Figure 1.1 Increase in Sue’s use of Facebook over two years

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Figure 1.2 Sue’s SNS use over two years


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commenting offered for socializing in new communities and investing in new identities.

Figure 1.3 also illustrates that while Sue first receives more comments than she gives (comments to Sue), the frequency at which she makes comments to others (that is, from Sue) soon overtakes the frequency at which she receives comments. In the middle of her second year, there is a notable increase of commenting both ways, although she maintains commenting to other people (that is, from Sue) as her primary means of Facebook use. We interpret this data to mean that Sue was socialized into Facebook practice by means of comments from others, on her posts, but that she quickly realized that commenting on others’ Wall posts was a major affordance for socialization and investment, perhaps more so than posting on her own Wall.

Comments from and to Sue from Facebook Friends

To determine the nature of Sue’s Facebook commenting behavior over the data collection period, we examined the number of comments exchanged between Sue and her Facebook friends. While Sue had over 150 Facebook friends when we gathered the data, we noted that less than half, or 65, had an active relationship with her, meaning that they had at some point commented on her posts, or that she had commented on their posts. In other words, Sue was Facebook friends with many ‘passive friends’ who never commented on her posts, or on whose posts she never commented. In addition, of those 65 active friends, only 26 were reciprocal relation-ships, meaning that Sue had both commented on their posts at some point and they had commented on Sue’s posts at some point. Nine of those friends were very frequently reciprocal, meaning more than 10 comments were exchanged over the two years and of those nine, three friends were extremely frequently reciprocal, with over 20 comments exchanged. On

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Figure 1.3 Sue’s shifting from posts to comments over two years


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the other end of things, 24 friends made unreciprocated comments to Sue, though only half of those were more than one comment. For Sue’s part, she made comments to 15 Facebook friends who did not reciprocate, though 5 of those involved only one comment from her.

To determine whether community and friend identity impacted Sue’s commenting behavior, we categorized her active Facebook friends into four groups. Group A was 27 fellow doctoral students; group B was 19 other academic friends; group C was 7 local, non-academic friends and group D was 9 friends at home in China – 3 friends were uncategorized, as Sue could not recall who they were. Of the 27 interactive Facebook friends in Group A who were in her doctoral program, 14 were recip-rocal – 7 never reciprocated comments back to Sue (although 5 of those were with 3 or less comments made by Sue). At the same time, 6 made comments to Sue that she never reciprocated (although 5 of those were with 3 or less comments made to her). When examining other groups, just over half of groups B and C were non-reciprocal in any way. Group D, however, was highly non-reciprocated by Sue – 9 friends from home made 20 comments, but she reciprocated only one comment back. We interpret this as evidence that Sue did not see Facebook as a means to maintain old contacts and friendships from home, even though there were many attempts by such individuals to do so. In other words, if frequency of post reciprocity can be taken as a measure of investment, Sue used Facebook as a means of socializing into new communities, rather than maintaining connections with home.

Table 1.2 shows the number of comments made by and to Sue to the four groups. Most notably, Sue made more comments to her fellow PhD students than they made to her, by a ratio of 2.3 to 1. At the same time,

Table 1.2 Comments from and to Sue by group, including unreciprocated

from Sueof those, to

unreciprocated to Sueof those, from unreciprocated

A: fellow PhD students

207 26 (13%) 89 13 (15%)

B: other academics

31 8 (26%) 49 24 (49%)

C: local 10 2 (20%) 11 2 (18%)D: home 1 0 20 19 (95%)Totals* 249 36 (14%) 169 58 (34%)

Note: *These numbers are below the total numbers, as we were unable to categorize some of Sue’s friends into these categories.


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the percentage of comments that were to or from unreciprocated friends in group A was relatively low, which in our interpretation signifies a relatively cohesive, dense network of users. The same density cannot be claimed for group B, which might be expected, since Sue’s relationship with them was most likely not as multiplex, that is, it did not happen in multiple domains and contexts, as with her fellow PhD students. Of the 9 Facebook friends with whom Sue had reciprocated exchanges of over 10 comments, 8 were fellow PhD students. To put it another way, if a fellow PhD student commented on one of Sue’s post, there was an 85 percent chance that Sue would comment on one of that student’s posts, while if another academic, say a Master’s student, or an acquaint-ance from another program, posted on one of Sue’s posts, there was only a 50 percent chance she would reciprocate. Even more dramatically, if you were a friend from home, there was only a 5 percent chance she would comment back on your post.

It is also interesting to examine the development of Sue’s friending practices, that is, how and to whom she made Facebook friend requests. In Facebook , friends have access to each other’s Wall posts and other features like photo albums (although access can be partially restricted) and so friending someone might be understood as investment in the identity one has in a given relationship. Taking a developmental perspective, we examined when Sue began commenting to newly friended Facebook friends and what percentage of her comments was to new friends (friended in the previous month) in comparison to old friends. Figure 1.4 illustrates that over the course of the two academic years, Sue made an increasingly fewer number of comments to new friends and more to old friends. Combined with the data in Figure 1.1 , this finding is evidence that Sue’s network became increasingly dense over time. Although it is understandable that friending is most frequent

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Figure 1.4 Sue’s comments to new friends and old friends over two years


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when one starts using an SNS and decreases naturally over time as one finds all possible acquaintances that use Facebook , the data trend shows that Sue may not have been using Facebook to make new friends with whom she did not share an identity affiliation. In other words, she understood it afforded a means for investment into communities that were limited in membership and into the identities associated with those communities.

Summary of quantitative findings

In summary, the quantitative findings of Sue’s Facebook use show that she used Facebook as a means to socialize into her graduate student community and to invest in her identity as a PhD student. Her network with this community became increasingly dense over time and although she used Facebook to make new friends, she used it more frequently to interact with her imagined community and networks than to make friends just for the sake of making friends. While she began by making status update posts and then shared link posts, Sue was socialized into Facebook practice by means of comments from others, on her posts. We hypothesize that within a few months of using Facebook she realized that commenting to others on their Walls was a major affordance for sociali-zation and investment. Sue perceived RenRen as a way to communicate with her Chinese friends in China, while Facebook was a way to invest in new, international identities and professional communities that used English. Sue did not see Facebook as a means to maintain old contacts and friendships from home.

These observations are hedged with the caveat that all Sue’s Facebook activity could not be quantified, simply because of the amount, diversity and frequency of the activity, as well as the fact that if the researchers went too deep, it might be considered intrusive. 2 For example, we were unable to determine frequency of photo shares, likes made, friends made and groups participated in, all of which would certainly be part of any truly comprehensive description of an individual’s SNS activity. Still, we maintain that because posting and commenting are the primary semiotic activities of social networking, they served as the main means of SNS-mediated L2 socialization for Sue, by functioning as investment vehicles into imagined communities. To understand these processes further, it is useful to examine the content of her posts and comments.

Post content analysis

In the tradition of an ecological approach to analysis of development, it is important to gather and examine qualitative data in addition to


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quantitative data. For social networking research, we propose that while quantitative research would examine frequency of SNS activity, qualitative analysis would involve more in-depth examination of the content of posts and comments, the subject of photos, the kinds of groups participated in, the kinds of posts and comments that are given likes and the identities of friends who are friended. Because of the limi-tations of SNS research and article length limitations, we present here only a sample of the data analyzed qualitatively; see Chen (2012) for the full analysis.

To conduct the analysis, we used a grounded approach in which each of Sue’s 203 Facebook and RenRen status updates and shared link posts in the three data collection periods were read and analyzed for the identity Sue seemed to be indexing in the post, either by the language used in the status post or by the content of the share post, with any images or photos she included. Separately, we (the authors) first read and tagged each post and then collated our posts and discussed the posts where we did not agree. By a process of grouping and re-grouping, we determined 12 categories: 5 that indexed traditional roles (1: human, 2: friend, 3: girlfriend, 4: student and 5: teacher) and 7 that indexed cultural and community participation (6: general, 7: Chinese, 8: local, 9: US American, 10: global, 11: university, 12: professional), descriptions and examples for some of which are provided below. We then went through the posts again to tag them using the 12 categories, allowing for double or triple categorization if necessary. Based on the primary categorizations, data showed distribution patterns across years (pre-arrival, year 1 and year 2) and SNS (RenRen and Facebook ) that are presented as percentages of totals in Table 1.3 .

Category 1: human

The ‘human’ category included posts that indexed the general identity of simply being human. Sue frequently expressed emotions on Facebook like ‘the night seems gloomy~~’, philosophical comments on Facebook like ‘is surprised by how surreal the reality could be ... ’, or general statements on RenRen like ‘什么也不想做。。。’ (I don’t want to do anything). These posts were reflective in nature and could not be associated with any other identity. A much larger percentage of her RenRen posts (46 percent) than of her Facebook posts (12 percent) were of the ‘human’ category, as were nearly two-thirds of her pre-departure posts, although there was no change from Year 1 to Year 2. We interpret this as evidence that Sue used RenRen more like a diary than as a way to interact with others, although it may also reflect the culture-of-use (Thorne, 2003) of the SNS.


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Category 2: friend

Some of Sue’s posts reflected a ‘friend’ identity and included mention of friends directly or indirectly. For example, in RenRen she stated: ‘气坏了我，被任志强:@:@:@’ (I was so angry because of a friend) and on Facebook she stated: ‘My birthday wish is that all my friends have a great time. Take care, everyone~~’. While a larger percentage of her RenRen posts indexed this identity presentation than her Facebook posts, it is clear that she understood that one function of SNS was to make broad statements to an audience of ‘friends’ and that offline and online friends overlapped.

Category 3: girlfriend

There were a few posts that indexed Sue’s identity as a girlfriend and later as a fianc é e. Because of the personal nature of these posts, they are not presented here, although it should be noted that Sue felt comfort-able enough to post them publicly to her friends.

Category 4: student

The largest percentage of posts in her first year (26 percent), the largest in Facebook and the second-largest in RenRen indexed the identity of ‘student’. In conjunction with the observation that most of her friends were fellow graduate students, we interpret this observation to mean that Sue saw her status as student as a key means of investment in her community. She sometimes addresses her fellow students directly, as the Facebook post: ‘PLEASE – I beg you people – do NOT post anything

Table 1.3 Percentage of posts according to identity indexed

pre-arrival year 1 year 2 RR FB

1. human 63% 15% 15% 46% 12%

2. friend 24% 6% 8% 14% 7% 3. girlfriend 3% 4% 2% 3% 4% 4. student 9% 26% 11% 17% 22% 5. teacher 0% 11% 0% 5% 6. general 8% 13% 1% 11% 7. Chinese 12% 5% 7% 9% 8. local 4% 11% 3% 8% 9. US American 4% 0% 0% 4%10. global 9% 0% 3% 6%11. university 9% 10% 4% 3%12. professional 3% 15% 1% 9%


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more about the stats exam. Let’s forget about it!’, or the RenRen post: ‘作好多’ (so much homework), posted soon after she arrived and began coursework.

Category 5: teacher

From Sue’s first to second year, there is a drop in percentage of posts from a student identity and a concomitant rise in posts from a teacher identity, most probably because she began her teaching assistantship in her second year. None of these posts are in RenRen. Her posts index a variety of feelings towards teaching, for example exhaustion, but prima-rily pride and enjoyment, like: ‘is amazed at her students’ talent!’, an interesting post, since only her Facebook friends and fellow graduate teachers would see it, not her students.

Categories 6 to 12: cultural and community participant

Categories 6 to 12 were centered on cultural and community partici-pation. There were a few posts that indexed general cultural participa-tion, not identifiable to any specific group. There were some posts that indexed Sue’s identity as a Chinese cultural participant, on both RenRen and Facebook , but these decreased between year one and year two. While posts that indexed participation in US American and global culture also decreased in frequency, posts that reflected identification with local, that is, city, regional and state culture, increased from year one to year two. This may be indicative of a growing sense of identity connected to actual place, rather than symbolic or imagined place. At the same time, the frequency of posts indexing an identity as an applied linguis-tics professional increased from year one to year two, mostly in the form of shared links but also with statements about professional activities like conference attendance. It should also be mentioned that an increase in similar posts indexing a developing professional identity is apparent in data for year 3, which is still being analyzed.

In summary, an analysis of post content shows that Sue used SNS to present a variety of identities, in traditional roles like student and teacher and as participant in several layered cultures and communities. While the content analysis is still underway, we expect to see the development of teacher and applied linguistics professional identities to eventually dominate others if Sue continues to use Facebook -mediated affordances for investing in the communities of which she imagines she is a part. Her use of RenRen, on the other hand, seems to reflect a different use of SNS, as a space for reflection and connection to home identities. It is interesting to note that Sue did not use RenRen for at least eight months


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after April of her second year, into the third year of data collection, returning to it to post something about a Chinese basketball player who had become a superstar in the USA.

Conclusion

By understanding the nature of SNS use as a means of L2 socialization, we might inform the design of more formalized learning activities and curricula. The goals of such pedagogy might be awareness of the diverse and dynamic ways that SNS afford, by enabling and constraining, social interaction, as well as the identities and imagined communities that we invest in as we respond to these affordances, be they linguistic, visual, or technological. We endorse literacies-based approaches to SNS-mediated L2 pedagogy, where students learn to see SNS as dynamic, negotiated, multimodal textualized activities and SNS use as a suite of socio-literacy practices.

We openly acknowledge a major limitation to our study, that indi-viduals usually engage in symbolic social practices more important to socialization than SNS-mediated activity, for example, participation in activities like attending classes and other social events, only a small frac-tion of which Sue referred to in her posts. Obviously, social networking is not the only means by which an individual may socialize or invest into an imagined community, as social relationships with SNS friends are often multiplex. Clearly, our study could not possibly document every offline meeting and conversation between Sue and her Facebook friends, nor could we possibly consider all the individuals with whom she interacted, the probable majority of which she was not Facebook friends with. All of these interactions and relationships would obviously impact socialization, perhaps with greater sway than SNS use.

Our study shows that a non-native, expert speaker of English who had never been to an English-speaking country before successfully used social networking during her first two years in her doctoral program as a means of socialization, in ways of which she may not have been conscious. Sue’s use of Facebook status update posts, shared link posts and commenting changes in frequency over time, perhaps, we propose, in response to her perception of the affordances that each tool provides for investment in new identities and imagined communities. In other words, as she was socialized into Facebook practices, she was able to take advantage of the opportunities that the various tools provided her to participate and develop new affiliations. While the processes involved were certainly dynamic, negotiated and interactional, Sue clearly played


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an active role in the development and presentation of these intercul-tural, multilayered identities. Ultimately, her activity contributed to the development of new communities, perhaps initially imagined, but eventually, in her and others’ minds, quite real.

Notes

1 . The data presented below represents only a small portion of a larger project (Chen, 2012).

2 . It should be noted that Sue read this entire chapter and gave her approval of its publication. The research was conducted in accordance with the ethical research guidelines of our university’s institutional review board.


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31

Introduction

The synthetic (virtual) world Second Life ( SL ) can be defined as a social networking (SN) environment: it allows users to network informally by initiating relationships with other users, often strangers, with whom they share no previous offline connections. Users can also connect with people with whom they have previously established offline relationships. In SL , networking can occur by interacting and later friending , other users whose avatars are proxemically close inworld. This is facilitated by a feature allowing public audio and textchat channels to be heard/read by other nearby users. Users can also initiate relationships through interest groups and create a public profile, albeit relating this profile to that of their avatar or their physical world (first world) identity. Users who friend each other can view the newsfeed and interest groups as well as the list of connections of one another and can navigate the latter.

The development of SN environments allows users to construct online personae/identities which may differ from their first world iden-tities (Turkle, 2011). The environments offer new ways of communi-cating, verbally and nonverbally, which imply new ways of being, of showing and negotiating identities (Nagy, 2010). As fully anonymous SN environments, synthetic worlds offer specific possibilities for identity construction and new ways of interacting because users are represented

2 Architecture Students’ Appropriation of Avatars – Relationships between Avatar Identity and L2 Verbal Participation and Interaction Ciara R. Wigham and Thierry Chanier


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32 Ciara R. Wigham and Thierry Chanier

by an avatar through which they communicate. Concerning language learning, interest is emerging in synthetic worlds. Research suggests that they may reduce student apprehension concerning interacting in a second language (Schweinhorst, 2002) and increase the students’ sense of presence and community (Nowak and Biocca, 2004). However, the questions of whether and how language learners use avatars to develop an identity and the impact of avatar use on participation and second language interaction remain largely unexplored.

In this chapter, we explore the above questions through the data anal-ysis from an experiment designed around a course which formed part of the European project ARCHI21. 1 For this course, a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach was chosen for students of archi-tecture whose foreign languages (L2) were French (FFL) or English (EFL). We explore how these students developed online identities and how these were forged through avatar appearance and the use of nonverbal communication, including gestures. We examine how these identities impacted interaction. Firstly, we looked at how changing avatar appear-ance influenced the way the students addressed each other inworld and their level of verbal participation and L2 interaction. Secondly, we inves-tigated whether constructing an identity partially through nonverbal communication in this SN environment may have created opportuni-ties for increased L2 participation. In our study, no instructions were given to the students regarding avatar appearance. The research ques-tions presented here were formulated after we remarked upon how the students changed avatar appearance and used nonverbal communica-tion during the course . Our study focuses on L2 interaction during open-ended activities rather than question-answer exchanges which may be more typical of a non-CLIL context.

Identity overview

Identity plays an important role in self-concept (Zhao, Grasmuck and Martin, 2008): an individual’s perception and beliefs of him/herself in relation to a number of characteristics. A simplified definition of iden-tity is that it is the part of the self by which a person is known and recognised by others. Identity construction is a public process which combines both how an individual claims his/her identity (‘identity placement’) and how other people approve, or not, this claimed iden-tity (‘identity announcement’). Identity is also considered as fluid: it is constructed with and through other people and changes depending upon the community or group with whom an individual interacts and


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Architecture Students’ Appropriation of Avatars 33

the collective identity of this community or group. Social identity theory suggests that a person’s conceptualisation of self is formed of multiple parts (or identities), depending not only on the social groups with which the person interacts (Hogg, Terry and White, 1995) but also those that a person aspires to join (Cabiria, 2008). Thus, identity construction occurs through changing physical environments, appearance and language and through interactions with others.

In face-to-face contexts, whilst a person’s identity placement may differ in the information s/he communicates about her/his social background and personality attributes, ‘identity claims still cannot go beyond the limits set by embodiment’ (Nagy, 2010, p. 171). One of the characteristics of online SN environments, however, is that they allow new forms of social interaction by changing the former conditions of identity construction (Zhao, Grasmuck and Martin, 2008) because phys-ical and personal characteristics are not directly obvious to others. SN environments also offer possibilities to enter into new communities where personal information may not be directly shown to community members, thus offering the possibility of experiencing a different self and of constructing new identities.

In SN environments, users’ online identities are created both through nonverbal and verbal identity claims, for example, the display of visual photographs (nonverbal) or how users choose to portray their iden-tity through the language used in their profile descriptions, Wall posts and comments (verbal). Many SN environments, such as Facebook and academia.edu, rely primarily on ‘anchored’ and ‘nonymous’ 2 relation-ships (Zhao, Grasmuck and Martin, 2008). Frequently, these relation-ships are initially established offline. The level of anchorage will vary depending on how easily a person’s online profile can be identified and located offline. Given that the networked aspect of these environments spans both online and offline networks, constraints are placed on the degree of freedom with which users can construct online personae and communicate an online identity nonverbally and verbally.

By way of contrast, in a fully anonymous SN environment, networking may be facilitated because users are free to construct the identity(ies) they wish and can decide whether or not to share information about their physical identity. In synthetic worlds this is particularly true because interactions are free of physical constraints due to users being represented by avatars: semi-autonomous agents represented in a digital space which can perform actions when commanded by the user (Peachey et al., 2010). With no physical manifestations of a person’s appearance or body to communicate information about users’ physical identities,


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the possibilities for users to construct online personae that differ from their physical life identities are multiple.

In the domains of social psychology, digital media and educational technology an increased interest in the impact of avatar identity exists (see Peachey and Childs, 2011) and, in particular, in avatar appearance on interaction. Studies show that whilst synthetic world users exert an influence over their inworld personae and digital embodiment as an avatar, the appearance and inworld personae of their avatars also influ-ence the users’ behavior (P ĕ na, Hancock and Merola, 2009) and interac-tion (Yee and Bailenson, 2007).

In a situated approach to inworld learning, the role of avatars and their identity is significant. Childs (2011), describing the importance of avatar appearance for learners, suggests that developing a body image and identity for a learner’s avatar is an ‘essential precursor for any subject-based activity’ (Childs, 2011, p. 27) because the avatar is both the tool through which a learning situation will take place and the learners’ ‘social capital’ (Bourdieu, 1986) within the group. This takes on further importance because situated approaches will rely on the co- creation of knowledge through learning situations which involve discussion and collaboration in the L2. In such situations, the communication of the avatar is the object of learning as well as the tool through which the language learning takes place. Given that avatars can be perceived as the source of messages in interaction, recognising how language learners perceive and use avatars has implications for understanding learning in these environments.

In non-computer-mediated communication contexts, nonverbal acts, including those of appearance and gestures, play important roles in communication (Kendon, 1982). Research suggests nonverbal and verbal communication are part of a single system with the same under-lying mental processes (McNeill, 2000). There is an increasing interest in the role such communication plays in second language acquisition (see McCafferty and Stam, 2008). With regards to L2 learning, it is assumed that communicating through avatars provides numerous potential opportunities for distance language learners; the physical presence of avatars provides verbal, para-verbal and nonverbal communication possibilities (Peterson, 2010; Wigham and Chanier, in press).

The use of avatars and their communication as the object of learning, as well as the tool in language learning situations raises certain ques-tions. These include i) whether and how learners use avatars to develop an identity; ii) what avatar embodiment means for interaction and iii) the extent to which the character of an avatar influences interactions


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(Lamy and Hampel, 2007). In this contribution, we address how learners distinguished between first world and inworld identities and constructed inworld identities through avatar appearance and the use of nonverbal communication. We relate changes in avatar appearance and use of nonverbal communication to the students’ L2 verbal interaction and participation.

Context for study

SN context

SN contributed to the context for the intensive design workshop ‘Building Fragile Spaces’ which is studied in this contribution at two different levels. With respect to Muijs, West and Ainscow’s definition of networking as ‘at least two organisations working together for a common purpose’ (Muijs, West and Ainscow, 2010, p. 6), the CLIL approach brought together architecture teachers from the Ecole Nationale Sup é rieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais and language teachers from Universit é Blaise Pascal (UBP) in Clermont-Ferrand to explore the poten-tialities of the synthetic world SL for CLIL. The five-day design workshop was held in February 2011. The relationship initiation for some of the teachers involved in this project occurred in SL : inworld groups allowed the teachers from different academic fields to be introduced, friend each other and then, through these new connections, discuss the potential for a project which developed into ARCHI21.

CLIL approach

In CLIL, the teaching and learning processes of a content subject, here architecture and a L2, here French and English, are interwoven. Our CLIL approach was content driven with the emphasis on the architec-tural content. The learning design for the language activities was articu-lated around the architectural learning design ( Figure 2.1 ). Working in subgroups, the students used their L2 to design a working, conceptual or architectural model in SL. The model responded to a design brief pertaining to the themes of Avatars, (E)Spaces, Scenario, or Land+scapes. The students gave a final presentation of their model orally in their L2 before a public jury.

The trigger for the macro task was a conviction that synthetic worlds are exciting new design fields for architectural experimentation. The community-building possibilities and the participant-created nature of SL were key in choosing SL as a learning environment. Firstly, the open, bottom-up nature and user-oriented features of the SN environment,


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which allow users to develop the content of the synthetic world, were important, in order to allow the students to create models and share their project work with others throughout the course. Secondly, the architecture teachers believed the SN opportunities to be greater than in other synthetic worlds, in particular, because SL allows users to see the profiles of other avatars that are proxemically close and, thus, to locate and interact with users, outside of their network, who are in the same inworld location. This encouraged the workgroups to share their models with other workgroups and SL users external to the course. Workgroups thus received comments and feedback on their project from other SL users: the network effects helped their models to become more valu-able as the number of people viewing them inworld increased (see Zourou, 2012).

In SL , the teachers did not prescribe how the interaction and collab-oration should occur or which tools the students should use. Rather, following two introductory sessions (communication tools and ‘building inworld’ in SL ), the students were free to network and interact within

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Figure 2.1 Learning design of the Building Fragile Spaces course (from Rodrigues et al., in press)


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their workgroups as they wished and had to manage the advancement of their model themselves.

Reflective sessions

To assist the students in their interaction and collaboration, language tutors ran SL reflective sessions with the workgroups on days 2 to 4 of the course ( Figure 2.1 ). Although the L2 was used by the students to interact during these sessions, the primary objective was not linguistic but rather for the students to deepen their understanding of their work-group’s design workshop process by externalizing their understandings. Secondly, the students aimed to develop critical thinking. The reflec-tive sessions provided opportunities to ‘stand back’ from the architec-tural macro task to better understand the ideas explored inworld with teachers, peers, or individually. This process was encouraged by asking the students to recall and describe in their L2 the information given to them by architecture teachers and any inworld observations made. The students were asked to infer the relevance of this knowledge and identify possible paths of future enquiry for the development of their project work.

The students were asked to bring to each session images of their inworld work and diary notes about their feelings concerning the work-group’s progress on the macro task as well as their own contributions. Each 45-minute session was divided into three micro tasks (the students’ general impressions of the day, their group achievements and the refor-mulation of their architecture teacher’s feedback). Figure 2.2 shows an example of the configuration for these reflective sessions. The micro tasks are projected on one posterboard and an image of student work on another. The reflective sessions were, thus, an open verbal discussion/task in which the tutors’ role was to animate the discussion and help the group progress with their brief.

Figure 2.2 SL environment configuration for the group reflective sessions


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Course environments and participants

Building Fragile Spaces was a blended course using SL and the software platform for spoken interaction VoiceForum (Fynn, 2007).

Two architecture teachers (one native French speaker and one native English speaker) conducted face-to-face workshop sessions during which the students explored SL with reference to their problem brief and created their model inworld. An EFL teacher and a FFL teacher from UBP accom-panied the students remotely ( Figure 2.1 ) during the language sessions in VoiceForum and SL . For the SL sessions, the students connected indi-vidually and synchronously to the synthetic world.

Eight female and nine male students, aged between 21 and 25 years old, participated in the course. They ranged from first-year undergradu-ates to second-year master’s students. French was the mother tongue of nine students, for whom English was their L2. The mother tongues of the remaining eight students were Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Korean and Arabic and their L2 was French.

Before the course, the students were instructed by email to sign up for SL , to select an avatar from the pre-customised selection SL offers and to friend their language teacher. No instructions were given concerning avatar appearance. Although the students chose a name for their avatar when initially entering SL, the students were asked to use their first name with the suffix ‘rez’ as the display name for their avatar that would be shown to other users. For example, a student named David would have been asked to name his avatar Davidrez . This was to aid the research protocol designed around the course, specifically the data collection. Once the course was over, the students could change their avatar’s display name. In this study we refer to all participants by their avatar names.

Only two students had previously used the synthetic world SL . Fifteen students had used other SN environments ( Figure 2.3 ). No students had previous experience of a CLIL approach.

The participants were divided into four workgroups. This division was thematic and linguistic: each workgroup received a different architec-tural brief and worked in the target L2 of either French or English. Two workgroups, studying the themes (E)spaces and Scenarios (respectively groups GE and GS) in SL had English as their L2. The groups studying the themes Avatars (GA) and Land+scapes (GL) had French as their L2. GL included one native French speaker. The language levels of the EFL students ranged from the CEFR (Council of Europe, 2001) levels B1 to B2 and for the FFL students from A2 to B1.


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Data collection and structuring for analysis

Researchers present in SL observed the group reflective sessions and recorded screen and audio output. The influence of a researcher’s presence on participants’ inworld behavior is termed by Panichi and Deutschmann (2012, p. 225) as the ‘observer avatar paradox’: the task of gathering data is undermined by the researcher’s presence itself (Labov, 1972). Therefore, a small animal avatar was used by the researchers inworld. Taking into consideration Yee and Bailenson’s study (2007), which suggests that avatar height influences users’ behavior, the researchers chose a small avatar that was an animal figure in order to dissuade participants from addressing them in their interactions. It was, thus, hoped that the researcher’s avatar would be as unobtrusive as possible. However, we cannot ignore that the researchers’ presence may have impacted participants’ identities and their construction during the research process.

Textchat logs from reflective sessions were saved. Pre- and post-course questionnaires were administered using an online survey tool and, using an audio-graphic conferencing environment, semi-directive interviews were conducted with five students following the course. Using the screen and audio recordings and textchat logs, multimodal

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Figure 2.3 Students’ previous use and frequency of this use of online multiuser environments


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transcriptions of the participants’ interactions were completed, adhering to a predefined methodology (Wigham and Chanier, 2013). This methodology built upon previous research (Ciekanski and Chanier, 2008) to establish a classification of verbal and nonverbal communi-cation acts in SL ( Table 2.1 ). The multimodal transcriptions allowed us to quantify the students’ verbal (L2) and nonverbal participation. These interaction data have been structured and assembled with the learning design and the research protocol into a LEarning and TEaching Corpus (Chanier and Wigham, 2011). We operationalize the concept of verbal/nonverbal participation in terms of number and total duration

Table 2.1 Classification of communication acts in SL

Communication mode

Communication modality

Act type and transcription code Explanation

Verbal audio audio act (tpa) verbal turn in the public audio channel

silence (sil) interval between two audio acts greater than three seconds

textchat textchat act (tpc) message entered in the textchat window

Nonverbal proxemics movement (mvt) avatar movement in the environment, e.g. avatar sits down, flies, walks backwards

entrance into/exit from environment (es)

avatar enters or exits the synthetic world

kinesics kinesic (kin) avatar gestures and movements made by an avatar’s body part, e.g. nod, point, clap

production production (prod)

production or display of an object in the SL environment


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of verbal/nonverbal acts that a participant contributes within the interaction.

Avatar identity and L2 verbal participation – interaction

We now analyze whether the students constructed inworld identi-ties through avatar appearance (Section 5) and nonverbal commu-nication (Section 6) and whether relationships exist between avatar identity and L2 verbal participation and interaction. We examine the students’ perceptions of the importance of the avatar before considering whether learners distinguished between first world and inworld iden-tities and constructed inworld identities through avatar appearance. We relate these results to L2 verbal interaction and participation. We then investigate whether nonverbal communication was perceived as essential to inworld identity construction and impacted the students’ L2 participation.

Students’ perceptions of the importance of the avatar

Student questionnaire and interview data suggest the importance placed on avatars for L2 communication and as social capital: the expected collective benefits from the cooperation between the participants were achieved through their being able to communicate through avatars. Once the students could manipulate the environment to move their avatar, perform gestures and change avatar appearance, they believed that their avatar allowed them to engage more in L2 interaction ( Figure 2.4 .)

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Figure 2.4 Communicating through an avatar (movements, gestures, appear-ance) allows you to engage more in L2 interaction with other SL users


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In the post-course interviews, from which quotes are shown as origi-nally formulated, one student explained that L2 communication was facilitated by using an avatar because she was less afraid of making mistakes during interaction (example 1). The student describes how her avatar allowed her to connect with other individuals inworld, albeit other student participants or strangers. Her avatar helped her to create opportunities to interact with members outside her network: she felt more at ease about speaking in her foreign language. Her inworld identity, portrayed through her avatar may, thus, have increased opportunities for ‘bridging’ social capital outcomes (Ellison et al., 2010).

[ (1) Zeinarez , (FFL) 10:30–11:20]: si on se trompe ce n’est pas tout à fait un probl è me parce qu’on n’est pas l à dans un sens physique le prob-l è me de parler un autre langage c’est le peur de se tromper ... il faut pas dire des b ê tises en fran ç ais ... quand c’est l’avatar c’est pas tout à fait un probl è me

If we make a mistake it’s not really a problem because we’re not there physically. The problem with speaking another language is the fear of making mistakes ... you mustn’t say anything silly in French ... when it is the avatar it’s not really a problem

The students expressed their not being comfortable with their avatar identity as being similar to that of another user of the networking environment:

[ (2) Hyungyoonrez , (FFL) 23:01–24:42]: c’était la m ê me chose que Zeinarez et mon avatar c’était vraiment similaire ... j’ai pas vraiment chang é beaucoup de choses ... c’est juste donner un peu de diff é rence entre les autres

it was the same thing as Zeinarez and my avatar it was really similar ... I didn’t really change a lot of things ... it is just to show a difference from the others

[ (3) Audreyrez , (EFL) 20:26–20:41]: j’ai chang é non seulement les v ê te-ments et puis l’apparence physique non le but é tait de faire quelque chose d’assez de loufoque et d’amusant le plus diff é rent possible de soi et des autres


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I changed not only the clothes and then the physical appearance the aim was to create something which was kind of crazy and fun as different as possible to me and the others

Such statements suggest, in the students’ subjective perception of the conceptualisation of their avatars, social capital was highly important and demanded individual inworld identities. One reason for this may be that the students did not wish to appear as ‘newbie’ users, in order to network and integrate more quickly with more experienced/knowledge-able users. The students’ perceptions of their avatars as social capital may also be related to SL being the students’ object of study as well as the environment in which they were studying: their avatars influenced how the students reflected upon their projects and the image of them-selves reflected, in part, the architectural stance they wished to adopt in SL vis- à -vis their workgroup and other users of the SN environment. As one student explained, her avatar was the object which represented her thoughts and character:

[ (4) Hyungyoonrez (FFL) 23:55–24:52]: l’avatar est une chose pour repr é senter notre notre pens é e et notre esprit comme ç a du coup l’apparence est une premi è re chose de montrer comment je pense

the avatar is the thing which represents our thoughts and our spirit there-fore the appearance is the first thing to show how I think

To link the above student impressions to our study, we now examine whether the students made distinctions between their first world and inworld iden-tities, how their inworld identities were constructed by changes in avatar appearance and any impact of this on L2 verbal interaction.

First world – inworld communication and identity distinctions

Our interview data (example 5) suggests that the students distinguished between first world and inworld interaction during the course.

[ (5) Zeinarez (FFL) 23:55–24:52] avec la personne avec qui j’ai travaill é m ê me si on é tait juste à c ô t é des fois on se communiquait avec des avatars ... quand par exemple quand elle voulait me montrer quelque chose dans l’île elle me regarde pas elle me parle pas mais je trouve une invitation de t é l é portation alors ok je vais elle est juste à c ô t é de moi mais c’était marrant d’aller voir son avatar qu’est-ce qu’il veut


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With my partner even if we were just beside each other [in the face-to-face environment] sometimes we communicated with each other using our avatar ... for example, when she wanted to show me something on the island she wouldn’t look at me or talk to me but I would find a teleporta-tion request so I would teleport she was just beside me but it was funny to go and see her avatar and what it wanted

This differentiation may be due to the students’ distinguishing between first world and inworld personalities. To examine this, we coded and counted in our transcriptions of the reflective sessions how the students referred to one another in their interaction. Although the students had been asked to name their avatars in a particular manner, 6 of the 17 students did not follow this instruction, but rather invented avatar names. Four of these students (students S1–S4, on the left side of Figure 2.5 ) were referred to, by their classmates, using their first world name ( Figure 2.6 ). For example, the participant Prevally (student S3) was referred to eight times by her first name and not at all by her avatar name. In comparison, the avatars of two participants, Hallorann (student S5) and Tingrabu (student S6), (to the right of Figure 2.5 ), were addressed by their avatar names rather than the students’ first world names. For example, Tingrabu was addressed by his avatar name six times and never by his first name.

Our data revealed that in the interaction, avatars with a human-based morphology were referred to by their users’ first names. However, avatars referred to by their avatar names had a less human-based morphology (see right side of Figure 2.5 ). It appears that the choice of a less-corporeal body by the students for their avatar helps distinguish the inworld iden-tity placement of these students from their first world identity.

The next figure shows how the appearance of the avatars in Figure 2.5 relates to the use of their names.

Avatars’ morphological evolution related to L2 verbal participation and interaction

To better understand changes the students made to avatar morphology and whether this impacted L2 verbal participation and/or interac-tion, we examined our student avatars’ morphological evolution with respect to the number of L2 verbal acts during the transcribed reflec-tive sessions. Although in the introductory sessions no activities had involved changing the avatar’s clothes or appearance, nor were any specific instructions given in the pre-course email, we noticed that despite SL being a new environment for most students, as they evolved


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in the world which they were constructing as part of their architectural projects many students customized their avatar’s appearance.

The changes the students made were, frequently, to become less based on human morphology either by editing avatar appearance using the SL menu to customise an avatar’s look (for example, change skin colour, body shape) or by adding objects which were scripted to their avatar’s body. In SL , it is possible to use Linden Scripting Language to write scripts (sets of instructions) to give behaviors to SL objects which can then be worn by avatars. For example, a script can be written so that the hat worn by an avatar includes moving appearance components ( Figure 2.8 , left) or that an object (for example, a can/mug) carried by an avatar

Figure 2.5 Avatars with human-like morphology and avatars with changed morphology

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makes the avatar repeatedly perform a gesture at determined time inter-vals (for example, a drinking gesture, Figure 2.8 , right).

Twelve students customized their avatar’s appearance during the course. These changes were predominantly made after the first intro-ductory session or midway through the course ( Figure 2 .9). Figure 2.9 ’s organization is inspired by Warburton’s (2008) graphical illustration of avatar identity development and empathy in Multi-User Virtual Environments based on his study of common threads in narratives describing avatar evolution. His graphical illustration shows the links between time spent inworld and a user’s empathy with his/her avatar. In Figure 2.9 , a vertical increase of one in the y axis shows a modifica-tion to avatar appearance by a student from one session to another.

Figure 2.7 Female student participant Emmegi88 changes her avatar body shape between day one and day three of course


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Figure 2.8 Avatars with a scripted appearance – a light rotating around an avatar’s head – and an avatar carrying an object which scripts the kinesic act of drinking

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Language learning sessions 1=introcomm, 2=buildjig,3=slrefl day 2, 4=slrefl day 3, 5=slrefl day 4

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Figure 2.9 Evolution of students’ avatar appearances


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For example, the student Arnaudrez modified his avatar’s appearance between each of the first four sessions, but did not change its appear-ance between sessions four and five (shown by the horizontal line). Audreyrez did not change the appearance of her avatar between sessions one and two and sessions three and four (horizontal lines), although the student changed her appearance between sessions two and three and sessions three and four.

Figure 2.9 shows that five students made no modifications to their avatar’s appearance during the course: the figure shows a horizontal line for each of these students for the totality of the five sessions on the x axis . One of these students, Zeinarez, explained that, at first, she did not have the time to change her avatar’s appearance and then finally that she felt that she did not really want to change its appearance. Possible interpretations of Zeinarez ’s comments might be that she either liked the way her avatar looked or she felt the need to adopt a persistent identity with respect to the appearance of her avatar, in order to be identified and re-identified consistently throughout the course. Although the student’s avatar appearance was persistent, we can question whether her identity evolved otherwise, in light of co-construction theories of identity which stress that identity is continually constructed with reference to the envi-ronments, groups and people with whom a person interacts. In this study we did not explicitly question participants about their inworld identity. Further research into identity in synthetic worlds, however, needs to consider how participants perceive the identity they feel is their own, as well as how they perceive the identity of others in these environments.

For four of the five students who did not change their avatars’ appear-ance: Huasha , Antoinobri , Zeinarez and Pjgamez ( Figure 2.9 ), our anal-ysis reveals that these students were amongst the five students to have made the least number of verbal acts during the SL reflective sessions ( Figure 2.10 ).These participants made an average of 13 verbal acts during a session, compared to an average, for any single participant in all three workgroups analyzed, of 30 verbal acts. A lack of avatar person-alisation suggests that the students have perhaps not passed the ‘tech-nological and competency threshold’ (Warburton, 2008: §4): they are not yet able to manage the graphical interface of the SN environment and interact with it. They have, thus, not accessed the ‘threshold of care’ (Warburton, 2008: §6). This threshold is when users start to iden-tify with their avatars and care about them, feeling an emotional pull towards their virtual selves. At this threshold, the user feels the necessary embodiment to invest in the synthetic world and in inworld interac-tions. Psychological appropriation of an avatar may, thus, be easier if the


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user has reworked his/her avatar, leading to an increased commitment to the activity in general. Another interpretation is that these students, due to motivational reasons, are generally engaging less with all aspects of the course.

Our interview data suggests that an avatar’s morphology may not only influence L2 verbal participation but also with whom the students decide to network and interact inworld or not. One student, Hyongyoonrez, depicts her workgroup member Antoinobri ’s avatar as similar to that of a monster, suggesting that the avatar’s morphology had strongly influ-enced how she characterised this avatar:

[ (6) Hyungyoonrez , (FFL) 26:01–26:06] pour l’avatar d’ Antoniobri c’était un peu un monstre ( Antoniobri’s avatar was a bit like a monster)

[ Hyungyoonrez , (FFL) 26:59–27:06] la t ê te é tait juste le petite mais le chest é tait vraiment grand ( The head was just little but the chest was really big)

When asked if this affected the way in which the student communicated with Antoniobri, the student states that they did not communicate at all, despite being in the same workgroup. Our data suggests the necessity to encourage the students to personalize their avatar appearance, in order to encourage L2 verbal communication inworld. However, we can speculate

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Figure 2.10 Verbal acts for students in workgroups GA, GL and GS during slrefl sessions day 2


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that there are certain limits that, when reached, influence with whom the students decide to interact. In one session, despite Antoniobri being one of the most active participants in the workgroup (the total length of his verbal acts being greater than that of any other group member, including the tutor), we observe that following his verbal acts, other students do not take the floor. Instead the language tutor intervenes and asks the students if they want to react to what has been said. His avatar’s morphology may influence this, although we must acknowledge that there may be other factors which may have influenced the lack of interaction with this student and in particular between Antoniobri and Hyungyoonrez . Indeed, Antoniobri was a native French speaker whilst the other GL members were FFL students. This dynamic may also explain a lack of communication between the student and his fellow group members.

Nonverbal communication related to L2 verbal participation

Having seen the role avatar appearance played in L2 participation and interaction in our study, we now turn to whether the students created their avatar identity in part through nonverbal communication ( Table 2.1 ) and whether this impacted L2 verbal participation. To study this, we analyzed the frequency of nonverbal acts used by different participants in our transcription data. Our analysis shows that certain students repeatedly performed the same nonverbal acts. For example, the avatar of Arnaudrez frequently used the kinesic act of drinking whilst the participant Emmegi88 repeatedly changed her sitting posture when she verbally interacted with the others. Our interview data shows how avatar configuration was perceived by the students’ peers. Audreyrez described that all of her workgroup members used gestures, but that Arnaudrez’s drinking gestures represented the student as funny and unique. Another student explained that participants drew attention to their avatar’s image by ‘ego-tripping’ through their use of gestures. Thus, our data shows that the students’ inworld identities were created in part through their nonverbal acts in addition to their avatar appearance.

We questioned whether the students who frequently used nonverbal communication utilised this to occupy the space during the SL reflective sessions so as to be seen participating without necessarily interacting frequently in their L2. We examined the total number of nonverbal acts compared to verbal acts during the SL reflective session on day 2 for the workgroups of participants Arnaudrez and Emmegi88 , whose nonverbal behavior was particularly striking to other students.


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Figures 2.11 and 2.12 show that Arnaudrez and Emmegi88 used consid-erably more nonverbal acts than the other participants. Although the quantity of verbal acts for Emmegi88 was smaller than for Arnaudrez ,

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Figure 2.12 Number of verbal and nonverbal acts by participant for workgroup GA during slrefl day 2


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the total number of L2 verbal acts for both students was within their workgroups’ norms. Therefore, it appears that they did not simply use nonverbal communication to occupy the space, but rather in parallel with L2 verbal interaction.

To examine whether the nonverbal communication acts of the avatars allowed the students to engage more in the L2 verbal interaction, two assumptions were formed and statistical significance tests performed on the SL reflective sessions’ data for workgroups GA and GS on day 2.

A1: The more nonverbal acts a participant performs, the more verbal acts s/he performs.

A2: An increase in the number of nonverbal acts performed by a participant results in an increase in the total length of the participant’s verbal acts.

None of the participants in GA and GS had used SL prior to the course. Therefore, the students had spent the same amount of time inworld when data was collected. Our analyses are available in an open-access distinguished LETEC corpus (Wigham and Chanier, 2012a).

The analysis of variance used to test A1 and A2 was a one-way ANOVA test for which the populations from the samples obtained must be normally distributed and the samples independent. To ensure this test could be performed, considering the small sample sizes, a Shapiro-Wilk test of normality was conducted. It showed that the population from which the samples were obtained was normally distributed, being greater than 0.05 (results of 0.90 for verbal acts and 0.86 for nonverbal acts).

Using the one-way ANOVA test to test A1, the two data sets were, thus, the number of independent verbal acts and the number of independent nonverbal acts performed by each participant. We define two acts as being independent when the time difference between the start time of act n+1 and the end of time of act n is greater than the standard devia-tion for the time delays between all acts in the session performed by any one participant ( Figure 2.13 ).

The result of the first one-way ANOVA analysis showed that the variance between the number of independent nonverbal acts and the number of independent verbal acts performed by each participant was not statistically significant (F = 0.121, p ≥ 0.5). Assumption A1 was not confirmed.

The two data sets used to test A2 were the count of independent nonverbal acts per participant and the total length of all independent verbal acts for the participant (in seconds) during the session. As our


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assumption concerned individual participants, the tests were performed for both workgroups GA and GS together.

The result of the second one-way ANOVA analysis confirmed A2: the variance between the number of independent nonverbal acts performed by each participant and the total length of each participant’s verbal acts was statistically significant (F = 27.616, p = ≤ 0.001).

To summarise, a student who performed a greater number of nonverbal acts did not necessarily perform a greater number of verbal acts. However, a proportional increase exists between the total length of

Act type

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634.9

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44.01

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471.54

484.04

488.19

505.67

509.48

12.69

End timeof act inseconds

Start timeof act inseconds

DifferenceEnd timeand starttime

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357.2

403

515.7

526.19

545.51

613

625

641.3

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784

871.51

46.34

68.74

473.36

485.96

489.84

508.17

511.85

115.97

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14.61

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9.9

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20.47

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15.83

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independent verbal act

independent nonverbal act

look_up

bon hier j’ai essayé un peu avec le

bon je [_laughs] je ne sais [chais] p

mais il y a un symbole de hm de qu

euh non mon {snapshot} se trouve

euh j’ ai une mais les autres je les

[_laughs] moi non plus

oui

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Actor = crispis. Contents of act.

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ils nous ont dit que sous que le thA

euh je crois que pour le moment /

je crois que que on ne sait pas trop

look_up

euh pardon vous pouvez répéterr r

Standard deviation for all actors = 25.69Independent acts highlighted

Figure 2.13 Identification of independent verbal and nonverbal acts


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all verbal acts performed by a student and the total number of nonverbal acts performed.

Our data suggests that these students used nonverbal acts to help to establish their inworld identity. They did not use the nonverbal acts to occupy the space, but rather in parallel with interacting verbally in their L2. Indeed, the students’ nonverbal communication helped support L2 verbal interaction: a student who performed a greater number of nonverbal acts took longer L2 verbal turns. We can question whether communication in the synthetic world in participants’ mother tongues (L1) would provide similar results.

Conclusions

This study concerned inworld identity construction through avatar appearance and use of nonverbal communication and their effects on the students’ interaction in a networked space. It investigated an archi-tectural CLIL course which used the SN environment SL . The results show, firstly, the importance the students attribute to avatars for L2 communication and as social capital. Secondly, the students’ differen-tiation between inworld and first world communication, which may be due to a distinction between first world and inworld personalities reflected through changes in avatar morphology. These changes affected how the students addressed each other and their level of L2 verbal inter-action: the students who changed their avatar’s appearance participated more frequently in their L2. Finally, our study showed that nonverbal communication is a building block of the students’ inworld identities and suggested a connection between nonverbal communication and L2 verbal participation: an increase in nonverbal acts is correlated to longer verbal turns.

Our findings suggest that L2 students do not need to choose avatars with morphological appearances to network within synthetic worlds. Rather, standing back from their first world identity may help increase students’ level of verbal L2 participation. However, students may need to be careful about the morphology of their avatar not being too intim-idating. Furthermore, introducing students to the range of nonverbal acts afforded by the SN environment may accelerate the emergence of verbal language production, particularly the length of L2 verbal acts. To conclude, increasing students’ awareness of the possibilities that exist in a synthetic world to alter avatar appearance and to use nonverbal commu-nication may help support L2 interaction and may facilitate opportunities for networking inworld in their L2. This will increase opportunities for


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potentially acquisitional sequences (Py, 1990), although more research is needed in the particular context of synthetic worlds. We are currently exploring ways in which the combined use of the textchat and audio modalities promote opportunities for increased verbal participation and feedback on language form (Wigham and Chanier, 2012b). We hope to explore whether interplay exists between students’ use of kinesics and requests for language correction and teachers’ provision of feedback and this nonverbal modality.

Notes

1 . The course formed an action with the European project Architectural and Design-based Education and Practice through Content and Language Integrated Learning Using Immersive Virtual Environments for 21st-Century Skills, Lifelong Learning Programme, KA2 Languages. The project was funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

2 . The opposite of ‘anonymous’.


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56

The considerable increase in membership of an international Online Reading Group (ORG) for professionals in English Language Teaching (ELT) and its boundary-crossing into other networking sites and tools has prompted this study. Our research is also inspired by a reflection on the historical context of non-online reading groups as well as by recent work on the role of online networking in learning and teaching. After discussing aspects of the pre-online reading group movement we introduce the ORG under study. We then specify what we understand by online networking, state our research questions and construct a case study from the ORG’s origins as a forum, in 2007, to its role as the core of a professional online network today. In this way we aim to contribute to the exploration of online social networking in its relationship to offline activity and online activity in networked spaces that may func-tion alongside the ‘social media’ (as this phrase is understood in the bulk of the present collection).

The historical context: e-reading groups and their predecessors

In the last few decades, reading groups have migrated across grand drawing rooms, libraries, middle-class kitchens, then to TV shows, to computer platforms and lately to applications for mobile phones and tablets. These shifts amount to more than instrumental change as we will show later. We start with a quote:

[W]e are all part of a great living thing and it takes all members to work it. We want to know more about each other, what books are liked the best, where the difficulties lie, how the magazines can be

3 Online Reading Groups and Network Dynamics Chris Lima and Marie-No ë lle Lamy


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Online Reading Groups and Network Dynamics 57

made of more use and touch our lives more and everything that can make us all feel we are workers together.

It could be a motto, or status, posted at the top of a new Facebook group. It is, in fact, a declaration published in the 1893 issue of the magazine of the National Home Reading Union (NHRU, see below) by the cultural historian Robert Snape. The desire of readers for togetherness and collec-tive agency transpires through this early text, just as it does in the online media of our day, as is shown in the contemporary rhetoric of ‘sharing’, ‘friending’, ‘liking’, ‘following’, or ‘crowdsourcing’ that is associated with them.

Yet historians of reading groups also agree that authority, an aspect of agency that is almost contradictory with ‘sharing’ or ‘crowdsourcing’, is an essential part of the functioning of reading groups. For example, Snape (2011) explains how the reading circles set up by the NHRU in Britain in the late 1880s to improve levels of reading among the working and lower middle classes encouraged normative cultural practices through guidance by an authority. The NHRU prepared lists of recom-mended readings with guidance notes for respected figures to present to groups: ‘most successful circles depended on the support of middle-class philanthropy, typically the intervention of a clergyman or middle-class woman’ (Snape, 2011, p. 63). The same principles pertained when the NHRU extended its reach to the colonies (Snape, 2002, p. 90). Similarly, in her study of twentieth-century Texas book clubs, the sociologist of book clubs Elizabeth Long finds that the social framing of reading which characterizes collective literacy is dependent on ‘groups of people (literary critics, publishers, or English professors, for example) [who] shape reading practices by defining what is worth reading and how to read it’ (Long, 2003, p. 11), from which we can conclude that collective agency was a powerful mechanism of reading groups from their incep-tion and that the social group exerting it had some form of de jure or de facto authority or seniority over the rest of the membership.

The e-reading group under study: presentation

Bearing in mind these antecedents, we now move to the origins of the e-reading group under study. In 2007, the British Council, an organiza-tion set up more than 70 years ago to promote British culture worldwide, was running a project called enCompassCulture to support face-to-face reading groups in countries where the organization had offices, aiming to improve literacy and facilitate multiculturalism through dissemination


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58 Chris Lima and Marie-Noëlle Lamy

and discussion of literary texts in English. The associated website func-tioned as a support platform for resources such as book recommenda-tions. An asynchronous forum was also available but underused. One of the present authors, Lima (henceforth ‘the coordinator’), felt that a specific target population, ELT teachers, could benefit from a dedicated online reading group. She obtained a space and some support from the British Council and set up the ORG for ELT teachers, where she initi-ated activity by choosing texts, introducing these to the community and moderating the ensuing exchanges. Unlike the earlier underused forum, the ORG has flourished, as will be shown in the next section. It now includes more than 1,000 participants from over 75 countries. In Figure 3.1 , light grey areas shows membership around the world and darker areas show countries where there are more than 40 members.

Research questions and methodology

Understanding the success of this ORG involves a variety of hypotheses and research instruments and lies within the ambit of a wider study currently in progress. Within the scope of this chapter, we limit our inves-tigation to the relationship between the ORG and online networking in its relationship to learning and we focus on two aspects: the historical and the techno-cultural. The historical focus leads us to examine the

Figure 3.1 ORG membership worldwide


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strands of continuity and discontinuity that link between-four-walls social reading, as discussed above, with social reading online. The tech-no-cultural dimension relates to the specific contribution of technology to the culture of social networking, as conceptualized in Zourou (2012) and explained below. Broadly, our research questions are (1) How does the ORG relate to historical reading groups and what role do the online media play in such a relationship? (2) What are the online networking features of the ORG and how do they relate to ELT teachers’ professional development?

To address these questions, we look at a) how participants’ interac-tions within the Group have affected and been affected by the online setting; b) how participation in this specific online environment seems to have contributed to some members’ engagement in other professional social networks, both online and offline and c) how participants assess the relationship between such networking and their own professional development and language-learning process. Our research instruments include documentation kept by Lima through the lifetime of the ORG and site analytics provided by the British Council, as well as an online survey conducted between February and May 2012, open to all ORG membership of about 1,000 participants at the time and responded to by 126 members. Some of the survey respondents agreed to participate in a further stage of data collection and were asked to provide short pieces of writing in which they narrated and analyzed their participa-tion in the Group. Such narrative frames (Barkhuizen, 2011) contained sentence beginnings that were designed to elicit some aspects of Group participation such as reaction to posts, challenges and attitudes towards reading literature online.

The role of the coordinator requires further explicitation. Lima’s role as instigator and coordinator of the ORG is akin to the role of discussion leaders in offline reading groups – being responsible for posing questions in order to promote engagement with the texts, keeping the discussion flowing and encouraging forum participation. Lima’s researcher stance is participative. As a founding member of the Group, she has been part of the dialogical process that has been taking place among participants since the ORG’s creation. Withdrawing from her role would not only be likely to significantly alter the patterns of communication and participation in the ORG and undermine a longitudinal study on group interaction, but also endanger the continuation of the project as a whole. Although this chapter is not principally about power, in a larger study of the ORG it would be important to rely on a methodology that acknowledged this researcher stance and took account of it through the data analysis.


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Online networking for teachers: main features

Zourou (2012), commenting on Musser et al. (2006), critically revisits the three features that these authors deemed to be the fundamental characteristics of Web 2.0: user participation (to which she adds ‘ re-use’ ), openness and network effects . We now present them in a little more detail, as they will help us interpret the data later on in the chapter.

User participation, already an issue in asynchronous learning from the earliest days of Internet forums, is recast in Web 2.0 as user participa-tion and re-use, an augmented form of participation, which now includes re-use through ‘[a]ggregating, combining, tagging, valorizing content through annotations and giving new meaning to raw sources in entirely new forms of expression’ (Zourou, 2012, §16). Also as a characteristic feature of Web 2.0, user participation and re-use is user-generation of content, understood as content that the user has added value to, collaboratively or individually. As Zourou (2012) puts it, these types of participation ‘bring informal learning [italics added] processes out of the shadows [and differ] from content created by users (here: learners) in institutional or classroom settings, be it in the context of face-to-face classrooms or online telecollaborative projects.’ (Zourou, 2012, §20).

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, §22).

The third feature, network effects, is taken from business management and is defined as a ‘situation in which the welfare of an individual is a ff ected by the actions of other individuals, without a mutually agreed-upon compensation. For example, the bene fi t to you from a social networking site is directly related to the total number of people who use the site. When someone else joins the site, they have increased your welfare’ (Easley and Kleinberg, 2010, p. 449) albeit no explicit contract is made.

In the Introduction to this volume, Lamy and Zourou have cautioned against a conflation of ‘interacting’ with ‘social networking’. For example, work such as Lomicka and Lord’s (2009) or Stevenson and Liu’s (2010) describes pedagogical interactions in social networking sites which are in fact comparable with interactions within the walls of a face-to-face classroom. The audiences in the research reported in these projects are formally defined by the institution (enrolled students, appointed teacher) and the tasks, however ‘authentic’, offer learners the


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possibility of interacting within the constraints of the task scenarios only. In order for it to be possible to claim that ‘social networking’ is going on, a further dimension is needed, for example, when learners engage in off-task interactions of such a nature that learning, formal or informal, can be shown to happen as a result of them. In the ORG, the ELT teachers are in the position of learners and there is a core task, albeit loosely instructed and never evaluated, which consists in discussing, each month, the currently uploaded set text. The rest of the chapter explores to what extent and how the ORG members engage in off-task networking activities (that is activities responding to one or more of the three features of Web 2.0 identified above) and these activities’ impact on teachers’ professional engagement and learning.

Agency and structural changes

In tracing the history of pre-online reading groups, we were interested in agency tensions between top-down influences by respected figures and the bottom-up collective influence of members such as documented in NHRU literature. Among the continuities between the ORG and histor-ical reading groups we would point to ‘authority’ (in this case the repu-tational weight of the ‘brand British Council’) and to active guidance by one individual (that is the coordinator’s initiating and mediating efforts). Also among the continuities is collective agency, determining evolutions within the ORG itself. The following timeline helps to see how both top-down and bottom-up influences converge to widen the scope of members’ activities, which as we will see later leads some of them to appropriate their reading group as a basis for wider networking. The changes that have occurred in the structure of the Group since its creation in August 2007 are summarized in Table 3.1 overleaf.

During the first year of the Group’s existence, the discussion forum consisted exclusively of threads on short stories, opened monthly, as each new short story was uploaded by the coordinator. The initial idea was that participants would limit themselves to discussions around the plot, characters, themes and language in the texts. Such a basic structure still remains. However, it was soon clear that different forms of expres-sion were taking place in the Group, which required the creation of distinct discussion threads.

In May 2009, for instance, the proposed text was The Child’s Story by Charles Dickens (2012) and the discussion was around childhood memories until a connection was made between the other characters the traveler encounters along the way (the child, the young man, the


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adult and the old man) and Jaques’ Seven Ages of Man in As You Like It (Shakespeare, 2005). From then on, what we can see in the data is that participants are posting a succession of pieces of poetry which are becoming progressively only vaguely connected with Dickens’ themes, from William Shakespeare’s Sonnet LX to translated extracts of The Lusiads by Lu í s Vaz de Cam õ es (2008). This episode of spontaneous poetic flow in the forum prompted a long-term member to suggest the creation of a thread where members could freely post and comment on any poems they liked. The Poets’ Corner was then created and it soon became the most active of all Group threads. It includes 704 posts at the time of writing (for comparison, the most popular short story thread is Romesh Gunesekera (1993)’s Ullswater , with 49 posts).

A discernible development in the way participants interacted inside the Group also occurred within the Poets Corner itself. It was originally meant as a free anthology of published poetry, with space to share and discuss

Table 3.1 Structural changes to the ORG since 2007

Aug 2007 May 2009 Sep 2010

Oct 2010 – present (Change in the host)

Welcome thread

15 short story threads

1 thread on Shakespeare’s sonnets

Welcome thread



The Poets’ Corner

Welcome thread



The Poets’ Corner

1 thread to share activities and lesson plans

Welcome thread

19* short story/books extracts threads

1 thread on Shakespeare

The Poets’ Corner

1 thread to share activities and lesson plans

3 threads to support local face-to-face projects

3 threads on the Groups’ own online publications

1 thread relating to the online survey

Note: *All the previous threads disappeared when the website shut down – they could not be imported.


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the works, until a member ventured to post one of his own poems. This led to significant transformations, not only in the thread itself but most importantly, in the nature of the relationships among the most frequent posters. Instead of published poetry, about 85 percent of all posts in the Poets Corner are now the members’ own pieces of poetic writing. Replies come in the form of poems created as a response or as a development of the original poem posted by other members. The online resource changed its function, from an annotatable anthology to a dynamic showcase for personal writing. In this move, members provided themselves with a tool for learning (and we will see later that survey respondents accorded a learning value to the writing skills development that the set-up afforded them). Thus they did not only engage in forum exchanges, but they are also networked through the re-use of user-generated material to carry out an informal task determined by themselves rather than by the coordi-nator. Furthermore they were involved in developing an evolving open tool for writing skills enhancement, thus creating content ‘with the community, using an open, participatory method’ (Zourou, 2012, §20). In these two respects, then, they were engaging in practices characteristic of Web 2.0 (Zourou, 2012, §20, §22).

The Poets’s Corner was not the only addition to the Group triggered by members themselves. A discussion of William Wordsworth’s (2008) ‘Michael’ led to a member’s comment about using the poem in a literacy project in his country to promote reading in English in schools and this, in turn, led to an email exchange among the coordinator and long-term members of the Group about the possible creation of a chat room where participants could discuss their professional experiences related to English literature and language learning. This resulted in the opening in February 2010 of a forum thread where members can make announce-ments and share lesson plans and activities. Thus the dissemination outwards by the original members triggered inside the ORG a reflection on the value of the work, which is seen to be increased as more outside users come into contact with it, leading the ORG to instigate accommo-dations to enable further dissemination both inside and outside of the forum, in a spiral (and viral) movement typical of network effects (the third of the features of Web 2.0 identified earlier).

Agency, in these successive transformations of the environment, inheres in members, more specifically long-standing members and most frequent posters. Their influence, aided by the coordinator, shapes the structure of the site, which in turn determines the networking practices afforded to all members. However, a further set of observa-tions leads us to also hypothesize that for some users collective agency


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might have intrinsic limits and that the almost unbounded expansion of contact permitted by the online media may become inhibitive to networking.

User attitudes to expanding their networks

Besides bottom-up changes, a major top-down shift occurred in the Group in October 2010. Due to a re-structuring process in the British Council, the enCompassculture project was terminated and the ORG moved into Teaching English , the British Council/BBC umbrella website for English language teaching worldwide (British Council, 2013). The transfer into Teaching English resulted in a considerable increase in the membership from about 250 in July 2010, before the move, to the current 1,233 members. Table 3.2 below shows that by that date, 73.6 percent of survey respondents have been members for one year or less (and have not posted, see discussion below).

These changes have had a great impact on the membership and on the dynamics of the ORG. Posts by long-term members reveal mixed feelings about the changes. Some members claim to be ‘missing the traditional enCompassculture environment’ and ‘feeling nostalgic’ about their ‘previous nest’. However, some were positive about being able to add links to videos and images to their posts and being in a more ‘visible’ and ‘widely available’ platform that would create the opportu-nity for contact with a larger number of teachers from different countries and therefore expand their professional network. Research into online networking has yet to clarify what appears to be a tension between a person’s network being seen as her/his preserve (a feeling encouraged by features such as personal ‘Walls’ in Facebook , for instance) and on the other hand the striving for more visibility (a perennial preoccupation of the practical ‘How to’ literature on networking).

Table 3.2 Time as a member

Frequency Percentage Percentage

Valid Percentage

Cumulative Percentage

less than 6 months 72 57.6 57.6 57.6

between 6 months and 1 year

20 16.0 16.0 73.6

between 1 and 2 years

18 14.4 14.4 88.0

more than 2 years 15 12.0 12.0 100.0Total 125 100.0 100.0


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User attitudes to posting on an expanded site

In this respect again, enlargement of the pool of potential readers of posts is observed to have an ambiguous effect. On the one hand, social interaction is one of the important driving factors behind membership among respondents of the online survey administered in 2012, after the expansion of the ORG: the desire ‘ To communicate with people from other cultural backgrounds’ is in third place (62.7 percent) among the reasons given for joining the Group ( Table 3.3 ). A more modest but nevertheless significant percentage of members value the opportunity ‘ To share my professional experience’ (35.7 percent), a motivation intrinsic to practi-tioner networking.

On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, in spite of expansion in the membership and notwithstanding the existence of a small cohort of new posters, survey results show that among non-posters 70.7 percent have been members for less than six months whereas 16.3 percent have been members between six months and a year ( Table 3.4 ).

Reasons given for not posting range from lack of time, to low confi-dence in the ability to express ideas in English, to ‘feeling shy’. Data from the narratives show that what non-posters find challenging about being a member of the Group is the feeling that they ‘lag behind’, ‘can’t catch up with [the others] because I think they have good experience’, or the feeling that they ‘don’t have anything original to say’.

Table 3.3 Reasons for joining the Group

Why have you joined the Group? Tick all that apply.

Answer Options Response

% Response

Count

A. To have access to literary texts in English 66.7 84

B. To discuss literature with other readers 44.4 56C. To communicate with people from other

cultural backgrounds62.7 79

D. To share my professional experience 35.7 45E. To gain access to literature teaching

materials65.9 83

F. To share my own writings 17.5 22G. To improve my English language skills 57.9 73H. Other 6.3 8Other (please specify) 9answered question 126 skipped question 0


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It could be argued that the prospect of posting to a potentially critical audience of over 1,000 members when you feel insecure about your language abilities and the extent of your knowledge of English literature may have significantly contributed to these participants’ reticence to post. This hypothesis finds theoretical support in a study of low and high participation among social network members (see Cho et al., 2007). The suggestions arising from both the attitudinal surveys in this study (attitudes to network size and attitude to posting to large audiences) point to the possibility that agency may be impacted by network size. If so, future research into pedagogical designs for harnessing large social networks for learning and particularly for L2 learning, may benefit from developing instruments to measure these factors more accurately than has been possible within the scope of our study.

Networking and professional engagement

The history of the creation and development of the Group shows that there is a complex relationship between participation in the ORG and participation in other online networks. At the time when initial discus-sions with the British Council about the possible creation of the Group were taking place, particularly active posters to the Literature forum at the 2007 International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) Aberdeen Online were contacted by the project coor-dinator to gauge interest in the initiative. IATEFL Online Conferences are

Table 3.4 Time as member related to posting – c ross-tabulation

Have you ever posted to the forum?

yes no Total

Time as a member

less than 6 months

Count 7 65 72

% 21.2 70.7 57.6between

6 months and 1 year

Count 5 15 20% 15.2 16.3 16.0

between 1 and 2 years

Count 10 8 18% 30.3 8.7 14.4

more than 2 years

Count 11 4 15% 33.3 4.3 12.0

Total Count 33 92 125% 100.0 100.0 100.0


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transient forums that remain active for about one month a year around the period of the face-to-face conference and the idea was to draw such individuals, most of them teacher trainers and influential in their local teaching communities, to engage in a more permanent network devoted to reading and discussing literature online. The response was considered positive and such individuals became the core disseminators and first posters to the ORG. Some of them are still active Group members.

In line with the processes earlier identified as network effects, partici-pation in the ORG also led in turn to engagement in other online networks. More active members of the Group have in the course of the last three years become members of other online literature discussion groups, namely the IATEFL Literature Media and Cultural Studies SIG Yahoo Discussion List (LMCS SIG, 2012) and subsequent editions of the IATEFL Online Conferences (Glasgow Online, 2012). Contacts created in the Group have also prompted members to extend their connec-tion to social networks, especially Facebook , where Group members have befriended each other and also the coordinator. Furthermore, one member announced that he was going to use Facebook to try to promote the discussion of contemporary novels on his local Teachers Association (TA) Facebook page on the model of the ORG. It does not seem that the initiative has fully developed, but there are nevertheless frequent comments and images promoting literature posted on that page.

Survey results indicate that there is a connection between Group posting and participation in other online spaces, such as local TAs’ discussion forums, LinkedIn , Twitter and, mainly, Facebook . Participants who belong to other professional and social networks contribute a higher percentage of posts than those who do not do so ( Table 3.5 ).

Table 3.5 Participation in other online networks and posting activity – cross-tabulation

Have you ever posted to the forum?

Yes No Total

Are you a member of other professional networks?

Yes Count 22 36 58

% 66.7 39.1 46.4No Count 11 56 67

% 33.3 60.9 53.6Total Count 33 92 125

% 100.0 100.0 100.0


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However, survey data do not make it possible to draw further conclu-sions about the nature of such relationship or how participating in the Group might influence participation patterns in those other networks. Hargittai and Hsieh (2010), albeit using a population of college students rather than adult professionals, similarly find that there is more inten-sive participation from those already engaged in social networks. They also similarly point to a gap in qualitative research on the nature of engagement.

It seems there is also a connection between participation in the ORG and engagement in other offline professional activities. As stated in the objectives on the Group home page, one of the reasons for creating the ORG was to make it possible for English language teachers to discuss literature with colleagues, particularly in places where participating in a face-to-face reading group is not viable. However, 36 percent of the survey respondents have said that they share the texts made available online with non-ORG teachers in their schools and institutions. Data from the interviews and forum posts, as well as Facebook comments and messages, show that teachers have been using ORG material in their language lessons, local TA events and other professional activities, thus illustrating the strength of Zourou’s (2012) second feature of Web 2.0 practices: openness and no-copyright re-use. Members of the ORG are crossing the boundaries between the group and other professional spaces and whilst our data does not enable us to know exactly how many of these other contacts and practices happen through other online media used by Group members, it is our hypothesis that a number will, based on the nature of today’s professional activities in education. Networking itself takes place permeably across online and offline spaces (Wellman, et al., 2003).

Three insights from the data support this claim. The first is the Maputo Readers’ Corner thread mentioned earlier. This was created as the online forum of a tripartite project that promotes three kinds of reading groups: reading groups in Maputo’s local schools; radio sessions on Maputo Corridor Radio, the Radio Mozambique English Channel; and online discussion in the Group. The stories and poems on the thread are from English school textbooks approved for use by the Mozambican National Education Authority, translated stories selected from Portuguese text-books and books being used in private English teaching institutions in the country. The creators of the literature radio program initiative in Mozambique have been active Group members since its creation and it was their suggestion to extend it back into the Group. Secondly, some ORG members in Argentina have been using ORG material and


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the online forum to support their classroom face-to-face discussion of texts. Since 2007, some lecturers at the Instituto Superior de Formaci ó n Docente y T é cnica in La Plata have, from time to time, directed their Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) students to discussions in the Group forum. Thirdly, the Group has also been used, for a period of time, to support Malaysian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students and professionals engaged in the Digital Stories for Literature Project coordinated and supported by the English Language Teaching Centre, Ministry of Education Malaysia.

Even though the Group was created to promote reading and discus-sion among teachers, members seem to constantly think of ways of taking their own online reading experiences to other offline professional activities. An interviewee pointed out that ‘[i]n general all the pieces read in the group have had a huge impact on me, as I print and continue the discussions in face to face reading groups I conduct’.

A member who provided a framed narrative said,

When I read a short story or a poem posted in the Group I usually think how my students (teens/adults) would feel about those texts, because they usually are the right size to deal with in class – sorry! Professional conditioning ... .

Whether participation in the Group has positively influenced members to engage in other professional activities related to literature outside the online environment or, conversely, whether offline engagement has led to their joining and participating in the Group is not clear-cut. The possible dynamic relationship between these two positions may deserve further investigation.

Learning through membership in the ORG

Of the total survey respondents, 57.7 percent said that they joined the Group in order to improve their English. Although the Group target population is ELT professionals rather than language learners, it is impor-tant to bear in mind that the overwhelming majority of Group members are non-native speakers of English – there are 50 different first languages listed among the 126 survey sample. Considering that the membership includes experienced and novice teachers, as well as TESOL students, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to assume that the level of English language proficiency also varies among Group members and that some of them may also see themselves as language learners to a certain extent.


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Some participants who have contributed framed narratives (included below in their original form) have commented that:

What I find most interesting about being part of it is that I can see what students require in reading and discussing literature and what can help to improve the learner’s English (and the learner may be myself). ...

When I read other members’ comments on the forum I usually have new ideas and maybe I will have more communication with other people and improve my bad language.

When I read a short story or a poem posted in the Group I usually look for the language items such as words, phrases and unusual way of structuring language.

Long-term members who have been interviewed pointed out:

Participating in the Group it has helped me achieve some degree of fluency and understanding of the complexity of practical use of English through exploration of the world of fiction and poetry. It has been useful and a key to improving my writing skills and confidence in using English for professional and entertainment.

The experience of reading and discussing texts has fed myself and my professional life a lot, in term of fluency in reading, analysing the text, vocabulary and so on.

The comments above suggest that these participants believe joining the Group has contributed to a certain extent to their language improvement. Current available data does not provide full evidence of individuals’ learning process or progress since we only have their comments collected in the forum posts, interviews, responses to the survey open questions and framed narratives. However, we do accept their testimonials as a reli-able account of their perceptions on the matter. Some of them report having experienced considerable development in their writing skills in English and the fact that some have felt confident enough to publicly share their written work may be indicative of some learning process taking place. Three collections of original poems and short stories written by both senior and novice Group members were published online in 2009, 2010 and 2012. There seems to be a consensus among contributors that such publications have helped them to develop their creative writing skills. Some of them have since then been invited to make their poems


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available on other websites devoted to literature and language teaching and learning.

An interviewee states that:

I have had motivation to read more and deeply as I try to come up with my comments and read about other readers’ comments. I now have more confidence as a reader. In ‘The Poet’s Corner’ we are allowed to post our own poems in the forum and I have transformed my reading into writing. In the end I found out I have written a number of poems and one of the poems has won an ELT writing contest ( At the Bus Stops ).

A participant also reports having been able to transfer his reading learning experience from the Group to his approach to teaching reading to his students:

My rich experience in the group has allowed me to adopt a myriad of tactics in dealing with the texts. For instance, I implicitly encourage students to express their response to the texts with ample liberty and to accept difference in opinion. More, the difference in points of views vis- à -vis the texts, as we have in the Group, enriches the students’ repertoire of reading.

In spite of the favorable comments, some members have expressed their disappointment at the fact that the Group is not more language learning oriented. A survey respondent made this clear, saying, ‘i want you to help me to improve my english’. Another expressed disappoint-ment at the way discussions happen in the forum:

When I decided to join this group, I expected much from it that in a few months I would have progress on in my reading ability. I still felt confused when I found out questions asking main ideas and topics of reading texts. I do hope by taking part in this group, any experts of reading would give me more samples of passages completed with questions, questions and explanations.

The comments above indicate some mismatch between the members’ expectation and what the ORG has delivered in terms of helping people develop their language skills. Perhaps the fact that the ORG is devoted to ELT professionals makes it easier to overlook the fact that its primary function is that of a reading group and the focus is, first and foremost, on the discussion of works of literature and


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only secondly on language development. Nonetheless, literature is expressed through language and, once again, the boundaries between textual interpretation, forum interaction and language learning are not clear-cut. Also, the fact that the Group has served as an outlet for members’ development of their creative writing skills has contributed to make the distinction between forum participation and personal language development less obvious.

Conclusion

The chapter has explored a worldwide online reading group’s relation-ship to historical reading groups, both those meeting face to face and those operating through international correspondence, to see how they relate to each other and what role the online networking tools of today play in changes from or continuities with social reading in the past. We have shown continuity in collective and individual agency in reading groups across time, which makes the traditional practices of reading groups well suited to the online media. Also, our data has shown that for some members of the Group the online experience has been extended to offline networks and perhaps vice versa, particularly in terms of sharing materials and ideas, underlining the type of environmental boundary-crossing – between online and offline and from one online space to another – that the online media facilitate.

Secondly, the chapter explored the social networking dynamics of the online reading group and how they related to ELT teachers’ professional development. Specifically, using Musser et al.’s (2006) and Zourou’s (2012) three features of Web 2.0 as our criteria for identifying online practices, we sought to clarify to what extent and how ORG members engage in off-task networking activities. We showed that the three features of Web 2.0 can be seen to underpin practices in sites not specifi-cally designed as Web 2.0 SNS, in that professional networking and boundary-crossing were supported by the traditional forum format of the ORG in 2007 as well as by the enhanced format in 2010. This conclu-sion is borne out by Lamy’s (in press) research on informal learning by language students, analyzing the learning of a single cohort that used a multimedia-enhanced forum as well as Facebook and comparing results in the two environments. That project suggested that sites specifically designed for social networking (such as Facebook ) do not serve the inter-ests of those wanting to take part in study-related socializing any better or any worse than traditional sites (such as forums enhanced or not with multimodal functionalities).


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Finally, we looked at ELT teachers’ own learning and found that expec-tations of linguistic improvement (expected – perhaps unrealistically – by participants) were not met although improvements in writing skills (unexpected by the participants and the organizers alike) were. Given the affinity between social networking and informal learning and given the serendipitous routes that informal learning can take, it is perhaps appropriate that even teachers should be surprised at the sort of learning that they experience in these online media. The more difficult question relates to those who are disappointed and is a cultural one as well as a practical one: What prior values do these users bring to their social learning? Do these values limit the benefits they might derive from the experience? How can web designers, organizers and influential members of online groups help widen their perceptions?


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Part II

Pedagogies and Practitioners


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77

Introduction

Gaining more and more importance in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) studies, as reflected through special issues of journals and edited volumes (Demaizi è re and Zourou, 2012; Guth and Helm, 2010; Lomicka and Lord, 2009; Thomas, 2009; Thomas, Reinders and Warschauer, 2012), the social web is a sociotechnical reality with fallout in the field of language learning and should not be ignored by experts, practitioners and researchers in the field. However, there is still some ambiguity regarding the terminology that best embraces this set of emerging technologies (Web 2.0, social web, social media, social soft-ware and so on. For a discussion, see the Introduction to this volume, as well as Zourou [2012]). In this chapter we share the viewpoint of Kaplan and Haenlein (2010, p. 61), who make a distinction between Web 2.0 and social media, the former being the technological and ideological platform allowing the latter – that is web applications enabling the crea-tion and exchange of User Generated Content – to evolve.

Rather than being a new concept, social networking is revisited here in light of the technological developments at hand (for a critical review, see Ellison et al., 2009). There is a growing body of research on social networking that explores its relation to identity performance and impres-sion management (Cachia, 2008; Ito, 2010) and to modalities of content uptake – including sharing, updating and adapting to new contexts (Pegrum, 2011). Its nature is often analyzed in light of the meaning of users’ strong/weak ties to networked activity (Donath, 2008; boyd

4 Bridging Design and Language Interaction and Reuse in Livemocha’ s Culture Section Katerina Zourou and Mathieu Loiseau


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78 Katerina Zourou and Mathieu Loiseau

and Ellison, 2007; boyd, 2011; Christakis and Fowler 2009; Donath and boyd, 2004; boyd and Heer, 2006). In general terms, the Web 2.0 social networking paradigm can be described as being shaped by the ease and rapidity of the multiplication of users’ networks, boosted by sociotech-nical features – such as Likes, friends, tagging, commenting and recom-mendation systems, to name just a few – meant to ‘harness collective intelligence’ (Musser et al., 2007, p. 14). Social networking sites (SNS), a category of Web 2.0 technologies according to Conole and Alevizou (2010), are emblematic of this new trend, as they ‘structure social inter-action between members who form subgroups of friends’ (p. 11). At the intersection of SNS and networked spaces explicitly designed for language learning, we find Web 2.0 language learning communities such as Livemocha , whose Culture section is the object of this study.

Structured Web 2.0 language learning communities and the social networking dimension

A variety of learning settings are supported by social networking technol-ogies (for example, Massively Multiplayer Online Games, serious games, Second Life), as are SNS customized by CALL practitioners or researchers from a telecollaborative perspective (Blattner and Fiori, 2011; Blattner and Lomicka, 2012; Mills, 2011). Learning settings can also be self-organized by learners who attend formal learning courses and jointly opt for non-institutional socialization spaces (see Lamy, 2012; Liaw and English, this volume). When it comes to Web 2.0 communities explicitly designed for language learning, these can be broadly broken down into three types, according to a typology outlined by Dixhoorn et al. (2010) and further elaborated by Loiseau et al. (2011), as follows: structured Web 2.0 language learning communities, which are at the core of our investigation, language exchange sites and marketplaces.

Structured Web 2.0 language learning communities comprise commu-nities such as Livemocha , Busuu , or Babbel , most frequently set up by Internet start-ups that provide free and paid distance language learning courses on dedicated platforms. Research on structured Web 2.0 language learning communities is being developed (Clark and Gruba, 2010; Harrison, this volume; Harrison and Thomas, 2009; Liu et al., this volume; Loiseau et al., 2011; Stevenson and Liu, 2010; Zourou, 2012). However, it is evident that we are still far from acquiring a solid under-standing of this field. In our view, this is not simply due to the novelty of these digital networked spaces, but rather it is linked to the fact that these communities often combine old and contemporary components


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Bridging Design and Language Interaction 79

of online language learning in a new ‘montage’ (Thorne, 2003), which lies at the heart of the complexity of the communities as objects worth analyzing and reveals the constantly evolving nature of these digital language learning settings.

Significance of the study and research questions

Structured Web 2.0 language learning communities are by definition spaces where collective networked activity takes place in a self-moti-vated manner, thus making them exemplary spaces suitable for the analysis of social networking and its implications for language educa-tion. This study builds on research initiated in 2010 (Dixhoorn et al., 2010) and three subsequent studies in the emerging field of Web 2.0 language learning communities. The first focused on a comparison of communities in respect of three crucial features: user roles, pedago-gies and network effects (Loiseau et al., 2011); the second explored the quality of language pedagogical frameworks adopted by community designers (Potolia et al., 2011) and the third critically examined the potential of open educational resources in three communities (Zourou et al., in press).

The aim of the present study is to contribute to improvements, both conceptual and technical, that can potentially be implemented in terms of sustaining peer language learning through social networking mechanisms and processes, grounded in the analysis of both design and computer-mediated communication practices (Bruckman, 2004; Ciekanski and Chanier, 2008; Fuchs and Snyder, this volume).

Main research questions:

Which design choices of 1. Livemocha ’s Culture section affect language interaction and its reinvestment from a language learning perspective? In light of the analysis of user interaction practices, what conclu-2. sions can be drawn in terms of technological and pedagogical design developments that would support a highly active social networking public space?

To tackle these questions we first approach the design of the commu-nity as an artefact by drawing on design choices, manifested through social networking features as enablers of peer language learning processes. In particular we assess our observations of design and interaction in the Culture section in line with two factors identified by Burke et al. (2009) as favoring greater engagement in an SNS in terms of content sharing:


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Factor 1: ‘social learning’: newcomers tend to share more content if ●

their contacts do so (p. 946); Factor 2: ‘feedback’: newcomers tend to share more content if their ●

initial contributions receive more feedback (p. 947).

Secondly, we investigate whether users appropriate the social networking space in ways that favor peer language learning and uptake. 1 Our interest in this stems from the fact that the whole activity takes place in a community dedicated to language learning.

This study is exploratory and follows ‘a Cultures-of-use analysis [that] attempts to render artefacts as they exist for users’ (Thorne, 2003), drawing on a sociocultural paradigm according to which learning practices are deeply rooted in the sociotechnical context (B é guin and Rabardel, 2000; Thorne, 2008; Wertsch, 1991).

From a methodological perspective, we use mixed methods research (Johnson and Onwuegbuzie, 2004), the goal of which is ‘not to replace either of [qualitative and quantitative] approaches but rather to draw from the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of both’ (pp. 14–15). Elements of the social networking architecture are scrutinized in sections 3.2. and 3.3., with a view to identifying design developments that can be operated to enhance peer language learning and support. In order to anchor the set of design recommendations in the reality of user practices and thus to favor a user-centered approach to design benefiting from the analysis of user practices (Bruckman, 2004), we analyze the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of user interactions (see ‘Data Analysis’), focusing on the density and complexity of threads and on peer support practices through social networking mechanisms.

These methodological choices respond to the call for moving beyond the dichotomy of quantitative or qualitative frameworks of analysis, thus favoring mixed methods research, initiated by Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) researchers (Stahl, Koschmann and Suthers, 2006). These approaches are also of interest to scholars in CALL. We consider that both levels of analysis are essential as they inform and reinforce one another: the data-driven analysis raises issues which are put into perspective by the subsequent qualitative analyses, themselves prompting further quantitative analyses.

Finally it is worth pointing out that our study is confronted with two difficulties; on the one hand the scarce literature on Web 2.0 language learning communities and on the other the ownership of data, which is not revealed by community administrators. Indeed the financial issues at stake limit the extent to which a start-up such as Livemocha can disclose


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information regarding its users’ practices (extensive communication on the number of registered users as opposed to the number of active users would be an example of such an issue). A critical approach such as the one adopted in this study is instrumental in the provision of evidence-based research to CALL peers who are to work hand in hand with such start-ups. Collaboration between the business and academic sectors, as we advocate later (see Further Developments), would be mutually bene-ficial – for this we provide a reproducible protocol of analysis that merits enrichment with data so far undisclosed by community administrators.

Context of investigation

Introduced in February 2011, the Culture section is intended to allow users to ‘discover what life is like around the world [and to] explore other members’ cultural photos and stories or share [their] own with the community’. 2 The basic features of this space prompt users either to write a short story or to share a picture associated with a description (‘Authoring tools’, on the right in Figure 4.1 ). The description field of a picture can be used to write a short story, but our data does not reveal any such occurrences (mean length of descriptions 7 words, median 3

Figure 4.1 Home of the Livemocha Culture section (threads presented in order of recentness)


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words). Both of these types of input serve to trigger discussions. The discussion threads (henceforth referred to as ‘threads’) are stored in the Culture section.

Each thread can be ‘Liked’ or commented. ‘Likes’ are similar to those in Facebook . The only difference is that they remain anonymous. Comments are nominative and displayed in reverse chronological order. On the Culture section home page, users can choose to display all threads, only the ones they started, the ones they ‘Liked’ or just the ones they commented. In addition the threads can be browsed country by country or by all countries at once (‘Filter by’, on the right in Figure 4.1 ). Whichever browsing category is used as a filter, the relevant pictures/stories can be displayed on the page using two sorting mechanisms: in reverse chronological order (‘Most recent’) or by decreasing popularity (‘Hottest’) (‘Sorting mechanisms’, Figure 4.1 ).

Data collection protocol and data distribution over time

We performed our analysis on a corpus of 105 Culture threads selected at random. In order to comply with Livemocha ’s conditions of service, we did not run any automated script and thus we retrieved the data manu-ally. We analyzed the data online, storing only the URLs and character-istics of each thread (which are given in the Appendix). Only publicly available data was used (requiring no registration on Livemocha ) and no nominative data was stored.

We took advantage of the fact that on Livemocha , each Culture thread is numbered in order of writing (#1 being the first topic ever created and #387337 the last topic present on 7 March 2012 3 ), providing us with unique IDs for each thread. This allowed us to estimate the quantity of activity in the Culture section.

Indeed, to select our corpus, we went through 129 thread IDs: 105 ‘pictures’; 22 broken links, that is, threads created and subsequently erased either by the user or the community (representing approximately 17 percent of all threads in the sample); and 2 ‘short stories’. We focused solely on images, because ‘stories’ were too scarce to allow for random selection. The ID of a thread (its number) only indicates how many were created before it, but we need to know how many were erased (broken links) in order to estimate the number of existing threads. To improve the precision of this statistical parameter, we doubled the size of the sample, selecting a second subsample, made up of 129 thread IDs (106 images, 4 short stories; 19 broken threads). The average proportion of broken links in our sample is 15.9 percent of all threads. 4 In order to extrapolate these figures from the sample to the entire data set we used the binomial sign


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test for a single sample (confidence interval 95 percent), which allows us to state that based on our sample, there is a 95 percent chance that the proportion of deleted threads is comprised between 11.6 percent and 20.9 percent. In other words, there is a 95 percent chance that, on 7 March 2012, the number of threads in the Culture section was more than 306,380 and less than 342,410.

For a better understanding of these figures, an attempt should be made to juxtapose them with the time span over which the data was created. Livemocha ’s official Twitter account states that the section was launched on 11 February 2011. 5 Every post (whether a thread initiated by a user or comment) has date information computed backwards from the moment of loading the page in the form of ‘XX (hours|days|months)|1 year ago’ or ‘over a year ago’. The timing unit changes as time passes. During the first day of existence an item’s ‘age’ will be expressed in hours and starting the next day it will be displayed as a certain number of ‘days old’. We found that the Livemocha system actually considers a month to be a 28-day period. An item displayed 57 days after its creation will thus be displayed as posted ‘2 months ago’. Roughly 14 such periods after the launch, we used the IDs of the threads to count the number of threads created during that time and we computed average numbers of new threads per day by trimester (groups of three consecutive periods). We then corrected these numbers with the average number of broken links in our sample ( Figure 4.2 ).

1400

1200

1000

800

600

400

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0

Period ID

New

thre

ads

per

day

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Figure 4.2 Mean number of new threads per day, computed per trimester


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If we use these estimates to compute a daily average number of new threads, we obtain at most 645 threads per day during the ‘trimester’, composed of periods 12, 13 and 14 and a mean of at least 1235 threads per day during the first trimester (periods 1, 2 and 3), 6 that is, a reduc-tion of over 48 percent.

At this point, we can assert that the use of the Culture section has been decreasing since its launch (although the decrease has gradually slowed down). We performed additional measurements a few months after the first batch of measurements used for Figure 4.2 (on 18 June 2012), which confirmed this trend. As shown in Figure 4.2 , in the trimester broadly corresponding to periods 16, 17 and 18, the decrease was still occurring (580 new threads per day, using the same estimation of broken threads as in the previous trimesters).

Although we cannot draw conclusions as to the causes of this decline, in the next part we analyze, then contextualize the social networking mechanisms at play in the Culture section.

Data analysis

Whereas Livemocha ’s learning-dedicated spaces include instructions on language learning, the expected use of the Culture section is a lot less clear. This area is not explicitly dedicated to language learning although it is a component of a user’s overall social activity, therefore belonging to the spaces where social networking effects may be generated. To understand the design challenges and practices occurring in this space, below we first discuss the shelf life of threads and then the questions this analysis raises in terms of design of the community as an artefact. To provide a more complete picture of design developments we analyze user practices, looking at density and complexity of threads and utter-ances within threads.

Shelf life of threads in the Culture space

We now estimate the degree of user engagement with threads through their shelf life (the duration of user activity within a thread). The only indicator available is provided by comments, which are generally dated in months (28-day periods).

This indicator is adequate when estimating the number of threads belonging to a period, but highly imprecise when estimating the posi-tion in time of a single event, as Figure 4.3 demonstrates. This figure represents two periods. Each vertical line in the figure represents a day and is colored according to the period to which it belongs (28 hatchings


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per period, each representing a day). Any item posted on any one of these days will be dated as belonging to a period (for example, ‘n months ago’). As the figure shows, two elements in the same period can be up to 27 days apart, while two elements in two successive periods could have been posted at a 1-day interval or up to 55 days apart. Figure 4.3 shows these different (≠ ) periods, split into days.

We nonetheless used this indicator to estimate the time between the initial post and the last comment of each thread of the sample.

Over our sample, only 10.5 percent of the threads remained active beyond the period of the initial post. This means that at the very least, 89 percent of threads did not receive a single comment beyond the twenty-seventh day following their creation.

This indicator, although imprecise, as explained above, reflects the ephemeral nature of the threads, which confirms that reuse is not in evidence and that learner activity appears to mirror the type of activity that has been documented in other SNS (McClellan, 2012; Wittman, 2012). Although these studies differ from ours in terms of artefact ( Facebook in the case of MacClellan and Wittmann, Livemocha in our case) and of precision of time measures (cf. ‘28-day periods’), we can state that the lifespan of threads in Livemocha is consistent with SNS observations as in both cases posts fall into oblivion relatively fast.

This observation will now be addressed within the context of our investigation of the design of the Culture section as an artefact geared to users’ activity. It will be then discussed in conjunction with the design elements of the Livemocha environment and with mainstream SNS.

Design mechanisms facilitating content management and reuse

The first design element of the Culture section that we explore is the organization of threaded discussions. Threads can be filtered by country (then sorted by popularity and date, see Figure 4.1 ). As discussed below, these data management mechanisms have implications in terms of the

n months agotime

n+1 months ago

same period, 27 days apart

= period, 1 day apart

Figure 4.3 Difficulties in identifying timing through the use of periods


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way users handle and interact with content. These implications vary depending on the quantity of data available for each country. For a country totaling few threads, all data can be gathered in a small number of pages and the proposed data management criteria mechanisms suffice. By contrast, for most represented countries, where result pages are very numerous, the access to country-specific older threads is arduous.

These sorting mechanisms are in themselves an indication that resources are not meant to be re-used, but rather are intended to encourage interaction or online activity in general and will work using this assumption. However, the country filter seems insufficient, espe-cially considering the high number of new threads each day. Owing to the data organization and accessibility analyzed above, a user could get lost in the plethora of data.

Moreover, from a language learning standpoint, the ‘country only’ thematic organization is simplistic. A learner might be interested not only in a given country but in a group of countries in which one of his/her target languages is spoken (see ‘Synthesis’ further down).

Finally, user practices also underline the limitations of the sole ‘country’ filter. Although this field is mandatory on entering new posts, some pictures are associated with no location and a tag is sometimes used instead of a location. For instance, in March 2012, there were 170 photos associated with ‘nature’. They can be found by typing ‘nature’ instead of a country (geographical filter in Figure 4.1 ). By taking this action, users carry out tasks for which the tool was not designed, thus ‘instrumentalizing’ (B é guin and Rabardel, 2000) an existing feature in the Culture section. This unusual use of the ‘country’ field was not conceived by community designers and we assume that it is strongly influenced by tagging as a general Web 2.0 trend.

The data management mechanisms analyzed in this section have been shown not to facilitate content reuse (both in features and observed uses). In the next part, we juxtapose them with two features favoring peer interaction in SNS: a ‘social’ organization of data and the associated notification mechanisms.

Social organization and notification mechanisms enhancing peer interaction

Threads in the Culture section can be accessed directly from that section and from user accounts: every user profile page includes a Culture element allowing the display of threads initiated by the user, in reverse chronological order. A user having a network of ten friends and using this feature to check whether friends have recently posted in this section


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will need to go through each profile (see the right side of Figure 4.4 ). Obtaining this information means clicking 29 times (2 clicks to access each friend’s culture contributions via his/her profile, 9 clicks to switch from one profile to the other).We argue that the complexity of access to friends’ activity in the Culture section limits opportunities for ‘social learning’ (see Factor 1, in ‘Significance of the study and research ques-tions’, above). By contrast, in the archetypal functioning of Facebook , the user’s network of friends (and groups/interests) and their respective privacy settings act as social filters on the global activity of the platform so that the user receives only data relevant to him/her, all relevant data being centralized in his/her newsfeed (see left side of Figure 4.4 ).

In most mainstream SNS, social organization of data is comple-mented by notification systems. The system developed by Livemocha is no exception. The Livemocha space dedicated to language learning displays information about networks of friends on each user’s home page. It centralizes most information about the activity of the network of friends in a box labeled ‘Recent Activity’ and to a lesser extent in the banner. In that space, notifications inform users of their friends’ status updates; learning activity (submissions, feedback received on their submissions) and teaching activity (the correction tasks they performed). However, such features do not exist for the Livemocha Culture section. To be informed that friends have participated in the Culture section, one has to accidentally stumble on a friend’s contribu-tion while browsing.

Also, users can receive notifications by email. Through the profile/privacy menu, users can ask to receive an email notification when someone adds

Global Facebook usersactivity

Facebook LivemochaCulture section

Contributor’s privacysettings, reader’s network

and display settings

reader

reader profile

profile

profile

Contributions to theCulture section



Figure 4.4 Social filters’ in Facebook and lack thereof in Livemocha


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a comment to a thread in which he/she was a participant. However, no customization is available regarding such inclusion in the ‘Recent Activity’ section embedded in the Livemocha space. This design choice may seem odd for a section revolving around interactions: receiving activity notifi-cations off-line might be useful to bring users back online, but probably does not favor spontaneity in exchanges. Also, this is likely to increase lag time in a conversation started in the Culture section, which is not in line with similar features of SNS, where both online and offline notifications are used in an ‘always on’ fashion (Turkle, 2011). This lack of connec-tion between users also reduces opportunities for feedback, which makes newcomers’ contributions to the Culture section less likely (see Factor 2, in ‘Significance of the study and research questions’, above).

Finally, it should be noted that AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML), a typical Web 2.0 apparatus technology (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010: 61), enhances continuous data flow in that the user does not need to reload the page to see its content evolve. It is thanks to AJAX that users can almost chat on a Facebook ‘Wall’. AJAX is conspicuously absent from the Culture section, which is especially inconvenient when it comes to browsing one’s own contributions (started/commented/’Liked’ threads, Figure 4.1 ). Not only is there no update without the user’s reloading of the page, but there is no information anywhere on the site regarding ‘new’ contributions to the threads concerned.

These various observations raise questions regarding the extent to which peer interaction is encouraged by the platform design. In the next part of the chapter we put these observations into perspective by confronting them with practices in the Culture section.

Analysis of user practices in the Culture section

Looking more closely at the details of user interaction through the social networking features available, we now go on to investigate user engage-ment within threaded discussions in the Culture section, at thread level and at comment level, through the complexity of utterances. We then synthesize both types of observations and complement them with a qualitative analysis of peer support

Engagement with threads: quantification

We quantified user engagement with threads by using the number of comments and ‘Likes’. Out of the 105 threads in our sample:

a) only 34 displayed comments; b) leaving 67.6 percent of posts uncommented (71 posts):


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21 of the 71 uncommented posts did not attract ‘ ● Likes’ (which means that 20 percent of the total sample received no feedback whatsoever).

The distribution of data shows that discussion threads were on average composed of 1.5 comments per thread and that only 9.5 percent of threads were made up of 4 comments or more.

This statistical element can be set against a qualitative overview of the longest thread in our data (41 comments). This thread was started with the picture of a Greek island, which produced a high level of response. However, users did not appear to have read one another’s comments. The author of the initial post did not provide a description. The first comment stated the name of the island. The eighth comment asks ‘Where’s it?’ None of the 32 subsequent comments answers the question, even though the thirtieth comment reiterates the question ‘What place is it in Greece? ( . . . )’. User1, the author of the initial post, does not reply either.

There are other examples of missed opportunities for interaction, some similar to this one, others different in nature. In one case, user1 posts a picture from Georgia which triggers the following interaction ( Table 4.1 ).

User1 engages with the first comment, but does not answer the only question asked (bold lines in comment #5). Both examples could be due to lack of motivation or failure to notice the subsequent comments, echoing our earlier questions regarding the lack of online notifications and the high proportion of short appreciative comments (such as ‘nice work’, ‘so nice’, ‘Bravo!’) and so on.

Table 4.1 Thread concerning Georgia

# 1 _ user2 : cool photo :-)

# 2 _ user1 : thanks

# 3 _ user3 : Beuatiful place!Lugar bonito!

# 4 _ user4 : th ı s ı s great a place ı want to see th ı s place

# 5 _ user5 : wow awesome beauti ! what is the exact locatino of this place and how far it is from your capital city t’bilsipls let me know* really very nice place it is

# 6 _ user6 : wonderful ... Georgia

# 7 _ user7 : Mysterious

Note: *Highlighted by the authors


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These two examples seem to be representative of a trend on the quali-tative level: neither thread appears to yield much interaction. They mostly contain signs of approval, admiration and gratitude, which involve some L2 output (and input for the subsequent readers), but no complex lexical structures or cultural information conveyed. In order to gain a better perception of the exchanges taking place in the Culture section, it is therefore worth taking a closer look at the complexity of utterances and interactions within threads.

Engagement within threads: complexity of utterances and interactions

To estimate the degree of engagement within threads we first carry out a statistical analysis of replies as a defining element of explicit interac-tions. The term ‘explicit interaction’ relies on the notion that reference to a comment is made explicitly. Whether a comment has been read and taken into account can only be manifested in another comment mentioning it. An explicit interaction as we define it starts with a comment which is not considered to be a reply and ends in a comment to which no one replies (see Figure 4.5 , most recent comments appear first).

The data analysis corroborates the low level of explicit interaction antic-ipated: only 47.1 percent of the threads with comments (15.2 percent of the threads in the corpus) contain at least one reply. These threads display an average of 1.5 replies per thread (total 24 replies in the corpus), with the longest series of interactions in the corpus containing 4 replies. Finally, less than 15 percent of the comments constitute a reply according to our definition.

We then counted the number of words in each comment in order to estimate their complexity. The length of utterances is used to assess their complexity both in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) – for instance (Ortega, 1999) – and of psycholinguistics, where the ‘mean length of utterances’ is commonly used to assess the complexity both of adults and children (Snow, 1995). The results show an average of about

Figure 4.5 Examples of isolated comment, reply and explicit interaction


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6 words per comment, but to shed light on the distribution, one should take into account that over 35 percent of comments are utterances of one or two words and 62 percent of the comments contain up to 5 words. 7 In addition, we decided to assess how many comments were over 12 words long. We based this choice on the fact that a study of a corpus of texts simplified for English learners (who are therefore not advanced learners) suggested that teachers, when shortening complex sentences produced and consequently expected learners to understand 12-word sentences as a mean (Petersen and Ostendorf, 2007, p. 70). Only about 8.5 percent of the comments satisfied that condition.

Finally, we attempted to elucidate whether or not the language used influenced the length of the comments. We grouped languages in terms of their status for the locutor in the context of the platform. We isolated five categories: first languages (L1 ≈ 29 percent), other spoken languages (L1 b ≈ 18 percent), learned languages (L2 ≈ 47 percent) and languages not appearing in the user’s profile (L2 b ). The last category concerns multilingual exchanges (most combine languages of different statuses within a single comment and others include a sentence and its translation in another language). The ‘multilingual’ category only represents 6 percent of cases when grouped with L2 b . The only two categories showing a significant difference (df = 104; t = 2.56; p < .05) in the mean length of comments are L1 b (8.3 words per comment, mostly English) and L2 (5.1 words per comment). This would tend to underline an emphasis on communication when using L1 b , as we explain in the next paragraph.

Links between both types of engagement

The analysis of user engagement with threads shows weak levels of engagement, both in quantity of comments by thread and in quantity of words per utterance. According to our data, both issues are intertwined. Indeed, there is a slight correlation between the length of the longest discussion and the mean length of the comments of a thread (two-tailed Spearman’s ρ : rs = .410; n = 34; p < .02), providing evidence that within threads, longer discussions tend to coexist with longer comments. To expand these results, we tagged each comment as either ‘part of an inter-action’ (n = 41; 9.83 words per comment) or ‘isolated’ (n = 122; 4.87 words per comment). ‘Part of an interaction’ is a comment which is either an explicit reply (dark grey in Figure 4.5 ) to a previous comment or explicitly replied to by another comment (as are both comments in the ‘explicit interaction’ area, dotted in Figure 4.5 ). A comment is ‘isolated’ when it is neither of the above. A t-test demonstrated that the


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difference between the length of comments according to the category to which they belong (‘part of an interaction’ vs ‘isolated’) was highly significant (df = 161; t = 4.638; p < .0001). This test does not allow the establishment of any relation of precedence, so we cannot say whether longer comments trigger more interactions or whether interactions include longer comments. But the test allows us to identify a trend, in that longer comments occur more frequently in ‘explicit interaction’.

The uses observed indicate relatively little meaningful activity from a language learning perspective, as most threads remain uncommented and the vast majority of comments are extremely basic (62 percent of the comments contain five words or less, as mentioned earlier). All the same, the fact that users directly dialoguing with one another write more complex sentences reveals potentialities in terms of language learning interaction, especially when L2 languages are well represented in the comments. At this point, it is worth discussing the potential of networked activity for language learning through some examples of L2 peer language support.

Peer language support

Despite the above reservations, there are relevant examples of peer-sup-ported language interaction. Appreciative comments are not included in the transcript for better readability.

The three transcripts illustrate three different aspects of peer support ( Table 4.2 ). In thread A, a learner rephrases information to adapt it to two different formulations of the same question. Thread B is an infor-mation request about the country, to which the author provides an educated answer, while thread C is one of the rare occurrences of meta-linguistic discourse.

All three threads present examples of learner exchanges and as such underline the potential role that peer interaction in open and informal interaction spaces can play in language learning. In thread A, one may wonder whether the fuel for the paraphrases is exclusively linguistic as the author’s profile displays a relationship status of ‘looking for a rela-tionship’ and the user’s first utterance (‘hello sweety’) could be perceived as flirtatious (for a discussion see also Lloyd, 2012 and Liu et al., in this volume). Yet other social motives can be found: the longest conversa-tion in the corpus is a politicocultural discussion on the formulation ‘persian gulf’ as opposed to ‘arabic gulf’.

Thread B was chosen because the author of the first post displays didactic concerns in the way he handles interaction with readers: the description of the image (the Uruguayan flag) is both in Spanish (his L1)


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and English (L1 b and communication language) and he takes time to answer with relevant information the one question that has been put to him. His answer did not trigger any further exchange, but this contribu-tion underlines two aspects of peer support:

some users seem to see the ● Culture section as a space affording both learning and teaching possibilities; the involvement of the thread initiator in the exchanges seems to be ●

a key aspect, as demonstrated by the corpus: there is a weak correla-tion between the number of comments from the thread author and the mean length of comments in the thread. 8 There is predictably a stronger correlation with the number of comments in the thread. 9

Finally, thread C shows how a learner (learner L2) uses the previous comment as input for her learning, which is reinvested straight away

Table 4.2 Three thread examples

Thread A: M → Male F → Female user1: author of the first post

# 1 user2 (F) : hello. where this *touristic resort*?

# 2 user1 (M) : hi sweety, this *touristic resort* is in *location*, *country*

# 3 user3 (F) : oh its coooooooooooool are u sure its from *country* wow i wish go to their soon

# 4 user1 (M) : yes, it is from *COUNTRY* in *location*’

Thread B: user1: author of the first post

# 1 user2 (L2 = es) : ¿Y por qu é la Rep ú blica es ‘Oriental’? Tambi é n hay un Uruguay de oeste ? :)

# 1 user1 (L1 = es) : No, se llama oriental por estar al oriente del r í o Uruguay’*

Thread C: between brackets the status of the language used

# 1 user1 (L1b) : great picture. i love hourse. #2 user2 (L2) : i love hourse picture very

much, wonderfull!’ #3 user1 (L1) : Beautiful horses! Not

‘hourse,’ ‘house,’ ‘hours,’ ( ... ) ;p’

Note: *– Why is it called ‘oriental republic of uruguay’ ? Is there a western republic of Uruguay?– It is called oriental for lying east of the Uruguay river (authors’ translation).


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in a sentence. However, the input contained errors, which found their way into the learner’s utterance. In this case, metalinguistic explana-tion was provided by another user, in his L1 and feedback exposed a set of phonetically similar words, to distinguish them from the erroneous form ‘hourse’.

Despite being under-represented in our corpus, these examples illus-trate some of the possibilities offered by an open and informal language learning environment.

Synthesis: paradoxes of social networking and suggestions for addressing them

Firstly, our analysis indicates that the Culture section appears to be designed more as an interaction-driven than a resource-driven space, where existing resources (threaded discussions) are not meant to be re-used. Consequently, it is possible to argue that Livemocha fails to effectively ‘harness collective intelligence through network effects’ (Musser et al., 2007) towards language learning activity in the Culture section. Indeed, despite occurrences of peer exchanges showing the potential of language learning-driven interaction (see previous section), most threads fall into oblivion quite fast, a fifth of threads analyzed remain without a single comment, comments are mostly short and explicit interaction between users is scarce. Although unable to claim a causal relationship between design and the ephemeral nature of the exchanges, we argue that the Culture section shows rudi-mentary features compared to some standard Web 2.0 design features (see sections on ‘Design mechanisms’ and ‘Notification mechanisms’ above).

For Bruckman (2004, p. 239), ‘[d]esigners begin with theory, create a prototype, test and then revise. However, it is not just the technology that can be revised, but also the underlying theory. Technological design and pedagogy have the potential to co-evolve in this new medium’. Following this claim, we move our analysis a step further by linking it to potential techno-pedagogical developments. Our design recom-mendations intersect with the two critical factors contributing to higher engagement in an SNS (stipulated by Burke et al., as we mentioned when discussing our research questions).

Regarding ‘social learning’ (newcomers tend to share more content 1. if their contacts do so), the following developments can be implemented:


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a) Integrating contributions of the Culture section with the general profile updates through which the user’s network of friends is noti-fied. This can stimulate participation by making access to friends’ contributions less tedious and create viral effects of user networks (Musser et al., 2007) in the Culture section.

b) Connecting user activity in the Culture section to the overall activity in Livemocha would make it part of the standard site conceptually and symbolically, thus repurposing its role as a potential learning component, as opposed to an exclusively ‘fun’ component, disconnected from the learning activity of the standard Livemocha space.

Regarding ‘feedback’ (newcomers tend to share more content if their 2. initial contributions receive more feedback), as we observed earlier, there is a correspondence between low engagement with resources in the long term (thus low uptake) and relatively limited content management features for content reuse. Therefore, embedding the possibility of feedback loops in the design is vital for sustaining newcomers’ activity, offering visibility and linking it to older activity. From a language learning perspective, this would mean expanding the possibilities of the section to favor interaction, to make it a central part of the language learning processes and to give users more information on how to make best use of it. These conceptual consid-erations lead to the following recommendations: a) Creating a language filter, allowing posts to be filtered by language

used in the thread and/or combining all countries in which a given language is spoken could constitute first steps from a language awareness perspective. From a technical perspective, the country filter seems insufficient, especially considering the high number of new threads each day. This issue is all the more relevant in that learners may not be aware of all the countries in which their target language is spoken. Additionally, the combination of more elabo-rate filters, such as a language filter and the type of ‘social filters’ we mention in our discussion of notification mechanisms and an updated version of the popularity sort algorithm that would lower the importance of the recentness of the resource, might prolong the lifespan of threads.

b) Creating a gateway from the Culture to the learning section. It would also be conceivable to do things the other way round, developing production exercises consisting of participation in the Culture section with focus on form constraints which would then be available both in the ‘review submissions’ section and in the


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Culture section. Users may be given the opportunity to engage in language learning in informal networked spaces from task-based language teaching, where social interaction is put to use in devel-oping language skills (Ellis, 2003; Mangenot, 2008a; Ollivier, 2012).

c) Focusing more on the learners’ activity and providing them with more information on how they are expected to use the artefacts for language learning. This does not necessarily go against a bottom-up approach, but simply aims to give users guidelines on beneficial use in terms of language learning (the ultimate aim of the community). Users would remain free to develop meaningful ways of using the tools. In light of our data analysis, encouraging them to read one another’s posts, to provide feedback and to try to write full sentences could be a first set of guidelines to be tested in order to determine whether or not these yield any improvement in learners’ production.

The list of design recommendations provided is mainly intended for those who might design such types of community, but our conclusions also call for further studies, for instance, of the role of the thread initi-ator in subsequent interactions (and in maintaining them), not only in language learning communities but also by comparison with behaviors in mainstream SNS.

Further developments

It is worth mentioning the limitations of our study. Within the scope of this exploratory research we had to restrict our analysis to the informa-tion at hand, with a view to describing the potential that we, as CALL researchers, see in exploring forceful and culturally rich networked activity and making it sustainable from a language learning perspective. To further the hypotheses formulated in the chapter, it will be necessary to collect two extra types of data. Firstly, a more in-depth investigation of Culture section appropriation practices, through investigation of the attitudes and stances of learners, would make it possible to complete the picture of the social networking reality. Secondly, it would be important to access the intentions of the community designers behind the launch of the Culture section, through extended interviews, for example. We had conducted a series of interviews in this direction (Dixhoorn et al., 2010), including Livemocha ’s then-marketing vice president. However


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the Culture section was not discussed in that work, as it was not fully developed at that time.

We advocate action research involving both CALL researchers and community designers working together towards the sociotechnical development of these communities. Such collaborative action would be mutually beneficial, on the one hand confronting CALL researchers with the reality of these communities, including their business limi-tations and challenges and on the other hand giving community designers the benefit of experience in designing telecollaborative language learning settings for sustainable and culturally rich online encounters.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Marie-No ë lle Lamy, Fran ç ois Mangenot and Thierry Chanier for their insightful comments. This article reflects the views of its authors only.

Appendix

Content: statistics and experimental data (see ‘Data collection protocol and data distribution over time’)

Characteristics stored

In the description of our protocol, we indicate storing various charac-teristics for each thread. Not all were used in the analysis provided in this article; therefore, we chose not to list them all in the body of the article:

For each thread: ●

thread ID on ● Livemocha : allows to generate its url dates: ●

period of the original post (a picture here) ●

period of the last comment at the time of the data collection ●

duration of the activity (computed from the last two ●

characteristics) Gender of the author of the original post ●

Country concerned by the thread ●

Language used in the description field ●

Image type, one or more of the following descriptors: ●


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Landscape ●

Civilization signs (monuments, construtions , objects) ●

Persons: ●

author of the thread (or relatives) ●

unknown people ●

Text ●

Symbols (ex : flag) ●

Wildlife ●

Food ●

Composition ●

Viral content ●

Length of the description in words ●

Number of ● Likes Number of comments ●

Number of comments by the author of the original post ●

Number of languages represented in the comments ●

Highest number of consecutive replies (longest discussion) in the ●

comments Description of the longest discussion in terms of locutors ●

Longest comment ●

Status of the language used in the longest comment ●

Average comment length ●

General qualitative observations ●

For each comment: ●

language used ●

status of the language used ●

number of words ●

to which comment it replies ●

which comment replies to it ●

Estimation of the number of threads (computation)

Results of the binomial sign test for a single sample:

11.6 percent < average proportion of deleted threads < 20.9 percent306,380 ≤ number of threads ≤ 342,410

11.6 percent of the total number of threads (387,337) ≈ 44,931 ; 342,410 + 44,931 = 387,341 > 387,337 . 20.9 percent of 387,337 ≈ 80,953 ; 306,380+ 80,953 = 387,333 < 387,337 .


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Notes

1 . Uptake is taken as an equivalent to reinvestment or reuse in Web 2.0 spaces and is not related to studies on corrective feedback.

2 . http://www.Livemocha.com/explore 3 . For instance the url for thread #507091 will be http://Livemocha.com/

Culture/507091 4 . Figure used by default whenever stating an estimation, unless noted

otherwise. 5 . http://twitter.com/#!/Livemocha/status/35890285523374080 & http://twitter.

com/#!/Livemocha/status/36166364087455745 6 . Numbers take into account the confidence interval computed earlier for broken

links to estimate the minimum difference between the two trimesters. 7 . More than 75 percent of the threads contain eight words or less. (Q3 = 8

words) 8 . two-tailed Spearman’s ρ : rs = .366; n =34; p < .05 9 . rs = .666; n = 105; p < .0001


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http://www.Livemocha.com/explore

http://Livemocha.com/

http://twitter.com/#!/Livemocha/status/35890285523374080



http://Livemocha.com/

100

Introduction

In recent years, the use of SNS has become more prevalent in all facets of our daily lives, with the emergence of SNS for foreign language learning such as Busuu, Italki, Lang-8, Voxswap and so on.

The aim of this chapter is to revisit a previous study carried out by Harrison and Thomas (2009) in which an SNS called Livemocha was analyzed, in an attempt to clarify how user identities affected language learning in socially based virtual learning environments. In that study we identified a major issue related to the concept of mediation that we felt needed further research. (Mediation is further discussed below). We discovered that at that time in Livemocha , the lack of users who could be identified as teachers created a situation where users had to actively seek out other users who they thought may be able to help them solve learning problems. In that study we called them ‘significant others’ and we said:

‘in Livemocha the only guide users have when attempting to find “significant others” is based on “impression management”’. (Harrison and Thomas, 2009, pp. 119)

According to boyd and Ellison (2007), impression management refers to personal identity formation, where users define their own identities through the information given in their profile and the extent to which they make it public or private within the community and send out

5 Profiles in Social Networking Sites for Language Learning – Livemocha Revisited Richard Harrison


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Profiles in Social Networking Sites 101

identity signals to others. As with many communication devices on the Web, users do not know the real identity of other users, but in SNS they ‘know’ what they can perceive from profiles.

The aim of this study is to argue that it is in fact the user profiles that initiate and determine the process of mediation in Livemocha . As the 2009 study did not provide enough data to draw any conclusions about this centrality of the role of profiles, the current study used a new set of subjects from which to collect data in the latest version of the Livemocha environment.

Research questions

Some of the challenges of research into SNS are understanding 1) how digital social behaviors relate to the development of language skills, 2) how identities are forged through the user-centered, participa-tive framework of social networks for language learning and 3) the role of peers (‘native’/‘non-native’ speakers) in social media envi-ronments, focusing on how sharing operates in a language learning community.

This chapter will bring together these issues with reference to previous studies carried out on learning in Livemocha , focusing particularly on the issue of the role played by profiles. The main research question is ‘how do user profiles in Livemocha affect language learning processes?’ I argue that profiles are a key construct in determining digital social behaviors, identity formation and management and the role of peers within language learning communities.

Previous research

CMC studies on profiles of Web 2.0 users

Several studies have been carried out on the role of profiles in the wider context of emerging social technologies known under the umbrella term of Web 2.0. boyd and Heer (2006) carried out a study of the SNS Friendster , noting the role of profiles as means of initiating communica-tion between users when they first enter a digital space. Participants use profiles to ‘set the stage for conversation and communicating’ (boyd and Heer, 2006, p. 60). Moreover, profile cues are culturally situated in that each profile projects the cultural background of the user and these cultural markers can sometimes be misinterpreted. Photos are a highly noticeable component of profile identity. As well as being iden-tity markers, the photos themselves have conversational properties as


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102 Richard Harrison

updating of photos can initiate dialogue between users. The authors conclude that a profile

‘constitutes a digital body, a social creation, an initiator of conversa-tion and a medium for ongoing conversation in multiple modali-ties ... [P]rofiles further construct a social context, expressing social norms and appropriateness. Communication emerges when actors can interpret and create social context while sharing their ideas’. (boyd and Herr, 2006, p. 61)

The authors finally alert us to the fact that the use of profiles is still evolving, as new users need to understand how to interpret the signals sent through the profiles of people they have never met and use them to negotiate interaction and cultural exchange.

Cachia (2008), in a wide-ranging study of profiles in Web 2.0 environ-ments, defines profiles as the ‘presentation of oneself’ (Cachia, 2008, p. 24). They are the level of entry to most SNS spaces, allowing users to ‘mobilise and organise their social contacts and profiles in the way they want other members to see them’ (Cachia, 2008, p. 25). Profiles come in many forms depending on the technical specifications of the particular SNS and have differing effects. Some are easy to use and some are diffi-cult. Cachia argues that Facebook profiles are powerful in that they are simple to manipulate through a clear and simple interface.

Ito (2010), in a study of online youth culture and digital literacies, points to the centrality of profiles for ‘developing shared norms for online publicity, including how to represent oneself in online profiles’ (Ito, 2010, p. 115).

The issues of profiles, identity and mutual language learning in Livemocha have been studied here and in previous research using short-term research time frames with a small number of subjects, based on qualitative research methods heavily dependent on ethnographic methodologies (Clark and Gruba, 2010). These studies allow us to gain snapshots of what is happening and the issues involved, but to move this research forward there is a need for much longer longitudinal studies (for example, Ohta, 2001) as identity formation and mutual learning by their very nature require a considerable amount of time to both create, develop and mature.

Previous studies of Livemocha

Since its launch in 2007, Livemocha has grown to a user base of over 14 million users from 194 countries, attracting the attention of researchers.


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One of the most recent studies of Livemocha is to be found in Brick (2011), in which the author describes a project where data was collected from seven undergraduate students who used Livemocha for three months. Students reported both positive and negative features of the system. The former were that users could practice interactive oral skills synchronously and the latter were that the quality and relevance of the learning materials was poor, with a lack of explicit grammar teaching. The study also reports on social interaction issues highlighted by the subjects using Livemocha , including ‘cyber flirting’ and profile manage-ment, recognizing that the use of real names or pseudonyms requires ‘[f]urther research ... to establish which behavior is typical and to inves-tigate whether cultural factors play a role in how students choose to compose their profiles’ (Brick, 2011, p. 27). In relation to this, Brick (2011) reports that networks of trusted friends require a long time to culti-vate and this is also an aspect of SNS that needs further investigation.

Komatsu (2011) presents a detailed survey of Web 2.0 and SNS, including Livemocha , which are available for language learning. She concludes that these systems offer possibilities for various forms of learning, including learner-centered learning, active learning, collabora-tive learning and social constructivist-based learning (Komatsu, 2011, p. 80). On the other hand, she highlights five major issues that need to be addressed when considering the implementation of these tech-nologies in actual language learning environments: 1) Goal Setting: who sets the goals for learning and is it possible for learners to set their own goals?; 2) Sustainability of learning: after the initial impact from learning in a new environment wears off, will learning be sustained?; 3) Affiliation to communities: what are the roles of teachers and learners in SNS environments?; 4) Mediation: how can learners be supported?; 5) Evaluation: what kinds of evaluation can be offered by these systems and is it meaningful feedback to users?

The main point to be taken from this study is that Komatsu analyzes SNS from the point of view of the teacher, with the aim of clarifying the issues that need to be taken into account when implementing them in teaching situations. She argues that although they can promote types of learning that put the learner at the centre of the language learning process, the role of the teacher is unclear in crucial areas such as goal setting and evaluation.

When signing up to Livemocha , users are asked to create a user profile as part of the login procedure. Once a basic profile is created, it can be edited by the user to add or delete information and to set privacy features that control the way s/he is identified within the Livemocha community.


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Jee and Park (2009) comprehensively review the features of Livemocha. The main features of this site are that it provides familiar online learning methods such as automated grammar drills and flashcard exercises, as well as social networking technologies that offer opportunities for users to contact other users and invite them into real-time interactive sessions, through text, voice and video. The social networking feature most relevant for this study is the use of user-created profiles.

Brick (2011) discusses profiles in Livemocha and notes that informa-tion such as gender and age, among other facts, clearly affects the ways in which flirting, for example, occurs. Harrison and Thomas (2009) also discuss this point in terms of how ‘impression management’ determines how users choose to accept or deny requests for ‘friendship’ and interact with other users.

Lloyd (2012) argues that because Livemocha has such a large number of users, the fact that profiles can be browsed increases the opportu-nity for users to find other users with whom they can make contact for language exchange and likewise to be found.

Stevenson and Liu (2010) in their study on social interaction issues in Livemocha noted the problem that profiles and the identity they project can cause confusion for users.

User A was confused by the use of the word ‘Tutor’ in the naviga-tion. She described an interaction with another user as ‘sharing [the learning of a language]. I don’t want to have to tutor someone’. Once they found the user pool, the users wanted more information about each contact and their level of language ability. User B wanted to be able to contact native speakers to learn French. He wanted more details on the users he found in the network because ‘how do you know what the other learner’s abilities are? I don’t want to find another ‘me’. (Stevenson and Liu, 2010, p. 248)

This last point sums up what is perhaps the major issue with profiles in Livemocha : the fact that users only have the digital identities of other users (as manifested in their profiles) to make decisions about whom they will interact with and how. On the Web it has always been possible for identities to remain elusive. Because in profiles, today’s users can find plenty of information (albeit unverifiable and sometimes unneces-sary), a legitimate question to ask is how digital identities are revisited by the advent of SNS.

Harrison and Thomas (2009) carried out a study in which data from observations of seven undergraduate students in Japan using Livemocha


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for a period of 15 weeks was collected and analyzed. This study revealed areas that we felt needed further investigation:

[I]t is possible to argue that when an SNS is used for language learning, the notion that people use these systems primarily to support their existing social networks rather than make new relationships is not upheld. ... [S]ocial bonding and intimacy through computer-mediated communication does indeed require time to mature ... [I]t can be seen through this small-scale project that mediation is something that online users themselves construct through negotiation with others and is liable to be dependent on individual users’ attitudes towards both their own identity and friendship management’. (Harrison and Thomas, 2009, p. 120)

It was found that, unlike users of other SNS, such as Facebook , users of Livemocha were creating new networks for the sole purpose of language learning rather than establishing new relationships (Stevenson et al., 2010).

Social interaction theory, social constructivism and mediation

Language learning environments are complex environments, tradition-ally involving a teacher, students, materials/tasks and the context(s) of learning (Driscoll, 2000; Hannafin, Land and Oliver, 1999; Jonassen and Land, 2000). Social Interaction Theory can be argued to provide the most robust theoretical framework for explaining the interactions that go on between students, teachers and the tasks, as firstly it can clarify how and why teachers and students interact together, referring to the construct of mediation. Secondly it explains how tasks that are created by the teacher can serve as an interface between teachers and learners. Thirdly, it situates learning in contexts that are socially constructed by the participants themselves and finally, it acknowledges the need for qualitative research methods that can reveal the social dynamics that take place in these contexts (Clark and Gruba, 2010; Coulon, 1995)

Of particular interest for this chapter is mediation, a central notion in sociocultural based theories of learning. Vygotsky’s (1978a) notion of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and Feuerstein et al.’s (2003) idea of Instrumental Enrichment stressed that mediation is fundamental to human learning, which is dependent on how learners overcome problems they cannot solve by themselves through negotiating and


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interacting with the people around them. As these problems are over-come, learners can move to the next stage of development that lies in the ZPD. Skilled mediators (for example, teachers) will initially provide lots of scaffolding and as the learners develop abilities to overcome problems themselves, will remove the amount of scaffolding needed so that independent learning takes place.

Furthermore, learning is seen not as a dichotomy between knowing or not-knowing, but rather as a means for the learner to move from closely juxtaposed zones of not-knowing to knowing through a contin-uous process. In this process they actively construct their own hypoth-eses and check these with various people known as mediators, or more knowledgeable others (teachers, peers, parents and so on), who provide guidance and help them move towards the next stage of development.

The social constructivist model sees the teaching and learning process as a dynamic interplay between teachers, learners, tasks and the contexts.

The main concept to take here for the purposes of the present study is that in digital environments where an identifiable ‘teacher’ may not be present, as is generally the case, then the role of the ‘significant’ others, that is, other learners who are willing to act as peer tutors, is of the utmost importance. Digital learning environments, such as Livemocha , are constructed around the notion that their role is to provide a space in which there are tools that foster the formation of communities, by allowing individuals to interact who have a shared goal, in this case language learning/teaching. Therefore the dynamic interplay in these environments is centered around the assumption that users want to be connected with others who can help them and that they are willing to reciprocate this help, regardless of whether the other person(s) are expert teachers. What matters to the user is that the person should be a native speaker of the language s/he is trying to learn and one that can be trusted. However, as discussed earlier – see Brick’s (2011) comments on the time factor in the development of trust – and below, this is not simple when it comes to SNS such as Livemocha . When users create new social networks and enter into communities with total strangers, this entails the forma-tion of social interactions that should be founded on trust, gained in part from the information about user identities contained in profiles.

Looking at this previous work, it is clear that the question of how profiles and the identities of the users they project, affect the social behaviors and identity management that take place in these environ-ments is a central issue of SNS research that has yet to be sufficiently explained.


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The study

(#1) Seven students took part in the study, carried out in the 15-week autumn semester at Kobe University The participants were students in a postgraduate applied linguistics seminar taught by the author, inves-tigating the use of technology in language teaching. The breakdown of the students was Japanese (three females), Chinese (one male and two females) and US (one male).

(#2) Livemocha was introduced to the group in the first class and the students then created a user name and ID together with a profile. The ‘edit profile’ menu allows users to enter and modify a list of personal information by choosing from the menus shown in the screen capture in Figure 5.1 .

(#3) Users are able to manage how they present themselves to other members of the community, that is, their digital identity. They can do this to a very high degree by controlling the information entered into the profile, which is used by the system’s social networking algorithm(s) for determining both the people selected for presentation to the user as candidates for further interaction in Livemocha and also the ways in which the ensuing social interactions take place.

Figure 5.1 Screen capture of the profile headings in Livemocha


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(#4) Students were asked to use Livemocha at least once a week for a minimum of one hour by themselves outside of class. In class (90 minutes), students used Livemocha in 45-minute sessions, as shown in Table 5.1 below, monitored by the researcher and a teaching assistant, with a debriefing discussion in the remaining 45 minutes. After every three classes students were asked to give a short presentation on their experiences, with accompanying handouts summarizing the main points. The presentations were then written up as short reports focusing on each topic. A final term paper, based on the users’ reflections on using Livemocha , was submitted two weeks after the course was completed.

Methodology

The data was gathered using an ethnomethodological approach because the aim of the research was to gain a deep insight into the issue of how users interact in this environment, with a small number of participants. The data gained was aimed at creating a ‘thick description’ (Coulon, 1995, p. 75) of these interactions rather than any statistical findings. Therefore I used several sources of data collection. The researcher and a research assistant took notes on comments made by the students during

Table 5.1 Postgraduate class schedule

Class Activity Data collection

1 Livemocha session Profile creation

Discussion notes

2 Livemocha session Discussion notes 3 Livemocha session Discussion notes 4 Presentation 1 Report 1: Courseware in

Livemocha 5 Livemocha session Discussion notes 6 Livemocha session Discussion notes 7 Livemocha session Discussion notes 8 Presentation 2 Report 2: Profiles in Livemocha 9 Livemocha session Discussion notes10 Livemocha session Discussion notes11 Livemocha session Discussion notes12 Presentation 3 Report 3: Identity in Livemocha13 Livemocha session Discussion notes14 Summary 1 Discussion notes15 Summary 2 Discussions

Term Paper: Livemocha and FLL


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classroom observations, discussions and presentations. This data set was supplemented by data gained from student comments in the final term papers. The reason for this was to give the participants time to reflect on their use of this system over the 15 weeks and synthesize the discus-sions, reports and presentations they had given over this period.

The comments from the students below have been quoted directly from the data collected, with spellings preserved when in English and translated by the author where appropriate. These comments were gained from presentations, semi-structured interviews during the course and from what they wrote in their final reports.

Ethical clearance was gained from the students, through signed state-ments that informed them that any data could be used in future publica-tions using pseudonyms to preserve anonymity. The university did not require further ethical clearance for the study.

Results

Language learning in Livemocha

Feedback from all seven students was positive about the materials, such as vocabulary drills, in terms of their being easy to use although they complained about the quality. With regards to the interactive features of the system, through which they were able to connect with other users for mutual learning, they reported that it was very motivating to be able to connect with native speakers of their L2. However, these aspects were heavily outweighed by the feedback that tied in very closely with the concerns pointed out in Komatsu (2011). They felt it was difficult to determine clear learning goals and it was unclear how evaluation was carried out. This in turn led to five of the seven students concluding that this affected the sustainability of their learning, as it became random and progress was difficult to monitor. Across the board they reported that while the course/materials were easy to follow, in terms of both the goals of the drills/exercises and the feedback given, they saw the human-human interaction as being far less structured, with direction and evaluation left to individuals, which led to random language learning experiences.

Profiles

All of the students reported major issues with creating and managing profiles. The centrality of the profile as the interface for interaction with others was a major theme of their feelings about how they were using Livemocha . They saw the profiles as being user defined and partly under the control of the individual and crucial to the way you ‘show


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yourself’ (students 1, 3 and 5) in the community. Furthermore, three of the students shared the view that profiles were the key to entering into new relationships and to how they viewed others. All of the students reported that the ways profiles are presented in Livemocha caused them to feel a certain amount of anxiety and mistrust, as usernames are anon-ymous and other identifiers of personal information such as real photo-graphs were often not available.

The students all use other SNS sites such as Facebook and are therefore accustomed to profiles. They reported that they want to have a high degree of control over the information being shown and to whom. If the ability to control one’s profile is not clear in an online community, they all reported feeling degrees of ‘risk’ in how they were being ‘projected’ in the community and ‘mistrust’ with the information being presented to them about other users. Two examples were the linkage to Facebook that is available from Livemocha and the existence of categories for ‘relation-ship’, ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ within the profiles themselves. With regard to linking Livemocha to Facebook , they all stated categorically that they did not want to use this feature as they felt this would infringe on their trusted network of friends in Facebook , by connecting what they felt to be their ‘closed’ and ‘open’ social networks, which they wanted to keep discrete.

With respect to the information they could include in their Livemocha profiles, they questioned the need for a category ‘relationship’ as this is something they did not associate with a language learning site and particularly one where the interactions are based on matching people to new ‘friends’. With ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ the feeling was also that these categories seemed incompatible with the purpose of a language learning site. Although students could see that these two topics could be used for initiating interaction with others, they felt uncomfortable about how to deal with other users who expressed clear views about these issues and felt that this should be left to be discussed when and if it arose in inter-action, rather than being part of the incorporated profile.

When asked about profiles, students expressed how central they felt these were to language learning interaction. Student 2 (Chinese female) stated:

I didn’t put up my real photo because I felt this to be a site with the objective of learning languages, so I don’t see the need for a photo as that is for making friends. I also write my profile in simple language. My main benchmark for dealing with friend requests is to reject


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people with over 30 friends as I consider them to be using the site for socializing and not language learning.

Student 1 saw profiles as being problematic because of their ability to create what she termed a ‘honeypot’ effect, where people could be ‘targets’ for unwanted relationships including flirting, an issue noted in Brick (2011) and reported frequently by all the students in the current study. Student 1 (Japanese female) said:

I feel uncomfortable about the profile because it is not clear to what extent it is being made public and the fact that you can link it to Facebook makes me really uncomfortable as I don’t want to confuse private networks of friends like Facebook and this open system in Livemocha. I feel uneasy about the relationship status, as I don’t see why it should be necessary in a language learning site, it’s more like Japanese dating sites! Livemocha should take into account the different cultures of users, for example the biggest Japanese SNS Mixi is comfortable for me to use, not just because of the language being Japanese, but because it’s profile functions take into account the shyness of Japanese users and allow anonymity and being able to set privacy levels to very specific settings which makes you feel in control.

Students 4 and 6 reported that profiles where the user did not use a real name and did not provide pictures lead to a feeling of mistrust, as she was accustomed to using other SNS where people use real names and real photographs. Student 4 (Japanese female) reported:

I look at profiles from the point of view of the writer and the viewer. The writer is unlikely to write their real names, or give personal infor-mation [ ] I don’t really understand why there is a need for entering your relationship status as this is not a dating site it is meant for learning, so I find it intrusive, [ ] with the entries for politics and reli-gion although they could be used for getting to know peoples opin-ions about it, but for Japanese people these are kind of taboo topics.

[ ] it’s easier to find friends or people with common interests, like in Facebook , but in Livemocha all the people are unknown so it makes me feel uneasy about being open. It is easier to trust and feel closer to the people you meet in these digital environments if there is a photo of the person, but you can never always be sure if this is their real photo


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or not as people can create their own identities. [ ]. You can always block them later!

According to student 6 (Chinese Female),

I feel there is too much personal information on view which could invade my privacy, as I don’t feel I am in control of who is seeing what. There needs to be more control before I would feel comfortable to make lots of friends.

Identity formation

All the students expressed strong opinions about the identities of users being projected through the profiles and that the issues they felt uncomfortable with, as noted above, affected the way they interacted with other users. Whilst they saw the benefits to be gained from finding people with similar interests that they could learn from, they found it difficult to decide when they considered someone to be a trusted friend with whom they could have meaningful language learning experiences (Students 2, 4 and 5 in particular saw this as a major issue). This was because they felt there was a risk associated with entering into relation-ships with others for the first time and sustaining that relationship.

Individual students created their own heuristics for deciding on how they viewed others once interaction was established. Student 7 (Japanese female) commented that:

I deliberately categorize the role of users in Livemocha into three types. I think of NNS of Japanese as those who ‘take advantage’ of me by just wanting to learn Japanese and not offer anything in return about their own native language. Japanese NNS of English who can interact with me in English are ok, as it was help both them and me to brush up on our language skills by practicing with each other and sometimes we can learn something from each other even though we are not natives speakers. NS of English who I regard as real friends are great as they will give me very good feedback on my learning, with lots of corrections and helpful information.

Student 2 (Chinese female) also created her own rule for determining the identity of people with whom she interacted:

If I meet Chinese NSs learning Japanese, I see them as users who could help me to ‘self-reflect’ on my learning, whereas when I interact with


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Japanese NS I think they can provide me with truly meaningful coop-erative learning.

Discussion

Social interaction theory assumes that students are active and will engage in mutual learning, but that there is a crucial need for media-tion of this learning, which is the role of the peer tutor or the signifi-cant other. Since the 2009 Harrison and Thomas study, Livemocha has modified its profile settings so that users can identify themselves as ‘teachers’. However, students reported feeling uncomfortable about trusting profile information about such users, as they know that iden-tities can be manipulated in online communities. So we can see that whilst peer tutors exist in the environment, according to their profiles, their credibility cannot be verified by students and they therefore work on a ‘trust’ basis, believing that these people are who they say they are, but may not indeed end up being who they say they are, or perhaps more importantly who the students think they are. This indeed appears to apply to all relationships the students form in Livemocha and not just with these peer tutors.

The lack of any clear criteria with which to identity for certain that someone is a peer tutor within the free space that these students used in Livemocha (as discussed above, students were limited to the free spaces only and not the fee-paying spaces where teachers are available) has consequences. It means that in order to maintain social interactions with a clear goal of language learning, users have to expend high levels of interactivity, such as establishing and managing identities and creating a feeling of trust between the interacting members.

We can see that because users are more experienced with other SNS spaces, they are sensitive about digital behaviors in general. Furthermore, Livemocha ’s goal is clearly stated as being socially based language learning and students tend to reject any other forms of digital behavior, such as friendship seeking, which they prefer to do in other communities which they trust. The typology of Web 2.0 communities proposed by Zourou (2012) places Livemocha in the category of ‘structured language learning communities’. This study’s report of students’ behaviors in Livemocha supports this typology in that students clearly see Livemocha as being in a different category to Facebook or other SNS sites.

Identities are forged through the ‘prism’ of the user-created profiles. Learners are aware of and extremely sensitive to the trustworthiness of profile information. They are also aware of the likelihood that their


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information could be used for unintended purposes, such as flirting and that others can manipulate their profiles.

They want control over what information they enter and how it is used, or else they feel anxiety about entering into online relationships with others. This can be a major obstacle to language learning in envi-ronments such as Livemocha , as the affective factors of trust, risk taking and anxiety are brought into the foreground and become a filter that can inhibit the social interaction needed for language learning

Language learning in SNS communities like Livemocha , where a network of new relationships has to be created, needs an environment in which learners feel uninhibited and relaxed enough to enter into these relationships. We saw that students form their own ‘user rules’ for deciding on whom to interact with and what kind of interaction is taking place.

Conclusion

Williams and Burden (2002) provide a model to explain learning as a form of social interaction and the interaction that occurs between teachers, learners and tasks. In their model the teacher plays a central role in how interaction occurs and is the facilitator of learning, by creating and implementing tasks that foster social interaction. However, in the case of Livemocha , the model is redefined to recognize that it the learners themselves who take centre stage in the decision-making process and the role played by peer tutors in the community is less prominent. Furthermore, we need to recognize that learners are required to mediate their own learning through interaction with more knowledgeable others as a consequence of learning in these digital environments.

A social constructivist model based on social interaction theory needs to be revised when we look at how learners socialize and construct inter-actions and language in online learning environments such as the one we have studied here. Firstly, the role of the teacher is less clear than in classroom environments, as we have seen here with Livemocha . Learning tasks are provided by the system itself and these interactions with these tasks may not necessarily entail any interaction with a teacher at all, with the learner either working alone or with peers. This leaves the ques-tion of what role does the teacher perform in such environments? It could be that s/her performs a ‘fall back’ function when learners fail or are unable to complete a task through interaction. So we can see that the position of both the teacher and the task components of the model


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and how they both relate to the learner comes into question when the context is shifted from a formal classroom learning environment to a digital one such as Livemocha . This is an area which requires research to further investigate whether and how the roles of teachers in these digital contexts change.

Tasks in the classroom traditionally come from the teacher, who is able to set them at levels appropriate to the learners’ ability and offer the necessary assistance/feedback to learners. However, when the context of learning shifts to Livemocha , the tasks are either presented to the learner from within the system, be they 1) formal language learning tasks such as drills or 2) tasks negotiated between the users themselves. There is clearly still a lot of work to be done to shed more light on the issue of how changes in learning context(s) affect the types of language learning tasks that learners engage in and their relationship to learning outcomes.

In conclusion, I started this study with the aim of looking at what language learning outcomes could arise from my students using Livemocha over a sustained period. However, at a very early stage in the project the issue of impression management, which I had already identified as an issue in an earlier study (Harrison and Thomas, 2009), came to the fore. As a result, this made me realize that even before we begin to look at learning outcomes, we need to look at the initial stages of entering these new social environments, for which the gateway is profiles. It is these profiles that appear to influence the process of impression management that is so important to determining the ways in which students interact with other users in Livemocha .

The results of the current study show that profiles are central to the dynamic of interaction in these online communities as they can deter-mine the initial relationships that need to be fostered for learning to take place. Profiles are the first things learners experience when they enter as newcomers into these communities and they form the basis for further interaction and learning experiences. However, learners bring with them previous experiences from other such communities that offer different mechanisms for creating and manipulating profiles and students bring this experience to bear on their behavior in Livemocha . This in itself is not surprising when we consider that the learners in this study have grown up with the Internet and are experienced users of these communities. However, there appears to be a need for the creators of communities such as Livemocha , which have a clear aim of language learning, to increase their awareness of students’ prior experi-ences. Such an awareness should inform their actions when designing


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the community and the digital social behaviors that are fostered by the system architecture.

The study has highlighted the need for further research on profiles, looking both at the structure of profiles in Livemocha itself and in rela-tion to the use of profiles in other SNS. As Livemocha has a built-in func-tion to log in through Facebook , it would be illuminating to carry out a comparative study of how the two systems deal with profile/identity management.


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117

Introduction

The title of this chapter suggests what is a commonplace truth among specialists in technology-based instruction: that it is not technology itself in the form of any tool that is going to necessarily lead to learning. Rather, it is learners’ use(s) of the tool in pedagogical tasks that will impact learning. And that use will often be a function of the pedagogical design of the course in which the tool is applied.

Successful integration of technology into the classroom in a peda-gogically sound manner involves more than simply introducing a software program or other innovation to the students in a classroom. Technology integration must be thoughtfully planned out based on curricular goals and instructional models – implying the use of new teaching strategies that actively engage students and rely on collabo-ration among teachers. (Oxford and Oxford, 2009, p. 8)

While the impact that instructional design has on learning has not received as much attention in the teaching of English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) and applied linguistics literature as else-where (Howard, personal communication, 16 April 2012), Chapelle (2003; 2007a) has suggested that computer-assisted language learning (CALL) applications provide a particularly fertile ground for exploring

6 It’s Not Just the Tool: Pedagogy for Promoting Collaboration and Community in Social Networking in CMC Carolin Fuchs and Bill Snyder


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118 Carolin Fuchs and Bill Snyder

the relationship between instructional design, technology and second-language acquisition. However, to date little has been done to examine the application of technological practices, such as social networking, which relate to an expanded definition of learning goals beyond tradi-tional content knowledge to more social forms of learning, although it is recognized that similar issues exist.

Stating that the ‘social software’ (or Web 2.0) technological apparatus has great educational potentials would be reductive and misleading; which type of learning can occur and under which conditions and ways this learning can occur should always be methodological priori-ties to be accounted for during instructional design. (Pettenati and Cigognini, 2007, p. 49)

Against this backdrop, the purpose of this chapter is to explore the extent to which pre-service language teachers in the USA and in Taiwan used Google Wave , an online writing tool and social networking site, beyond their pedagogical tasks and the instructional design implications of this use. In particular, the goals of this study were a) to provide pre-service teachers in different countries and teaching contexts (in the USA and in Taiwan) with the opportunity to discuss various aspects of language teaching and technology with one another by interacting and collab-orating via computer-mediated communication and Google Wave in particular; b) to offer online interaction and task co-construction aiming at the development of a common understanding of computer technology facilitated by SN applications (for example, Google Wave ); c) to apply a model learning approach (Willis, 2001) to integrate technology tools and Web 2.0 applications in (language) learning settings. Based on these goals, the research question was as follows: Do participants in a language teacher education project go beyond virtual classroom walls and project task requirements to engage with (cross-) institutional counterparts?

In the following, we are first going to look at different approaches to instructional design and how they relate to technology-based instruc-tion. Next, we define social networking and describe the Google Wave tool before laying out the methodology for the study and presenting our empirical data.

Background: instructional design

Instructional design materials in the English language teaching litera-ture are largely concerned with general issues of curriculum or syllabus


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It’s Not Just the Tool 119

construction (Brown, 1995; Graves, 1996, Richards, 2001). While selec-tion and implementation of appropriate tasks for learning purposes is included, the relationship between pedagogical design and learning outcomes has not been a focus perhaps because of the difficulty of making such links directly in language teaching (Allwright, 2005; Woods, 2006). Chapelle (2001) did propose a set of six evaluation criteria for CALL tasks. However, her overall model has been critiqued as overly grounded in an interactionist SLA perspective (Blake, 2008) and vague in distinguishing the cognitive and social aspects of learning (Levy and Stockwell, 2006).

Fink’s (2003) Significant Learning Experiences model emphasizes instructional design and provides an approach which clearly distin-guishes the cognitive and social aspects of learning. Fink proposes six types of learning that are essential to the design of any course: founda-tional knowledge, application, integration, human dimension, caring and learning how to learn. Fink’s model may be particularly appli-cable to the analysis of instruction involving SN technology because it does not privilege the acquisition of content knowledge over affective learning, but rather sees the acquisition of all six types of learning as part of a unified learning-centered approach to education. Instructors are expected to plan for ‘rich learning experiences’ in which students ‘simultaneously achieve multiple kinds of learning’ (Fink, 2003, p. 111). In Fink’s model, collaborative interaction in tasks enhances student learning experiences through the creation of community, which in turn helps support all forms of learning. Participation in social networking tasks could be seen as promoting valued affective forms of learning, in particular developing the human dimension of learning, helping students to learn about self and others as part of a process of developing what Goleman (1995) calls Emotional Intelligence. This approach may be especially relevant when looking at language learning because of how social mastery is embedded in the acquisition of the language system.

Before laying out how and why Google Wave was used as an integral part of the course design, we review the characteristics of SN tools – and of Google Wave in particular.

Background: social networking tools

SN tools (for example blogs, wikis, chats) have opened up a multitude of modes of communication through a combination of audio, video and written text and the potential of such tools for language teaching and intercultural learning has been under discussion for some time now


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(for example, Arnold et al., 2005; Belz and Thorne, 2005; Dooly, 2008; Drewelow, 2012; Goodfellow and Lamy, 2009; Guth and Helm, 2010; O’Dowd, 2003).

Social networking has been defined as ‘web-based services that 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. The nature and nomencla-ture of these connections may vary from site to site’ (boyd and Ellison, 2007, n.p.).

Drawing on work by Cross (2006), Pettenati and Cigognini (2007) stress that social networking falls into the informal learning category in that social networking is not necessarily intentional or recognized by subjects themselves as enabling them to acquire knowledge and/or competence:

Social networking is emerging as a highly natural practice because it is deeply rooted in our daily behaviour; spontaneous relations, interac-tions and conversations support informal learning practices, contrib-uting to the creation and transmission of knowledge. In informal learning practices, the social behaviour and the support of technolo-gies converge toward the ‘network’; a network made by people and resources, a social network, unified by personal needs or common goals, interaction policies, protocol and rules and telematic systems all together favouring the growth of a sense of belonging to the ‘net’ community. (Pettenati and Cigognini, 2007, p. 43)

Palloff and Pratt (2005) also stress the importance of collaboration and community (without a sense of community, no collaboration can occur) and the implications for the ‘real’ world:

The inclusion of collaborative group work in an online class can help to develop the skills that will be needed to lead or function in a virtual team in the work environment, particularly if learners are encour-aged to reflect on the potential application of these skills. (Palloff and Pratt, 2005, p. 11)

Moreover, Palloff and Pratt insist that activities should nurture a team charter and the instructor needs to empower the teams to develop their team’s vision, mission and strategy; negotiate the accountability of each member; identify results and deliverables; develop methods to


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review progress and results; and share best practices with other teams (see also Fink, 2003; Michaelsen, Knight and Fink, 2002, on team-based learning).

Background: Google Wave

It was precisely these collaborative and empowering aspects that had triggered the excitement about recent SN tools. For instance, Google Wave ( GW ), a synchronous online writing tool, (and more recently Google+, see Chen, 2012) have been met with considerable interest among teachers, but have had mixed results in application. Shortly after GW ’s start, the Google Wave CALICO group ‘Using Google Wave in CALL’ was founded by Scott Payne for the use of researchers within the CALICO consortium. Its intent was to ‘foste[r] an open and unstructured discus-sion’ (Payne, 2010, n.p.) in order to explore how GW could be used to promote language learning and SLA research.

The GW interface is divided into four parts: navigation, contacts, inbox (showing all the user’s discussion threads or ‘waves’) and one individual wave. The inbox works similarly to an email inbox in that it shows all the waves available. The headings of the waves are in bold print if there are any unread messages (or ‘blips’ – the GW term for all messages) in that wave. The toolbar functions at the top are similar to most SN tools. At the very top of each wave one can see profile images of each of the participants. The screen capture below shows a snapshot of a blip in GW (‘Technology in Teaching’) as used in the US class. The instructor (identi-fied as ‘Me’, top left of the screen) posted a broadcast blip for her students on the wave encouraging them to participate in the CALICO group ‘Using Google Wave in Call,’ to which they had all been invited.

GW allows for asynchronous and synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) and combines functions similar to email,

Figure 6.1 Screen capture showing the ‘Technology in Teaching’ wave interface


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discussion boards, chat, video conferencing and file sharing. These various functionalities contained in just one tool thus lend themselves to cross-institutional exchanges. Posts on this synchronous online writing tool are called ‘blips’. Each blip shows the name(s) of the author(s) and/or collaborators and the date. GW also incorporates features of email and instant messaging: ‘If a group member of a Wave creates a new addition to the Wave or edits an existing resource, this will immediately appear in real time in the Wave display of all members of that group, including, amazingly, what is being typed letter by letter’ (Godwin-Jones, 2010, p. 13). In 2010, Godwin-Jones explained that the tool was still in the beta version and cautioned that it might be too early to tell whether it had ‘transformative’ power; however, the potential was recognized: ‘At a minimum, its advanced features demonstrate in a dramatic way the high degree of interactivity and collaboration becoming possible on the Web’ (Godwin-Jones, 2010, p. 13). Moreover, one can upload and share documents and revert back to previous versions through a change log (Godwin-Jones, 2010), as well as add gadgets and extensions such as video conferencing and Google maps.

The empirical research on GW is limited (for example, Fuchs, 2011; Sadler, 2007; for a review of web 2.0 tools, see Sykes, Oskoz and Thorne, 2008), with a good number of projects and trials mentioned in the blogosphere (for example, Fitzpatrick, 2010; 2011). One notable review discusses how effective GW is as an online collaboration tool for intrac-ampus and intercampus collaboration (Ovadia, 2010). The author lists the chat as a benefit because it ‘records and archives conversations, providing users with a transcript of conversations within a wave, even conversations for which the user was not present’ (Ovadia, 2010, p. 160). Another advantage is ‘its ability to search other users’ public waves. This gives Wave users the ability to find and join specific projects and conversations they might not otherwise be aware of’ (Ovadia, p. 161). The Calico Wave mentioned earlier had set out to explore how GW could be used for language learning and whether it could potentially replace other course management systems such as Blackboard (Godwin-Jones, 2010), a process also explored by Kelley (2010). Fuchs (2011) highlighted the potential of GW for collaborative writing, peer feed-back, learner communication and discussion, real-time chat and learner engagement. Students particularly liked the combination of synchro-nous and asynchronous functions and saw great potential for intercul-tural learning.

However, other applications of GW had more limited outcomes, in some cases perhaps because both course designers and students in courses


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were not able to fully exploit the tool. Some instructors have used GW in combination with Google docs, but seem to refer to GW as either a ‘blog’ (Williamson, 2010) or a fancy version of email (Fitzpatrick, 2010; Parry, 2010). Still others saw it as simply more limited than other SN tools in terms of the control it offered users over their identities and collabora-tions (Kitsantas and Dabagh, 2011). In many cases, the critiques seem to be founded on the inability of users to identify clear purposes for using GW that would allow them to exploit it effectively. On the one hand, there was the familiar interface of GW with its communication tools that resembled email and chat. On the other hand, there was this ‘now what?’ moment after people had accessed GW because no one really knew where this was all headed aside from exchanges about a certain topic or using the tool for a class.

Part of what was so wonderful about Wave was how utterly unfa-miliar it was, forcing its users to rethink their relationships to the groups with which they communicate, placing the groups’ collab-orations first. Unfortunately, that unfamiliarity led to Wave being significantly misunderstood, thus preventing the full adoption of the system, which might have facilitated its further development. (Fitzpatrick, 2010, n.p.)

Despite GW ’s potential as tool for communication and collaboration that integrated both synchronous and asynchronous CMC, the tool only lasted ten months. Maintenance officially discontinued in August 2010 (Jackson, 2010; Swan, 2010) and the read-only format shut down on 30 April 2012.

In the next section, we lay out the context of the study, which started in January 2010 – shortly after the arrival of GW in October 2009.

Methodology

Participants

This empirical case study took place over the course of a semester between January and May 2010. Participants included 17 graduate students in TESOL/Applied Linguistics at a private American graduate institution on the East Coast and 13 master’s teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) student teachers at a university in Taiwan. The US participants were enrolled in the elective course Internet and Language Teaching and the students in Taiwan were enrolled in an elective course called Multimedia Language Teaching, Learning and


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Material Design. Of the 17 US participants, 14 students were master’s degree candidates in the TESOL/Applied Linguistics program and 3 students were graduate students enrolled in other programs, interested in learning more about the technology tools. Small groups of students were paired up with cross-institutional counterparts, with whom they also had two in-class Skype sessions, one at the midterm and one at the end of the course. Prior to these two Skype sessions, participants had posted and responded to discussion questions on GW about joint read-ings on technology-based language teaching and intercultural learning. The US course used Ning as the course management platform and GW and Skype for the cross-institutional collaborations and exchanges with the Taiwanese partners.

Collaborative tasks and exchanges

Drawing on O’Dowd and Ware (2009), the following tasks were layered in terms of increasing complexity as the course went on and required students to use GW :

For the introductory information exchange task , participants provided their cross-institutional partners with information about their personal and professional backgrounds, communicating on GW . Participants in both locations were partnered up with one to two cross-institutional counterpart(s). Moreover, all participants were invited to the CALICO Wave ‘Using Google Wave in CALL’ (Payne, 2010) in order for them to be able to engage with scholars and professionals in the field of tech-nology and language instruction.

The precursor to the comparison and analysis task involved a pre-reading discussion on GW . Between 1 April 2010 and 8 April 2010, students in the USA posted two questions for discussion on GW in preparation for the first Skype meeting with their Taiwanese partners on 12 April. The questions were based on three joint readings. One reading was Hofstede’s seminal 1986 article on high-context versus low-context cultures and the implications for teaching and learning. The second and third arti-cles (Shih and Cifuentes, 2003; Niehoff et al., 2001) had been chosen because they both dealt specifically with cross-cultural communications between Americans and Taiwanese and classroom implications. After the second Skype session, US participants were asked to debrief via GW by posting two responses based on their experiences with the Taiwanese students. One response was based on the in-class Skype experience with the students in Taiwan and one response was based on what their peers in the USA had said on the synchronous online writing tool with regard to the class experience.


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The collaborative task asked all participants to discuss on GW how this tool related to other synchronous and asynchronous CMC tools and the advantages and disadvantages of the tool as well as the usefulness of several Web 2.0 tools (for example Ning , GW and Skype ). More specifi-cally, some groups were discussing issues such as authorship/ownership and plagiarism with regard to GW .

Lastly, based on the outcomes of the two previous tasks, local groups of US students designed technology-based tasks for English as a second language or English as a foreign language learners focusing on reading, writing, speaking, listening, grammar, vocabulary, or a combination thereof. Each group presented their technology-based task to their class-mates at the end of the semester and provided peer feedback for one other group.

Data collection and analysis

This exploratory case study draws on action research (Nunan and Bailey, 2009; Richards, 2003). As well as being co-designer of the course and researcher, one author acted as participant observer (Denzin, 1989) in collaboration with the instructor in Taiwan. The other author acted as researcher and participant observer in one class session in the USA. The researchers triangulated their data through a combination of different instruments (CMC data, pre-course needs analyses, post-course ques-tionnaires), which are laid out in detail in the next section.

Data collection

The CMC data consisted of blips on GW ‘Technology and Teaching,’ which was shared by instructors and students in the USA and in Taiwan as well as a small number of fellow technology researchers at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Arizona and the University of Le ó n, Spain, who had been invited to join the wave (and to possibly join the collaboration). The GW data was collected through copying and pasting the wave ‘Technology and Teaching’ in its entirety into a Word docu-ment once in mid-course and once at the end. Indeed, each document only represented a snapshot at a particular time because anyone could edit the blips and the Wave at any point – up until the Wave was read-only in August 2010.

The needs analysis (Questionnaire1 or Q1), an online survey in Google Forms (a function within Google Docs which allows users to create, edit, share and send surveys and other forms), was administered to the US students at the beginning of the term. The survey consisted of


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three parts. The first part contained seven open-ended questions about students’ prior technology experience in teaching and/or learning, the tools students would like to focus on and the settings where they would like to teach after graduating. The second part included a total of 17 Likert-scale items (on a scale from 1 to 4 with 1 = insufficient and 4 = very good) and its purpose was to elicit information about students’ self-rated proficiency with synchronous and asynchronous SN tools (for example GW , Ning , Skype , blogs, wikis and so on). The third part contained three open-ended questions asking participants about their experience with using any of the technology tools in their teaching. Moreover, students shared benefits and/or challenges of any prior group work and cross-cultural experiences they had been involved in. Q1 was not anonymous, but was shared with the class with the goal to help students team up with peers who had similar interests with regard to choosing a technology tool and target learner population for the tech-nology-based tasks.

All participants in the USA and Taiwan also filled out a post-course questionnaire (Q2) at the end of the course where they reflected on the tools used and on their collaborative exchanges. Q2 was adminis-tered anonymously through an online survey and consisted of 11 open-ended questions about learning experience and benefits and challenges through the cross-institutional discussions, for example, interaction on Skype , room for improvement, the benefits of the cross-institutional interaction for participants’ final projects and any additional comments regarding the tools covered in class.

Data analysis

Van Lier (2003) stresses that although ‘the classroom activities described cannot be generalized , it is likely that some of the best things that happen in these classrooms can be particularized as part of pedagogically sound curricula in other settings’ (van Lier, 2003, p. 57; italics in the original). With the goal of ‘particularization’ in mind, the researchers set out to analyze the CMC data since this is where social networking did or did not take place. While Pettenati and Cigognini’s (2007) ‘Social Network Characteristics’ were primarily developed for informal SN contexts, we used this framework to analyze the GW data because the features are also relevant for pedagogical contexts.

In a first round of open coding, the researchers counted a total of 49 blips in the GW data, which either showed SN characteristics and/or addressed the pedagogical potential of GW . In a second round, the researchers identified the following 67 instances within these blips:


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Category 1. Social networking aspects (7 blips); Category 2. Excitement about impending project/collaboration/

engaging with other Ss (19 blips); Category 3. Benefits of GW (23 blips); Category 4. Drawbacks of GW (18 blips).

Category 1 will be discussed in detail below. Category 2 included comments that seemed task related and were thus not included in Category 1: ‘It looks as if we will be paired up for next week’s skype activity. I’m super excited and think it will be a fun experience’ (J., 9 April 2010), or ‘I have experienced the collaborative writing aspect of GW with my friends and we appreciated the way it allowed us to brainstorm, draft and work together on a document, without losing our trails of thought, then revising it and saving it right here and all of this while sitting comfortably at home :)’ (F., 7 April 2010). Categories 3 and 4 were not directly related to the research questions (for a detailed discussion, see Fuchs, 2011).

In a second round of coding, we applied Pettenati and Cigognini’s 2007 framework to the relevant excerpts from Categories 1 and 2. More specifically, we identified, in our data, the following features from these authors’ framework (all data are kept in their original spelling):

Goal (for example. relations based on individual interests); 1) Belonging (for example, spontaneous and autonomous motivation); 2) Cohesion and enabling factors (for example, sharing and 3) evaluating).

The fourth feature, nondefined duration , was excluded since classrooms settings are typically limited to a specific time period. Additionally, results from Q1 and Q2 were found to support the CMC data results.

Findings and discussion

As became evident from Q1, all 17 US students expressed interest in learning how to integrate technology into their teaching, although some comments were rather general (‘Using technology in classroom activities to make them interesting to students’ or ‘[h]ow to use tech-nology in the context of the developing world.’). Ten of the US students expressed interest in learning how to use SN tools (for example ‘create a social network for learners’, ‘[O]nline communities for learners’, ‘ Ning , GW ’) – with five of the US students specifically stating that they brought prior Web 2.0 experience to the class (wikis, blogs, GW ).


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Despite the students’ motivation and enthusiasm with regard to using GW, the actual CMC data below illustrate that only a few encounters could be categorized as social networking in accordance with Pettenati and Cigognini’s 2007 framework.

Excerpt 1

[March 8, 2010] J: [ ... ] The lag is bad. Enjoyed watching you type, thoguh, K. [March 8, 2010] [email protected] i feel as if i were stuck in a jam or something ... gosh ... google wave is making me illiterate that i cannot spell ...

The two students express their frustration with regard to the tool’s lag. By directly addressing the lag and K.’s typing skills, J. seems to invite a response from her classmate. K. emphasizes and further elaborates on how he feels about the fact that every letter appeared on the screen with a major delay (‘ ... google wave is making me illiterate that i cannot spell ... ’). Their joint complaint seems to serve the purpose of creating a sense of belonging – even though in a negative sense.

Excerpt 2 below features introductory blips by two US students who both happened to be from the same state – the second one expressing a positive sense of belonging.

Excerpt 2

[n.d.] [email protected]: Hello everyone, my name is D. I am studying TESOL at [the US graduate insti-tution]. I am currently part-time in my studies but will begin full-time in the fall of 2010. I am from the State of New Jersey! I look forward to communicating with everyone on Google Wave!

[23 Mar] [email protected]: Hello everyone from [the Taiwanese graduate institution]! My name is B. from Prof. X’s class. I’m in my first semester of the MA-TESOL program here at [the US graduate institution]. I was born in Taiwan and moved to New Jersey (yes, it is part of the United States) when I was ten. I look forward to meeting everyone on Skype next week and communicating here on Google Wave!

[29 Mar] [email protected]: Go New Jersey! Hooray!


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mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]:




In addition to expressing excitement about the impending collabora-tion with their Taiwanese partners on GW , first D. and then B. mention that they are from New Jersey. Upon noticing the commonality or belonging, D.’s subsequent post ‘Go New Jersey! Hooray!’ can be catego-rized as spontaneous and autonomous motivation .

The following excerpt shows a blip of the Taiwanese student P. toward the end of the collaboration, in which he expresses his goal and interest for using GW .

Excerpt 3

[5 Apr 2010] [email protected]: When I see someone is also editing his/her response, I feel somebody is working with me. Thus, I’d like to keep on working. It’s nice to meet partner on GW. The best part of GW is we construct knowledge together. I really learn a lot from others.

Despite being task- or work-related in nature, P.’s comment displays community/networking aspects because he expresses the goal of having a relation (‘It’s nice to meet partner on GW.’) to fulfil his individual interest (‘to learn from others’). It seems that the tool’s synchronous function creates a sense of belonging for him due to the function’s immediacy and intimacy: ‘When I see someone is also editing his/her response, I feel somebody is working with me’. The student seems motivated to stick around and ‘keep on working’.

The exchanges between J., B. and D. in excerpt 4 below exhibit cohe-sion and enabling factors illustrated through sharing and evaluating .

Excerpt 4

[n.d.] J. and B.: Hi B. Fancy meeting you here! Hi J., I suppose you can call this close encounters of the GW kind!

[10 Apr 2010] D.: Fascinating display of a hyperpersonal relationship in its in [blip ends here]

When J. and B. accidentally meet online, they refer to this incidence as ‘close encounters of the GW kind!’ The exclamation mark seems to underline their surprise and possible excitement about the encounter. D.’s post follows immediately after and his evaluation of J.’s and B.’s


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encounter (‘hyperpersonal relationship’) refers to Walther’s (1996) article that students had read for the seminar. The reference to Walther in D.’s comment is interesting in that the student’s observation does not seem to match the low frequency of these encounters on GW . However, they are in line with earlier research on one-time-only, time-limited CMC groups, which tend to be more task oriented (than face-to-face groups) because social relationships develop more slowly and there tends to be no anticipation of future interaction (Walther, 1996).

In excerpt 5, another US student, F., addresses everyone with a descrip-tion and reflection of her GW experience.

Excerpt 5

[10 Apr 2010] F: Hey I just deleted a whole chunk of P.’s comment WHILE he was typing it, hehehe. Shh, don’t tell him :) ... However, on a serious note, I was trying to see what happens if and when a blip or parts of it is deleted by some one else. Would it be shown somewhere? would it be highlighted, or would the writer get an update of sorts, or whatever, but it seems that nothing happens! There goes the whole plagiarism /ownership issue! P. I think didn’t know what happened, because he started a completely new blip. So if multiple people are online and one deletes the other’s blip, what happens then? how would we know who did it? I would like to know what others think on this and what their experience with this particular issue on GW says.

In her description of what she did (‘just delet[ing] a whole chunk of P.’s comment WHILE he was typing it, hehehe. Shh, don’t tell him :) . . . ’), F. first shares and emphasizes her surprise (‘WHILE’ in caps) at the tool’s features. She then reflects on and evaluates her experience of deleting parts of someone else’s blip by thinking out loud about the issues of author-ship/ownership and possible consequences of plagiarism. She signs off by inviting responses from everyone about their experiences with GW .

Findings indicate that participants rarely seemed to go beyond the task requirements to engage with their partners.

They did engage with one another, however, in that they commented on each other’s use of GW : ‘Hey P., luckily I’m online GW too and I could see and read whatever you were posting, even the words and spell-ings you corrected after typing them up :) While I was waiting for you to finish typing, i couldn’t help but admire this special “collaborative” feature of GW , in which one could actually see the other person typing and follow his/her trail of thought. For example you wrote “once the discussion ends” and then you deleted it and wrote “once the discussion


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picks up”, this I thought was interesting as two writers can collabora-tively write a document and help each other by catching each other’s thoughts and words ... ’ (F., March 8, 2010).

In this excerpt, F. stresses that not only can GW encourage collabora-tive writing but the tool lends itself to self-editing (substituting ‘ends’ with ‘picks up’) and may thus foster language learning. The ability to reflect on and modify one’s own writing in GW does not end with hitting the ‘send’ button, but one can make changes and edits at any point in the future. Moreover, although the student teachers were aware of the underlying pedagogical structure of the GW exchanges and they were primarily engaging with discussion questions, they also expressed hope to collaborate more with their cross-institutional partner groups (‘Hi, I’m P. from Prof. X’s class. I think we were not really talking to each other because we were mainly replying to [the instructor’s] questions. Once the discussion picks up, I’m pretty sure it’ll be interactive and collaborative, just like on our Ning’s site. I look forward to the virtual meeting :) (P., March 8, 2010)’. This comment suggests that Ning may have served the social networking needs of students more effectively than GW , perhaps because of its similarity to Facebook , with which they were already familiar. When the US students tried to have a remote loca-tion session on GW when the instructor was unavailable, the students and the teaching assistants did not succeed in making it work and had to switch the conversation back to Ning , unsurprisingly since the course in the US was primarily run on Ning , which has been described as a ‘one-stop multimedia organizer’ and ‘virtual gathering place’ (Ikumi Hitosugi, 2011, p. 72) due to the fact that it incorporates a number of features such as discussion threads, chats, blogs and Walls (see also Rooks, 2011). Students may not have used GW in part because they lacked specific training in it and they may have resisted GW because it was mandatory in the class. Ning may have been an easier alternative for them due to the lag time typical of GW at times of peak usage.

Nonetheless, in their Q2 answers, students saw the potential of using GW for intercultural learning and Intecultural Competence (ICC) projects (Byram, 1997). Six students listed advantages such as the tool’s synchro-nous function, ‘great tools for online collaborative projects’ and ‘easy for learners to manipulate’ (for a more detailed discussion, see Fuchs, 2011).

Conclusion

Prior research had shown that most participants in this study thought that GW had great potential for ICC (in contrast to Skype or Ning ) due


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to the immediate communication (a trait of rich media) and the fact that students could discuss projects online (Fuchs, 2011). In contrast, the analysis of the data produced showed very limited evidence of social networking (only seven mostly isolated blips that pointed to social networking). Based on these results, we argue that simply integrating a SN tool into course design is not enough to produce social networking, even when students see the possibilities (for example, GW for ICC). The exploitation of social networking must be an explicit part of the instructional design of the course. The question then becomes how to best achieve the desired learning outcomes associated with the use of SN tools.

In the case of language instruction, there is an added layer of complexity to the problem. Not only do we deal with the fact that we use the language to talk about teaching the language. But additionally, ‘we use the media to teach the media ... ’ (Howard, 2012, p. 494). And we seem to neglect the fact that our students may not have native-like proficiency in either. Students need to acquire basic skills relative to the tools they are expected to use in the online learning environment. Students need to be ‘[shown] what a collaborative endeavor entails ... and how they can build their own community of practice’ (Drewelow, 2012, p. 140) in the use of SN tools. Mangenot (2013) stresses that the amount of guidance provided should be appropriate to student needs, which may vary with their familiarity with the social network and its conven-tions, as well as their own level of autonomy. Failure to gain these skills may lead to a ‘frustrating experience’ and ‘cause the learner to drop out from the learning environment’ (Pettenati and Cigognini, 2007, p. 54).

Instructors using SN tools as part of CMC in courses can provide opportunities for students to analyze and apply models through genre analyses as a way to prepare students for autonomous use of the tools provided. Teaching key genres is a way of helping L2 learners gain access to particular professional, academic and occupational communities and ‘[t]here is nothing inherently prescriptive in a genre approach’ (Hyland, 2003, p. 27; see also Mangenot, 2013). Genre-based pedagogies offer students ‘explicit and systematic explanations of the ways language functions in social contexts’ (Hyland, 2003, p. 18). Teachers can ‘guide them [students] towards a conscious understanding of target genres and the ways language creates meanings in context’ (Hyland, 2003, p. 21) by scaffolding students’ learning and using knowledge of language. Or, in John’s words: ‘[W]e are assisting them [students] to enter the world of important discourses and to understand and produce these texts for what they are’ (John, 1995, p. 189). Hyland suggests providing writers with


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an ‘understanding of how texts in target genres are structured and why they are written in the ways they are’ (Hyland, 2003, p. 26). This can be achieved through investigating texts and contexts of target situations, encouraging reflection on writing practices, creating mixed-genre port-folios and modeling, joint negotiation and independent construction.

The notion of students as ‘ethnographers of their disciplines’ and the genre-based portfolio goes back to the 1990s: ‘[a] disciplinary portfolio can now, in general terms, be defined as primarily an analytic tool that allows students to collect and reflect upon the results of their examina-tions of and attempts to produce, the field-specific rhetorical and gram-matical conventions of their chosen discourse communities’ (Hirvela, 1997, p. 89). Main foci of the disciplinary portfolio are ‘the analysis and discussion, through reflection, a disciplinary discourse as well as student production of that discourse’ (Hirvela, 1997, p. 89). But Hirvela also points out that students are not limited to collecting and analyzing in that they can also include their own writing and reflections (cover notes) on discourse common to their disciplinary communities.

As Howard (2012) notes, ‘Learning complex tasks often requires exam-ples of quality products. Examples of essays and reports are common learning objects, but rarely are examples of quality communications or quality online discussions utilised for their pedagogical value’ (Howard, 2012, p. 504). Howard (2012) suggests that the lack of pedagogical atten-tion to CMC products may be because of their perceived informality, but argues that close reading of these outputs can reveal a great deal to learners about the social use of language and how the social relation-ships of participants are constructed.

Seeing CMC productions as collaborative genre(s) may be especially worthwhile. Howard (2012) points to the assumption of single producers as misleading designers regarding the target of instruction and suggests a collaborative perspective as a needed antidote:

By making whole discussions a single example, learners can analyze not only content and discourse, but to what extent full interactions utilize CMC conventions and make clever use of configurations. Contextualized interactions give learners a chance to see responses or tactics they may not have thought of otherwise. (Howard, 2012, p. 505)

Learning the language of an SN tool, then, is learning to be a mean-ingful member of the community of users and an effective collaborator (Mangenot, 2013; Paloff and Pratt, 2005). As Fink (2003) has argued,


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these social and affective learning purposes should be seen as having equal importance to traditional content-oriented learning of subject matter. The gains to be made in Fink’s human dimension of significant learning, including understanding of and empathy for others, may be especially important in language learning and intercultural collabora-tion as supports to motivation to continue to learn (another affective dimension of significant learning).

For the students in this study, the CALICO Wave could have served as such a model of expert performance with GW . A genre-based pedagogy in which students could have dissected the online interactions and/or tried to reconstruct the communication threads on the wave (for example, characteristics of blips, playback function to review the revision history) might have encouraged students to take their use of GW further. More specifically, the comparison and analysis task could have been extended beyond the traditional cross-cultural comparisons and parallel texts in telecollaborative projects (cf. Belz, 2002; Furstenberg et al., 2001). Rather, the two student groups could have shared insights from their Calico Wave experience by conducting a mini-genre analysis. Additionally, students-as-ethnographers could have tracked, reflected on and evaluated their learning process and progress throughout the collaborative task by analyzing their own participation in GW . The reflection could also entail a linguistic analysis of their own and their cross-institutional partners’ writ-ings, which could then feed back into a larger class discussion. This work could then culminate in electronic portfolios where students demonstrate that they are reflective practitioners in the field (Sch ö n, 1983).

The recommendations that we make here are not tied specifically to GW . Most Web 2.0 tools will have a limited lifespan. Like GW , they may fail to generate sufficient initial use to be maintained. Or, they may become obsolete as better tools are produced. The use of genre-based pedagogy that we have advocated here is applicable to the use of any social networking tool in instruction. The reflection and evalu-ation component of such a pedagogy is particularly important from a language teaching point of view for achieving the goal of creating a collaborative community in the classroom. This component ties three of Fink’s (2003) types of learning back into instructional design: the human dimension, caring and learning how to learn. This collabora-tive aspect can then, in turn, help students take ownership of their own learning and empower their agency and autonomy within the course they are taking and beyond.


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Part III

Learning Benefits and Challenges


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137

Introduction

As web 2.0 applications, social network sites (SNS) hold much poten-tial for education in different content areas. However, there is little empirical research on whether or how SNS can be used to facili-tate the learning of a second language (Stevenson and Liu, 2010; Zourou, 2012) even though they could provide an abundance of hitherto unavailable opportunities for second language learning. Understanding learners’ use of and reactions to Web-based learning experiences can provide valuable insights into how technologies can function as teaching and learning tools for language learners. In this study, we examined how university students of English as a Second Language (ESL) use SNS for language learning and their perceptions of these learning experiences.

Theoretical framework

The use of SNS to facilitate social relationships between members can potentially create heretofore unimaginable learning resources (Conole and Alevizou, 2010). Duffy (2011) identified five common features of SNS: a user can (a) create a profile, (b) find peers online, (c) publicly erect or confirm peer connections, (d) collaborate to share content and (e) form online communities (p. 286). boyd and Ellison (2007) stated that

7 A Study of the Use of Social Network Sites for Language Learning by University ESL Students Min Liu , Matthew K. Evans , Elaine Horwitz , Sunjung Lee , Monica McCrory , Jeong-Bin Park and Claire Meadows Parrish


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138 Liu et al.

SNS ‘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 connec-tions and those made by others within the system’ (boyd and Ellison, n.p., in Zourou 2012, § 7). In these networked social spaces, users with different interests are encouraged to improve their individual ability in communicating with others and share their knowledge so everyone in the community can benefit.

The user-centered, participatory and collaborative practices associ-ated with Web 2.0 applications are consistent with the sociocultural understanding of SLA. Influenced by Vygotsky (1978b), sociocultural SLA theory posits that the source of language learning is social inter-action and that learners incrementally internalize socially acquired language, moving from egocentric, cultural ambivalence toward more socialized speech (Piaget, 1932; Lantolf, 2006). In this view, language learning takes place through scaffolded interactions where language learners use the social assistance of more expert language users to incorporate new linguistic features into their developing language competence (Cook, 2008). SNS, designed to allow learners worldwide to exchange ideas, seem to be an ideal platform for scaffolded language interactions. Indeed, many second language researchers contend that SNS have considerable potential for L2 pedagogy (Brick, 2011; McBride, 2009; Reinhardt and Zander, 2011). McBride (2009) suggested that SNS naturally facilitate the development of second language skills and communicative competence and Horwitz (2012) believes that learners can use SNS to find online tools for their personal language learning needs.

Despite much enthusiasm about the potential of SNS, there is little evidence-based research on their use as teaching and learning tools for second language learners (Clark and Gruba, 2010; Stevenson and Liu, 2010; Zourou, 2012) or on whether learners perceive networked experi-ences to be useful. As perceptions can influence learners’ future use of the learning sites, it is important to understand students’ responses to SN sites.

Therefore, this study intended to address these research questions:

When are social network sites for language learning (SNSLL) used as a 1. tool for classroom and off-site language practice and what do univer-sity ESL students think of them and how do they use them? What features of these sites do students find most useful in helping 2. them develop language skills and why?


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A Study of the Use of SNS 139

Method

To address these questions, survey research was employed. A survey, comprised of both Likert scale and open-ended questions, was designed to seek participants’ usage as well as perception of the selected SNSLL.

Participants and research setting

Twenty-one ESL students from 11 countries attending an Intensive English Program in a large public university in the southwestern USA participated in this study in Fall 2011. They ranged in age from 18 to 40. Ten participants were female and eleven were male. Participants were enrolled in three ESL courses: Listening/Speaking – Advanced Level (L&S); Writing – Beginner Level Low (Writing) and Grammar – Beginner Level High (Grammar). (Detailed demographic information is presented in the ‘Results’ section.)

Procedure

boyd and Ellison (2007) discussed the difference between the terms social ‘network’ and ‘network ing ’ and cautioned that network ing implied active relationship initiation while network is a more neutral term. We followed this convention and use ‘network’ in this paper. Given our language learning focus, our selection involved only language learning sites that have SN characteristics as discussed above and excluded generic SNS such as Facebook, Twitter and Ning . This study included the following three steps.

Step 1: selecting SNSLL

Having constructed a list of possible sites from the literature on the topic, we evaluated each potential site using the SN criteria proposed by boyd and Ellison (2007) and Duffy (2011). We eliminated sites that had few or no free materials (for example, Babbel, iTalki ), did not enable user-gen-erated content (for example, Verbling.com ), were only for teachers (for example, CO13 ), had no or limited network possibilities (for example, ESL Caf é , English Central, SharedTalk ), were not specific to language learning (for example, Study Zone, MeetUp ), or had too many advertise-ments (for example English Club ). We also wanted the content of the sites to align well with the learning objectives of the participating ESL classes. This selection process resulted in the choice of three sites : Busuu, Livemocha and English Caf é . These sites are not simply Web 2.0 language learning communities (Zourou, 2012); rather, they offer specific SN features as defined by boyd and Ellison (2007) and Duffy (2011) and summarized in the second paragraph of the chapter.


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140 Liu et al.

Step 2: generating the learning tasks

Guided by our research questions, we created tasks for each of the partic-ipating ESL classes and aligned the tasks with the content topics and language skills the participants were learning when the study took place. In creating the tasks, we took care to include SN features of the sites. For example, one task asked students to network with classmates and another asked them to network with someone in the larger network (see Appendix A).

Step 3: implementing the learning tasks

During Fall 2011, participants in the three ESL courses used the sites over a six-week period and performed the structured learning tasks both in-class and in free exploration outside class.

For each course, an introductory session was offered during which two to three researchers were present, one providing an introduction for this study and the other(s) helping students log in and begin the task as described in a handout. Students were given 40 to 60 minutes to complete in-class tasks and up to 10 days to complete out-of-class tasks. They were also encouraged to explore the sites freely on their own, to build their own networks outside of the class and to chat with anyone, in addition to their classmates, they found online.

Data collection and analyses

Surveys are the primary data source for this study. At the beginning of the study, the participants completed a demographic survey to describe their language learning backgrounds and typical use of the Internet and SNS. At the end of a series of tasks for each site, surveys were distributed to elicit students’ use and perceptions of the site. These surveys contained a mix of general questions regarding each site and specific questions tailored to each assigned task. Survey responses were tallied and organized by demographic categories, sites and tasks. An iterative comparative approach was used in sorting and analyzing the data (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). Findings were organized by emerging themes as guided by the two research questions.

Results

Demographic information

Since some participants were enrolled in more than one course and not all participants responded to all questions, the response rate for


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each question varied. A 5-point Likert scale was used for some ques-tions (1 being low and 5 being high) and average scores are reported (see Table 7.1 ).

Students indicated that on average, they spent about 3 hours per day using the Internet and 2.5 hours per week studying English using the Internet. They had an average of 3.5 years computer experience. Their most frequently visited sites included Facebook, Google, Gmail, YouTube and several country-specific sites. The participants also mentioned Twitter and some country-specific SNS.

Students’ use and perception of three SNSLL

To explore the perceived affordances of SNSLL, the ESL students were given specific tasks to perform both in and outside of class. Each learning task intentionally included the use of one or more SN features from the selected site (see Appendices A and B). The results are organized by the themes that emerged from the data and the findings concerning SN for the three sites are highlighted. Student comments are unedited.

Table 7.1 Participants’ demographic information

Course Age Gender CountryYears of English learning

L&S 20–30 ( n = 5) 31–50 ( n = 1)

Male ( n = 4) Female ( n = 2)

China (2) Japan (1) Kazakhstan (1) Saudi Arabia (1) South Korea (1)

< = 5 ( n = 1) >5 ( n = 5)

Grammar 20–30 ( n = 7) 31–50 ( n = 1)


South Korea (2) Chile (1) Guinea (1) Kazakhstan (1) Mexico (1) Saudi Arabia (1) Thai (1)

< = 5 ( n = 6) >5 ( n = 2)

Writing 20–30 ( n = 8) 31–50 ( n = 3)


Saudi Arabia (3) South Korea (3) Chile (1) Kazakhstan (1) Mexico (1) Thai (1) Venezuela (1)

< = 5 ( n = 8) >5 ( n = 3)

Note : Four students took both the Grammar and the Writing courses.


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142 Liu et al.

Busuu

A total of 21 participants (L&S, n = 14 ; Grammar, n = 7 ) completed the Busuu survey.

Use of Busuu in class: 64 percent of L&S and 71 percent of Grammar participants indicated they made friends other than their classmates on Busuu and 71 percent of L&S and 57 percent of Grammar participants were comfortable making Busuu friends online. These participants viewed Busuu as an opportunity to interact globally with English speakers and learners, commenting: ‘I want to make a lot of friends in all over the world’ and ‘because I love making new friends’. However, 28 percent of the participants offered conflicting responses: 14 percent indicated they had made unknown friends on Busuu , but were not comfortable and 14 percent, though comfortable adding friends, said they had not made any unknown friends and had added only classmates to their networks. A few were hesitant about using SNS: for example, ‘I don’t feel comfortable with being online friends with total strangers. No offense to others, it’s just my opinion about online friends’, or ‘I don’t use social networks in order to make friends’. When adding friends, age was the factor considered most important by the participants in both courses (see Table 7.2 ); country of origin was another crucial factor.

Merely having students connect with others in a network was not the primary goal of this study. Rather, this study sought to encourage students to use SNSLL as a means to communicate with others in order to practice English. Thus, several tasks specifically required participants to conduct a synchronous live chat with classmates, friends they made through the network, or even strangers. The average comfort level for text chat was M L&S = 4, M writing = 3; for audio chat M L&S = 3.21, M writing = 2;

Table 7.2 When adding a friend, what factors did you consider?

AgeCountry of origin Gender

Language learning Name

Profile picture L1 Other

L&S ( n = 14 )

57% 43% 29% 29% 29% 21% 7% 7%

Grammar ( n = 7 )

43% 43% 43% 29% 29% 29% 0% 0%

Total ( n = 21 )

52% 43% 33% 29% 29% 24% 5% 5%

Note : As the participants were allowed to choose as many factors as desired, the total percentages for this question do not add up to 100. This is also the case for Tables 1.7 and 1.10.


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and for video chat M L&S = 2.86, M writing = 2. In general, participants found text chat to be the most comfortable mode. However, the more profi-cient L&S participants were more comfortable than the less proficient Writing participants in all chatting modes.

An important affordance of SNSLL is getting help from others in a networked circle. Participants from the three courses had different expe-riences receiving and giving feedback while chatting: only 14 percent of the advanced proficiency L&S participants reported receiving corrective feedback while 71 percent of the Grammar participants provided feed-back. Moreover, 49 percent of L&S and 57 percent of Grammar partici-pants reported noticing a chatting partner’s English errors and 91 percent of those who noticed the errors pointed out their partner’s mistakes.

Use of Busuu outside class: we encouraged the participants to use Busuu outside of class. Fifty-two percent of the participants indicated that they had used Busuu in their free time, including 38 percent of L&S and 85 percent of Grammar participants. When the participants were asked how long they had used it, most reported using it between 30 minutes to an hour while a few used it more than 60 minutes (see Table 7.3 ).

Table 7.3 How long did you use Busuu/Livemocha/English Caf é over the past week outside class?

0 minute

30 minutes

60 minutes

90 minutes

120 minutes

More than

3 hours

Busuu L&S ( n = 14)

36% 50% 14% 0% 0% 0%

Grammar ( n = 7)

14% 29% 29% 0% 14% 14%

Total ( n = 21)

29% 43% 19% 0% 5% 5%

Livemocha L&S ( n = 9)

44% 33% 11% 11%

Writing ( n = 7)

29% 29% 43% 0%

Total ( n = 16)

38% 31% 25% 6%

English Caf é

Writing ( n = 9)

22% 56% 22% 0%

Grammar ( n = 4)

25% 25% 50% 0%

Total ( n = 13)

23% 46% 31% 0%


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144 Liu et al.

Different types of communication are available in these three sites to connect to others in the network. Busuu offers chat, through text, audio and video, as a means for language learners to communicate with friends or strangers within their network. All participants –especially the Grammar participants—felt comfortable using text, but they were all less comfortable with either audio- or video chat (see Table 7.4 ).

Perception of Busuu : compared to the Grammar participants, L&S participants found the site more helpful ( M L&S = 3.57 v. M grammar = 2.71) and enjoyable ( M L&S = 3.36 v. M grammar = 2). One student, however, expressed mixed feelings about Busuu : ‘It was interesting to talk with other people who I don’t know, but I think there are some problems with people who are available to talk with. I tried more than 10 people to busuutalk, but no one answered. Except for this point, I think Busuu is an interesting website that helps learning English’.

Participants identified a variety of favorite Busuu features. Fifty-seven percent of Grammar participants appreciated the social networking aspect, as reflected in responses such as: ‘easy to make a friends’ and ‘Because you can talk with many people at the same moment and from different place’. L&S participants’ responses addressed various features of the site: ‘because I learned more [grammatical] rules’, ‘this [trans-lator tool] is a very useful tool for chat’ and ‘I might get the feedback from other people that I’ve never met before [using recording tool]’. Participants’ least favorite features included video chatting: ‘I don’t feel comfortable talking with other person who I don’t know’.

Sixty-four percent of L&S participants and 57 percent of Grammar participants said that they would like to use Busuu in the future.

Table 7.4 Outside of class, how did you use Busuu ?

Language content Social networking

Listening exercise

Vocabulary exercise

Grammar exercise

Make friends

Help others learn your L1

Chatting

N/AVideo Audio Text

L&S ( n = 14 )

36% 36% 29% 21% 21% 21% 7% 36% 14%

Grammar ( n = 7 )

14% 29% 29% 14% 0% 0% 86% 57% 0%

Total ( n = 21 )

29% 33% 33% 19% 14% 14% 33% 43% 10%


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Additionally, 86 percent of L&S and 57 percent of Grammar partici-pants reported that they would recommend Busuu to someone learning English. In terms of their future use of Busuu , L&S participants most often selected learning new vocabulary and helping others, but Grammar students indicated they would use the site in the future to practice reading and grammar (see Table 7.5 ).

On the whole, 38 percent of the participants preferred practicing English on Busuu over face-to-face communication (see Table 7.6 ). While 57 percent of Grammar participants preferred face-to-face interaction, only 21 percent of L&S participants selected this option.

Livemocha

A total of 16 participants (L&S n = 9 , Writing n = 7 ) completed the Livemocha survey.

Use of Livemocha in class: 44 percent of L&S and 86 percent of Writing participants reported making friends in addition to their class-mates on Livemocha . Seventy-eight percent of L&S and 100 percent of Writing participants felt comfortable making friends. Consistent with their feelings about Busuu , some L&S participants were hesitant about making friends via a SNS, for example: ‘I don’t usually make friends out of social networks’, or ‘I’m not used to having online friends’ and ‘As I mentioned before, I don’t like being friends with strangers that I’ve never talked or met before’. Whereas 38 percent of Livemocha partici-pants reported conflicting views on adding strangers as online friends, most participants’ expressed a desire to make new friends. Some partici-pants explicitly commented positively on using a SNSLL, for example:

Table 7.5 How will you use Busuu.com in the future?

Language contentSocial

networking

Practicing a skillQuestion

about grammar

Learn new

vocabMake

friends

Help others learn my L1Write Speak Listen Read Fun Other

L&S ( n = 14 )

57% 43% 36% 43% 36% 43% 14% 43% 21% 21%

Grammar ( n = 7 )

71% 14% 29% 57% 57% 29% 43% 29% 14% 0%

Total ( n = 21 )

67% 33% 33% 48% 43% 38% 24% 38% 19% 14%


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146 Liu et al.

‘Because I make friend to practice English’ or ‘It’s nice to make friends who wants to learn Chinese’ and ‘Because is interesting know about other countries’.

When adding friends, practicing/learning language(s) and age were the factors considered most important by participants in both courses, with 52 percent each selecting these factors (see Table 7.7 ). L&S partici-pants also highly valued a potential friend’s country of origin.

Participants in L&S conducted a live chat and posted audio record-ings on Livemocha to get feedback though its SN feature. Unfortunately, only two of them actually received feedback on their audio postings, but both of these participants found the feedback to be helpful. In commu-nicating with others in the network via chatting, L&S participants again


Learning or practicing

language(s) AgeCountry of

originProfile picture Gender Name

L&S ( n = 9 )

43% 50% 50% 21% 21% 21%

Writing ( n = 7 )

71% 57% 43% 57% 43% 43%

Total ( n = 16 )

52% 52% 48% 33% 29% 29%

Table 7.6 Which do you prefer for practicing English?

Using Busuu.com Face-to-face Both

L&S ( n = 14 ) 36% 21% 43%

Grammar ( n = 7 ) 43% 57% 0%Total ( n = 21 ) 38% 33% 29%

Using Livemocha L&S ( n = 9) 33% 44% 33%Writing ( n = 7) 17% 29% 57%Total ( n = 16) 25% 38% 44%

Using English Caf é Writing ( n = 9) 33% 44% 22%Grammar ( n = 4) 75% 0% 25%Total ( n = 13) 46% 31% 23%


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reported higher comfort levels with text only ( M txt = 3.89, M voice = 3.33, M video = 2.44). Participants favorably rated the helpfulness of giving and receiving feedback: M L&S = 3.67, M writing = 3. Forty-four percent of L&S participants reported that their Livemocha chatting partner had explic-itly corrected an error in their L2 production. Additionally, 78 percent of L&S participants reported noticing a chatting partner’s English error, but only 67 percent reported pointing out the error.

Use of Livemocha outside class: 50 percent of the participants indicated that they had used Livemocha in their free time, including 44 percent from the L&S class and 57 percent from the Writing class. Considering both courses together, the most popular features used outside class were vocabulary exercises (38 percent) and adding friends (31 percent) (see Table 7.8 ). Twenty-five percent of the participants, mostly from the Writing class, worked on grammar exercises outside class.

Perception of Livemocha : in general, the participants reported that Livemocha was helpful for improving their English: M L&S = 4, M writing = 4. Nineteen percent of the participants mentioned that they enjoyed the tandem-learning aspect of Livemocha while others commented on the SN features in particular, which allowed them to make ‘friends with people from all over the country’ and ‘make a lot of relations from other country’. One participant was pleased that the site allowed him to share information about his native country with others including strangers in the network.

Responses varied when participants were asked to name their favorite Livemocha feature. One reported enjoying helping other others to learn their native tongue: ‘My favorite part of Livemocha was that I can give feedback to other people. I was surprised that there are a lot of people

Table 7.8 Outside of class, how did you use Livemocha ?


Listening exercises

Vocabulary exercises

Grammar exercises

Making friends

Helping others learn

your L1

Chatting

Video Audio Text N/A

L&S ( n = 9 )

0% 22% 0% 22% 22% 0% 22% 0% 33%

Writing ( n = 7 )

14% 57% 57% 43% 0% 29% 14% 43% 29%

Total ( n = 16 )

6% 38% 25% 31% 13% 13% 19% 19% 13%


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Table 7.9 If yes, how will you use Livemocha in the future?


Practice writing

Practice speaking

Practice listening

Practice reading

Grammar questions

Learn new vocabulary

Making friends

Help others

learn my L1 Entertainment Other None

L&S ( n = 9 )

22% 33% 22% 11% 0% 11% 22% 56% 22% 11% 11%

Writing ( n = 7 )

43% 43% 43% 57% 71% 71% 57% 43% 29% 0% 0%

Total ( n = 16 )

31% 38% 31% 31% 31% 38% 38% 50% 25% 6% 6%


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who are interested in my language’. When asked for their least favorite feature of Livemocha , one participant lamented that she did not receive any feedback on her audio recording: ‘Since I didn’t get any feedback from no one, it was disappointing’.

When asked if they would use the site in the future, all the partici-pants in Writing and 67 percent of the L&S class responded positively. Eighty-eight percent of the participants said that they would recom-mend Livemocha to someone learning English and 50 percent indicated that they would return to the site in the future to help others learn their native language (see Table 7.9 ). Interestingly, details of future use differed between participants in the two courses, possibly reflecting the different content focus of the courses.

In terms of learning preferences, 38 percent preferred practicing English face-to-face and 25 percent preferred practicing via Livemocha (see Table 7.6 ). However, 44 percent of the participants indicated that they liked both modes of practice equally. There were variations in responses between the two courses, with L&S participants preferring face-to-face practice and Writing participants expressing a preference for both.

English Caf é 1

A total of 13 participants (Writing n = 9 , Grammar n = 4 ) completed the English Caf é survey.

Use of English Caf é in class: 33 percent of Writing and 50 percent of Grammar participants responded that they made friends on English Caf é in addition to their classmates and 44 percent of Writing and 75 percent of Grammar participants were comfortable making friends using English Caf é . Similarly to the use of the other two sites, partici-pants had inconsistent responses about making friends: 31 percent who only made friends with classmates felt comfortable, while 15 percent who had made unknown friends felt uncomfortable. Fifty percent of positive comments on adding friends focused on the utility of the site, with one student commenting directly on the SN aspect: ‘I think I can find some people if I have question about English’. Of the 31 percent of participants who expressed reluctance in adding friends, only one participant admitted hesitance to engage with the SN aspect of the site. When adding friends, learning or practicing languages was the most common factor to consider (77 percent), as shown in Table 7.10 .

Finally, the participants indicated that they were neutral or slightly uncomfortable with posting comments on other users’ content on English Caf é : M writing = 2.67, M writing = 3.


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150 Liu et al.

Use of English Caf é outside class: only 11 percent of Writing and 25 percent of Grammar participants indicated that they used English Caf é outside class. Of those who did use the site for extracurricular purposes, 77 percent of participants spent at least 30 minutes using the site outside of class (see Table 7.3 ).

Sixty-two percent of participants reported that they recorded and posted or reviewed a video during their free time, making this the most popular of the SN features (see Table 7.11 ). Additionally, 62 percent used English Caf é to do grammar exercises outside class.

Perception of English Caf é : participants reported that English Caf é was useful for improving their English: M writing = 3.5, M grammar = 3.33. Their favorite features of English Caf é were similar across both courses: 38 percent mentioned the class video feature, citing the usefulness of this feature and their level of enjoyment. Comments included exam-ples such as: ‘many pictures and videos. They are very useful to me’, or ‘Classes’ video. Because they are very useful to learn more English’ and ‘video, more fun’. In contrast, participants’ least favorite features were less clear. Thirty-one percent reported not having a least favorite feature and another 23 percent offered ambiguous responses such as ‘I don’t know’. One participant reported discomfort with the SN feature of adding online friends to the profile.

Seventy-eight percent of Writing and 50 percent of Grammar partici-pants indicated that they would like to use English Caf é in the future. In terms of specific purposes, 62 percent indicated that they would return to find help with grammar-related questions, while 54 percent chose writing practice (see Table 7.12 ).

In terms of learning preferences, 46 percent of all participants preferred practicing English via English Caf é as compared with 31 percent who preferred face-to-face practice (see Table 7.6 ). Seventy-five percent of the


Learning or practicing

language(s)Profile picture Age Sex Name

Country of origin Other

Writing ( n = 9 )

78% 44% 33% 33% 33% 22% 0%

Grammar ( n = 4 )

100% 25% 50% 50% 25% 50% 25%

Total ( n = 13 )

77% 38% 38% 38% 31% 31% 8%


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Grammar participants preferred to use English Caf é , whereas 44 percent of the Writing participants preferred face-to-face communication.

Overall, 67 percent of Writing and 75 percent of Grammar partici-pants reported that they would recommend English Caf é to someone learning English. When asked for final comments regarding English Cafe , most participants offered positive responses, describing the site as ‘useful for people learning English’. Only 15 percent of the responses were negative.

Table 7.11 Outside of class, how did you use English Caf é ?


Grammar exercise

Vocab. exercise

Listening exercise

Record or

review a video

Help others learn your L1

Comment on others’

posts Forum

discussion Make

friends

Writing ( n = 9 )

56% 22% 22% 78% 0% 11% 11% 0%

Grammar ( n = 4 )

75% 25% 25% 25% 25% 0% 0% 25%

Total ( n = 13 )

62% 23% 23% 62% 8% 8% 8% 8%

Table 7.12 If yes, how will you use English Caf é in the future?

Language contentSocial

networking Fun

Questions about

grammar

Practicing a skillLearn new

vocabMake

friends

Help others learn my L1Write Read Listen Speak

Writing (n = 9)

67% 44% 44% 44% 44% 22% 22% 33% 11%

Grammar (n = 4)

50% 75% 50% 25% 25% 25% 25% 25% 25%

Total (n = 13)

62% 54% 46% 38% 38% 15% 23% 31% 15%


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Discussion

SNSLL reflect the social, personalized, interactive and participatory nature central to the Web 2.0 technology. Two main affordances of SNSLL are to enable users to connect to others, either someone they know or strangers and to encourage learner autonomy and collaboration in a digital social space so that users with different abilities and skills can serve as the knowledgeable other in building a distributed knowledge base for meeting their language needs. We were particularly interested in determining what ESL students thought when they were asked to perform purposeful learning tasks on SNSLL. We wanted to explore how such sites could be used as teaching and learning tools both in formal and informal language learning contexts.

Because our goal was to examine the extent to which SNSLL can facilitate the learning of English, each learning task was intention-ally created for students to perform using SN features offered by the selected sites. It is, therefore, important to point out that the design of this study introduces a specific learning context where both pre-assigned closed as well as open-ended tasks were included in formal instruction. In addition, completely free exploration was encouraged outside of class.

Overall the participants reported positive experiences interacting with peers via SNSLL, although some were less positive. The results revealed several factors played important roles in participant satisfaction with their networking experiences in the social spaces provided by the three sites: overall comfort level, language proficiency levels, preferred communication modes for connecting with others and the design of the sites.

Comfort using SNSLL

Although there was some variation, in general, two-thirds of the participants made friends and reported feeling comfortable making friends using these SNSLL. This finding is consistent with research by Lloyd (2012). However, about one-third of the participants had mixed views about making friends through SNSLL: they were reluctant to make friends with strangers, but were comfortable making friends with a classmate or someone they knew. This finding does not appear to be site-specific and is consistent with previous findings (Brick, 2011; Harrison and Thomas, 2009). When participants were considering adding a friend to their circle, finding people who are similar in age and country of origin were important factors. Given these results, when


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designing classroom activities, instructors who wish to incorporate SNSLL may want to pay particular attention to students’ comfort level in using such tools and encourage them to begin with their classmates, then move to a circle of friends in their age group before reaching out to complete strangers.

The positive feedback provided by the participants about their expe-riences using the three sites highlights the affordances of using SN features to connect to native or other target-language speakers to form a learning community and practice language skills in an authentic setting. Participants particularly valued language practice opportu-nities provided by the sites. These findings indicate that the partici-pants were receptive to SNSLL as tools for language learning (Forlano, 2009).

Communication modes preferred in connecting with others

A fundamental aspect of SNSLL is that they allow people to extend their physical circles that make it possible for language learners to practice their new skills in authentic interactions with friends or stran-gers. Networks, for example, can provide opportunities for language learners to chat with and receive feedback from others. The three SNSLL in this study provide a variety of means for communication including email, forums and chat (text, audio and video). Although chatting by itself is not a SN feature, Web 2.0 applications which include SNSLL are inextricably connected and most Web 2.0 applications are used in combination to achieve a particular language learning goal. In this case, ESL students connected to others in their circle via SNSLL and practiced English skills via chat. Of the three chatting modes available on these sites, participants were most comfortable with the text mode, as also shown in Lloyd (2012) and least comfortable with video, espe-cially when connecting with strangers. Although some participants were comfortable sharing photos and videos, they were reluctant to connect to strangers using video in real-time. Responses also showed that those with higher proficiency levels were more comfortable than novice participants in all modes. The reluctance to use video to connect with others indicated the challenge of connecting to unfamiliar people through SNSLL and suggests that instructors need to consider learners’ preferences when incorporating SNSLL as teaching tools. Website designers should consider making a variety of communication modes available to facilitate language instruction, and think about delivering content using multimedia, to help learners who have different prefer-ences for their learning mode.


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154 Liu et al.

Influence of language proficiency level

Content topics and proficiency level also appeared to influence the participants’ use of the sites. Participants’ use of the sites outside the class varied according to proficiency level: Lower-proficiency partici-pants spent more time practicing their English than the advanced-level students. Not surprisingly, they all tended to look for activities related to the specific class content they were studying such as listening or grammar. All participants intended to return to the sites in the future to practice their English skills. This finding indicates the potential of using SN tools for language learning outside the classroom, especially for beginners. Most language learners visit sites such as the ones studied here to improve their language skills. SNSLL can help them connect with fellow learners of more expertise beyond their immediate circles. In developing language learning sites, designers’ primary goals should be to create interactive and useful language learning activities, but Web 2.0 tools can also offer language learners significant new opportunities for language interaction.

Importance of receiving feedback

Consistent with a sociocultural view of SLA, receiving feedback from others, especially more proficient speakers, is a very important affordance that SNSLL can provide (Brick, 2011). Participants had particularly favorable perceptions toward the sites when they received feedback. However, actually receiving feedback is challenging since network participants are not obligated to respond to others (Jee and Park, 2009). Herein lies an important challenge of using SNSLL. Many participants reported that they did not receive feedback and the quality of feedback responses varied among the three sites. While chatting on Busuu , Grammar participants received more explicit correction on accuracy than L&S participants. Grammar participants also noticed a chatting partner’s error slightly more often than those in the L&S course, but all participants perceived feedback to be very useful. Reciprocal feedback (Schmidt, 2010), when it occurs, illus-trates the benefits of SNSLL as a tool in mediating language develop-ment (Harrison and Thomas, 2009). The lack of feedback, however, can negatively influence users’ perception of a site and interest in its future use. Therefore, when instructors consider using SNSLL in their classrooms, they themselves need to be diligent in providing feedback and encourage students to provide peer support when the


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online feedback is lacking. As shown in this study, feedback is espe-cially important for those who are less comfortable or do not see the potential value of SNSLL.

Design features

All three sites allowed participants to make friends and collaborate with other users. However, the participants’ responses showed differ-ences based on the site designs. For instance, Livemocha and Busuu have embedded chat features, whereas English Caf é does not. Busuu users are free to personalize their learning by choosing the order in which they complete each lesson, whereas Livemocha users have to follow a more linear track from one lesson to the next lesson, making the learner less autonomous and learning less personalized (De Wever et al., 2007; Solomon and Schrum, 2007). In contrast, English Caf é does not provide its own lessons, but rather is a space for users to post their lessons for learners, thus relying on user-generated content (Duffy, 2011). Regarding participants’ expected future uses of the sites: Busuu was chosen for future writing and reading practice, Livemocha for building SN for language learning purposes as well as to practice speaking English and learn new vocabulary and English Caf é was chosen for grammar ques-tions and to practice writing and reading. Such findings revealed that although the learners may be intrigued by new technology tools, their ultimate purpose for using these sites is to practice language skills, not just socialize.

So we end with a question about SNSLL: which design features actu-ally facilitate language learning? A possible direction for future research would be usability studies on site-specific features to determine which design features are most accessible or useful for language learners.

Conclusion

We examined university ESL students’ use and perception of three popular SNSLL. The findings demonstrated a number of benefits that they can offer to extend learning beyond classrooms and into online language learning communities. The results also found important chal-lenges associated with the use of SNSLL. When incorporating such sites as teaching and learning tools, instructors need to be aware of their limi-tations and take measures to provide support in order for learners to develop their language proficiency.


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Appendix B Screen captures of social network features available in the selected sites

Busuu Listening & Speaking: Students identified a topic of interest, listened to a brief audio recording and recorded the sentences on the website for feedback.

insert image1.jpg here

Livemocha Speaking: After practicing pronunciation and reviewing other members’ submissions, students recorded a speech, then submitted this audio to the website for feedback.


English Caf é Writing: Students joined a group called ‘World Culture’ and shared their culture with friends from different countries by describing pictures they had posted.


Note

1 . This study was completed in Fall 2011 and the English Caf é site was closed in Spring 2012, after the study was completed.


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158

Introduction

The present generation of students resides in a technological world. With the explosion of information technologies, students nowadays interact on digital devices while educators strive to optimize technol-ogy’s possibilities for learning. Educators face new challenges to design motivating yet relevant courses that take the distinctive characteristics of today’s students into consideration (Skiba and Barton, 2006).

In language education, there has been optimism that technologies could supplement and enhance learning and teaching despite reports of misunderstandings rooted in the broader sociocultural contexts (Kramsch and Thorne, 2002; O’Dowd, 2003, 2005; Ware, 2005). More specifically, it is believed (van Compernolle and Williams, 2009) that the use of technology could potentially contribute to intercultural competence, sociolinguistic and pragmatic development and linguistic accuracy. The participatory features of Web 2.0 technologies may lead to active participant-driven networks of social communication and collab-oration conducive to the development of new online literacy, self-found online identity and interpersonal relationships (Guth and Helm, 2010).

To take advantage of the possibilities Web technology provides, a yearlong telecollaborative project, Beyond these Walls , was implemented. University students in Taiwan and France were linked to study English through intercultural learning via a sequence of joint tasks created by

8 Online and Offsite: Student-Driven Development of the Taiwan–France Telecollaborative Project Beyond These Walls Meei-Ling Liaw and Kathryn English


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Online and Offsite 159

the researchers 1 and hosted on a project website (hereafter referred to as the ‘official’ site). The tasks were designed with the consideration that an awareness of one’s own plural identities is an important part of intercul-tural competence and one that students should be offered opportunities to deal with and develop (Dervin, 2006, 2007, 2010). The official website was initially designed for the students to observe, comment upon and validate shared intercultural and language learning experience. However, as the project developed and as interaction among participants intensi-fied, students initiated their own Facebook group to conduct exchanges on subjects of their own choosing at their own pace.

In this chapter, we track the transition from communication on the project website to the students’ social networking site (hereafter referred to as the ‘unofficial’ site) and we describe student production in both contexts. We first present the qualitative and quantitative analyses of student data on the official and unofficial sites. We then examine their writings in both spaces to understand the interactional and interper-sonal dynamics that occurred in the two mediation contexts. We use Halliday’s (1978) social semiotic perspectives to examine how students constructed and construed meaning, presented themselves and devel-oped their relationships. We then comment upon the changes in our students’ language socializations in the two contexts and their ensuing effects. Finally, based on the findings of this study, we discuss the risks and rewards of incorporating informal learning into formal study envi-ronments using social networking tools.

Literature review

Telecollaboration and interpersonal relationship building

Studies have revealed that telecollaboration tends to foster interpersonal relationship building and promote participants’ self-image as speakers of the target language once they are able to self-regulate during commu-nication in the target language (Carter, 2010; Thorne, 2003). In addi-tion, those engaged in such activities may demonstrate hyperpersonal behavior, that is, greater levels of closeness within a group or dyad than would similar groups or dyads interacting face-to-face (Walther, 2007, 1996). For example, in a case study examining the interaction between university students in the USA and in France, Thorne (2003, p. 54) found that the ‘elusive, allusive world of hyperpersonal communication’ might have provided a powerful affordance for communicative activity that had drawn much of students’ ‘energy from muted but obvious flirtation’ (p. 54). In the Virtual Harlem Project, Carter (2010) used Second Life as


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160 Meei-Ling Liaw and Kathryn English

an environment for US students to interact with Swedish English as a Second Language students as well as students in France. Sustained inter-action that would not typically have occurred in traditional classroom settings was reported.

While observing interpersonal relationship building in telecollabora-tion, the important roles of mediational tools and their cultural historical resonance in the communication process have also been noted. In case studies reported by Thorne (2003), the participants experienced mutu-ally satisfying interpersonal engagement as part of a formal learning process. They attained intercultural partnership maturity after their communication migrated from the academy (the course used email and NetMeeting sessions) to another communicative medium, instant messaging (IM). It was found that moving from email to IM was more than just changing communicational tools; it actually involved shifting from prescribed assignments to building interpersonal relationships. This change boosted participants’ self-image as target-language speakers and confirmed the relationship. This finding suggests that online, inter-cultural exchanges, mediated by different tools, can create semiotic transformation and various levels of interpersonal interactions. Further, as online interaction expands and mediational means emerge, a greater understanding of the relationships among mediational means, genres of communication and forms of communicative practice can help educa-tors and learners select the right tools for designing effective activities and communication.

Language socialization in informal contexts

Beyond observing different attitudes towards learning, how students socialize to learn in formal versus informal settings also deserves further discussion and research. Sykes, Oskoz and Thorne (2008) postulate that online social networking fuels foreign- and second language learning by providing meaningful contacts beyond the formal learning contexts and adds real-world relevance to classroom instruction. Downes (2005) also points out that many students prefer greater autonomy, connec-tivity and socioexperiential learning and Internet-mediated commu-nication could provide personal learning environments (PLE) with multiple socialization levels to promote communities of inquiry. The use of Web resources in non-traditional spaces and of traditional versus non-traditional settings, is increasingly discussed as learning focuses on ownership, contexts, personalization and meaningful tasks. Formal learning usually involves prescribed frameworks or schedules, speci-fied tasks facilitated by teachers and formal accreditation or assessment


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based upon external specifications (Eraut, 2000). In contrast, informal learning is owned and directed by learners through independent study using non-institutional technologies and it usually takes place away from formal, educational contexts. Hall (2009) suggests that formal and informal learning should be connected as learning is most effective when the learner engages in both types of activities. Dabbagh and Kitsantas (2012) posit that a PLE is promising for integrating formal and informal learning using social media. Nevertheless, opportunities for language and intercultural learning in informal contexts have yet to be explored. Lamy (2011) and Lamy (in press) conducted studies of learners using informal institutional websites and their own created social networking groups for informal discussions. The former study looked for evidence of differences in L2 use and found more formal language on the insti-tutional site. In the later study the focus was on networking for study purposes and it found more evidence of this on the institutional site. More work needs to be done to see what might have affected students’ language and technology choices in these two informal contexts. A solid understanding of how language socialization works to facilitate learning in these different contexts would help language educators make sound pedagogical decisions towards achieving a balanced approach for their students (Basharina, 2007).

Social semiotic views of language and intercultural development on social networks

To be accepted into a partnership or community, specific language usage and online behavior may be necessary. Negotiation and presentation of self is a likely requirement for relationship building and accultura-tion. To understand how foreign-language learners socialize in both formal and informal online communities, the social semiotic perspec-tive of language development may ‘explain the powers of conversation’ (Halliday, 1987, p. 170) in social contexts involving different cultures and languages.

From a social semiotic perspective, language is not merely a carrier of meaning but a system of meaning involving multiple semantic choices embedded in the social contexts when language is deployed (Halliday, 1987). In other words, language is for speakers in a given context to participate, assume roles and convey wishes, feelings, attitudes and judgments. Viewing intercultural communication from a social semi-otic perspective where both textuality and context define the mediating process would allow us to examine how meaning is constructed with respect to attitudes toward learning, cultures-of-use and context.


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Exploring text within social context drives the focus towards function in systemic functional linguistics (SFL). According to Halliday (1987), the semiotic structure of a situation is formed by three social semiotic variables: field, tenor and mode. Field refers to what people talk about; the topics and actions which language describes. Tenor is who is doing the talking; language users, their relationship to one another and their purpose. Mode refers to how communication takes place; the channel through which communication occurs. Field, tenor and mode act collec-tively as determinants of a text because they specify register and system-atically associate linguistic structure with the functional components of semantics. We agree with Chapelle (1998) that these three contextual variables would help researchers gain insights into relevant contextual variables in formal and informal online intercultural interaction. SFL is used in this chapter as an explanatory model to understand the specific linguistic characteristics of student writings (Halliday and Hasan, 1989).

In summary, Internet-mediated intercultural interaction challenges traditional understandings of communication and interaction. Online social formations may be of great significance to participants and denote social dynamics which create partnerships and community rules of online cultures (Lantolf and Thorne, 2006). In addition to attitudes, participants’ perceived ownership of communication and levels of comfort in the socialization process may play significant roles in inter-personal relationship building and consequently in the success of inter-cultural communication and subsequent language development. As the quantity and variety of online communication activities expand and intercultural contacts escape institutional settings, we should learn more about language socialization in different contexts and the conversations that take place in them. Therefore, we chose social semiotic analysis to frame how the participants in this study constructed meaning and built interpersonal relationships in both formal and informal computer-mediated, intercultural communication contexts that eventually led to a different dynamics.

Research Method

Context of the study

In the Taiwan–France telecollaborative project, entitled Beyond These Walls , the researchers created and hosted a series of joint tasks on an official project website in Taiwan (Taiwan-France, 2011) The French


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students (n = 18) in this project were either engineering or management students and the students in Taiwan (n = 48) were English majors. The project was centered on developing intercultural communication skills as well as learning English via asynchronous text, graphic and audio/video exchanges. Because the students had different majors, the instruc-tors designed tasks that would provide a convergence of interest to foster the synergy necessary for sustainable intercultural communication, as reflected in Dervin (2007, p. 32), who observes that ‘the complexity and internal plurality of each individual’ are important in the intercultural approach. The tasks included a) a self-introduction activity in which the participants each described two objects that were of personal signifi-cance in their past and present and one object that would be impor-tant in their future, b) a phase when students formed groups of four to five members to select and present culturally meaningful works of art to their intercultural partners. For each task, the students of both sides could post their selected formats of presentation (for example, texts, images, audios, or videos) to the project website. Online forums were available for the students to comment on postings. Although not a formal project requirement, students were encouraged to submit reac-tions based on postings. In addition, as contacts among participants progressed, the students initiated and built their own social networking site, parallel to the official site, to discuss and arrange ‘real’ exchanges (that is, visiting each other) without the monitoring of their instruc-tors. 2 Eventually three Taiwanese students visited their French partners in Paris and eleven French students visited Taiwan.

Data collection and analysis

This study relies on the social semiotic perspective to provide an explan-atory framework for the dynamics of intercultural interaction between participants from Taiwan and France. The data were texts that partici-pants had posted on the ‘official’ website of the project and on the unof-ficial Facebook site, initiated by students. Although the Facebook group is still being used, only the texts posted during the implementation of this project were analyzed.

SFL was chosen as the analysis framework because of its focus on both text and context in the meaning-making processes. The three general concepts of field, mode and tenor (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004), which refer to the ideational, organizational and interpersonal metafunctions of language, were used to represent the semiotic struc-tures of intercultural communication (Halliday, 1978).


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The Practical Guide for Functional Text Analysis was consulted when analyzing the text (M ě chura, 2005). First, data analysis began by iden-tifying what texts were about (field) and the most frequently appearing lexical items as high-frequency words are generally considered indicative of the experiential/ideational domain of the text. Next, the mode of the texts was analyzed focusing on interactivity and spontaneity. The typical techniques to make the audience feel involved (for example, apparently direct address to the audience, use of rhetorical questions, responses to an imagined contribution from the audience or from another speaker/writer and so on) were noted as indicators of interactivity. Spontaneity refers to when the text seems to have been produced in real time and without an opportunity to edit or correct it. Lexical density 3 and readability 4 were observed for spontaneity. Lastly, the interpersonal metafunctions of the text (tenor) were investigated with the aim of finding out how the partic-ipants presented themselves and how they expected others to respond and to illuminate the relationship between the participants. Features considered indicative of the tenor of the text included turn-taking, use of first names or titles, speech functions (for example, expressive, direc-tive, referential and so on) and lexical choices that showed closeness, solidarity, degrees of politeness, or distance.

Open-access text-analysis software ( Textalyser , 2004) was used to give general summaries of the statistics (including tokens, types, complexity factors, sentence lengths, readability, high-frequency words and so on). The data analysis procedure followed an inductive approach in which findings were derived from examinations of raw data (Thomas, 2006). The textual documents posted in the official and unofficial sites were iteratively read by the first author and a research assistant to identify the most salient features from the SFL perspective. These features and exam-ples were then further discussed by both authors for conceptualization of broad themes and interpretations.

Before going on to the results of our SFL readings, we summarize find-ings from the quantitative analysis.

Findings and discussion

Quantitative findings from texts

All of the students posted self-introduction documents on the offi-cial website and had the option to post comments on the self-intro-ductions, although none did. On average, French students provided more information about themselves than Taiwanese students (Lexical density of self-introductions: French students 39 percent, Taiwanese students 20.7 percent). The texts they wrote were of similar readability


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levels (Gunning-Fog Index of self-introduction: French students: 6.6, Taiwanese students: 6.4).

In addition to self-introductions, participants posted introductions to works of art that they considered most representative of their coun-tries and cultures. French students eventually selected five works and posted presentations for their Taiwanese partners to read and comment on. The Taiwanese students chose works representing eight types of art and posted descriptions on the official website. The French students did not post comments regarding the Taiwanese works. 5 Taiwanese students posted a total of 36 comments on the French works. Lexical density results show that information regarding French art written by French students was 60.8 percent, higher than the lexical density of the Taiwanese students’ presentations of art (49.9 percent). The Taiwanese students’ writing had slightly easier readability than that of their French counterparts (Taiwanese readability: 7.3, French readability: 8.1). The Taiwanese students’ responses to French students’ postings on French works of art had the lowest lexical density (36.3 percent) and readability (6.0) of the three types of texts related to the art introduction activity. Table 8.1 summarizes these observations.

Table 8.1 Textalyser output of students’ postings on the official project website

French students’ self-introductions

(n = 18)

Taiwanese students’ self-introductions

(n = 48)

French student postings

of art

Taiwanese students’ response to French postings

of art

Taiwanese students’ postings

of art

Total word count (Token)

3214 11054 610 2878 2290

Number of different words (Type)

1254 2291 371 1044 1142

Complexity factor (Lexical Density)

39% 20.7% 60.8% 36.3% 49.9%

Readability (Gunning-Fog Index)*

6.6 6.4 8.1 6 7.3

Average syllables per word

1.59 1.54 1.68 1.61 1.68

Sentence count 420 1440 77 480 411Average sentence

length (words)12.92 13.04 14.66 11.08 12.18

*6-easy 20-hard


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An examination of the Textalyser output of the students’ postings on the official project website suggested that different writing tasks resulted in different types of performance. In the self-introductions, both groups of students used fewer content words than in the introductions to the works of art. The words used in self-introductions also had fewer sylla-bles than the introductions to the works of art. The readability of self-introductions was also higher than the introductions to the works of art. Low lexical complexity, high readability and short sentences are not only characteristics of verbal communications but also possible indications of the participants’ strategy to solicit responses from other participants by making their postings as easy to understand as possible. For some reason, at this stage, none of them initiated comments about others’ self-introductory postings. Interaction came later when introductions to the works of art were posted. Nevertheless, the absence of comments should not be taken as an indication that no interaction took place. It may be that some (or many) participants read the self-introductions, but chose to remain silent. If so, this seemingly passive ‘silent period’ might have been important in terms of deepening the understanding of indi-vidual identity (Dervin, 2010, p. 166) and we may hypothesize that it served as a prelude for the later sustained networking activity observed.

It was not until the second task, presenting works of art, that the participants began to interact with written comments. Some Taiwanese students started to comment on the French students’ selected works. In their responses the Taiwanese students’ data presents higher lexical density, readability and average syllables per word, as well as longer sentences than the way in which they wrote the introductions to the Taiwanese works of art.

In the Facebook group, the participants posted 134 messages (86 by Taiwanese students, 48 by French students). The total number of comments on first-in-thread posts was 563 (Taiwanese participants commented 280 times, whereas French students commented 283 times).

In addition to writing comments, the participants also used the Like 6 button to participate in the Facebook interaction. The total number of Likes was 690 (Taiwanese participants’ Likes occurred 449 times and French students’ 141 times). Table 8.2 summarizes the statistical output of the Facebook postings by the participants.

The Facebook postings are clearly different from the official website postings in terms of lexical density, readability and average sentence length. The lexical density of Facebook postings was lower, readability was higher and average sentence length shorter than those of the official website postings.


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SFL analysis of participants’ postings

The texts participants posted online will be discussed below according to the SFL framework describing field, mode and tenor. In each of these three sections, observations about postings to the official site will be set against postings to the Facebook site.

Field

Participants’ postings on the official website provided introductions and presentations of art representing their respective cultures. The self-in-troduction activity required participants to select and post descriptions of three objects meaningful to them in their past, present and future lives. An analysis of the postings by the French students revealed that objects from their past were mostly childhood toys (for example, teddy bears) and old photos, gifts from parents or good friends (for example, a bracelet), souvenirs from memorable trips (for example, a ticket stub) and so on. The objects meaningful in their present lives included inspiring messages from books and gifts from family. Electronic devices (for example, a computer, a camera) were also considered most impor-tant at their present stage of life. What they considered most important to their future lives were items related to career and financial success (for example, a car, a flat) and global experience (for example, a world map). The Taiwanese students’ most frequently mentioned objects from their past were childhood toys (for example, dolls, Legos) and items related to their high school lives (for example, a uniform, a report card, an award certificate). Electronic devices (for example, a computer, a cell phone), gifts from parents or friends (for example, a necklace, a watch, a bracelet) and appointment books were considered essential at their present stage in life. The objects they considered meaningful for their future suggested aspirations for active lifestyles (for example, a schedule book, a camera and a world map) and financial success (for example, a

Table 8.2 Summary of Facebook data

Total word count (Token) 2645

Number of different words (Type) 950Complexity factor (Lexical Density) 35.9%Readability (Gunning-Fog Index) : ( 6-easy 20-hard) 4.8Average Syllables per Word 1.51Sentence count 460Average sentence length (words) 9.49Readability (Alternative) beta : ( 100-easy 20-hard, optimal 60–70) 69.4


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bankbook, money, a car, an ATM card). The following are excerpts from the participants’ self-introductions. Figure 8.1 is an example of students’ self-introductions:

Analysis of the field of self-introductory texts showed recurring topics for both French and Taiwanese students. Family and friends played important roles for both groups. Students identified themselves with family members and school while striving to become independent. They looked forward to being members of the global community. After examining the most frequently used adjectives in the texts, we found that they were all positive, such as best, good, beautiful, important and so on, perhaps demonstrating general optimism.

As for culturally significant works of art, the French students selected and described the following items: a) the painting Prise de la Bastille by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel, b) the impressionist painting Bal du Moulin de la Galette by Auguste Renoir and c) the video Homo Modernus. 7 The works of art selected by Taiwanese students were a) the Taiwanese opera, b) Eight Generals, 8 c) Taiwanese puppetry, d) the performance of aborigine sacred songs, e) Cloud Gate Dance Group, 9 f) aborigine tattoos and g) the performance of techno music of Prince Nezha. 10 While the works selected by French students were masterpieces by individual artists,

The first object I have chosen concerns ballet: thereare my ballet shoes They represent my past becauseI danced a lot when I was younger I kept my first ballet shoes; I have had since I was 11 years old Infact I would like to be professional dancer I practiceddance from 5 to 17 years old I have got a diploma inorder to teach dance.

The second object is my watch It represents a goodtime I spent during an internship in 2009. My colleaguesknew I had no watch because I looked at my mobilephone to see the time. That’s why they decided to giveme this object. I like it because it corresponds to mystyle and it symbolizes for me a good period in this firm.It was my first internship in new technologies and Ilearned different things about work, relationships andmyself.

The thrid object is a map of the world. I haven’ttraveled a lot yet but I am really decided to do itwhen I can I would like to go to Italy and to Hollandthis year, and maybe somewhere else if I can Butafter that, I would like to go to Canada, Ausrtalia,South America and to the north of Europe. In fact Iwould like to go everywhere! This map representsfreedom and some projects for me.

Figure 8.1 Example of student’s self-introduction


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the works selected by Taiwanese students were collective performing arts and most of them traditional or folk arts that have been passed down for generations. The high-frequency content words that occurred in the texts also revealed differences. The following are excerpts of students’ introductions to culturally significant works of art:

I’ve always thought that art was a different way to express one’s idea or vision of the world. In my opinion, the value of a work was slightly linked to the idea behind. A Picasso or a Monet can only be appreci-ated if the artist’s vision was just outstanding or completely revolu-tionary. No matter the technique or the colors used, a masterpiece has to transcend all the material ways of expression to whisper to the viewer a kind of a secret creating thus a magic link between them. (AAA, French student)

Taiwanese Opera, pronounced ‘Gua-A-Hi’ in Taiwanese, is the only indigenous form of performing arts in Taiwan since the early 20th century. Taiwanese Opera evolved from a simple musical expression by chanting the lyrics into performing arts which adopted various forms of folk music and dramatic elements, as well as combined with overseas performing art such as ‘Beijing Opera’. There are many distinguished features in Taiwanese Opera. (BBB, Taiwanese student)

In our comparison of fields reflected in the postings by Taiwanese and French participants regarding works of art, we found there was an effort by Taiwanese students to convey a sense of unity, an individual integrated into the sociocultural network while French art expressed creativity and personal aspiration. The two groups perceived the idea of culture differ-ently. It would appear that the French students understood art with a capital ‘A’ – as in formal art, whereas the Taiwanese students’ concept of art (which we might spell with a lowercase ‘a’) was more of a social one.

The field, as reflected by lexical choices in the postings on the offi-cial website, denoted participants’ individual and collective identities and world experience. The texts constructed images of life experience, dreams, world views and how they saw themselves. At the same time, it seems that they tried to make readers aware of their values and cultures through the texts they constructed. Nevertheless, communication may have taken place, as the absence of overt responses cannot be taken as a sign of low engagement.

The field of the Facebook postings revealed participants’ ‘cultures-of-use (Thorne, 2003)’. In contrast with instructor-prescribed writings


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on the official website, the unofficial group was initiated by the French students to communicate among themselves and discuss hosting plans for their Taiwanese visitors. They later invited the Taiwanese students who were planning to go to Paris to join the group. Eventually all the Taiwanese students joined to write about travel and social plans At this point, the official project website was no longer solicited for communi-cation. The students had moved beyond the instructor-built ‘walls’ and constructed an environment where they apparently felt more comfort-able to communicate on the tasks at hand.

The topics on the unofficial Facebook group were mostly related to the administrative tasks for visits (flight schedules, hosting plans, meeting places, safety reminders and so on) and affectionate private jokes. The field of the Facebook texts was clearly social instead of academic.

Mode

Neither the self-introductions nor the introductions to art posted on the official project site contained terms of address. No questions were posted either. In the Taiwanese students’ responses to the introductions of French art, a few quoted French students’ views and agreed with their opinions, but the general mode of the texts on the official website resembled that of written assignments for a language course in which interactivity was not sought.

By contrast, in texts posted on the Facebook group, terms of address were usually present. Participants wrote directly to certain individuals for questions and comments on postings. They addressed peers by using the terms ‘everyone’ or ‘my dear French/Taiwanese friends’. At times they addressed individuals for seemingly private conversations. It was common for one posting to receive multiple comments, responses and ‘ Likes ’. Each initial posting in a thread received one or more answers or comments. Efforts appeared to have been made to grab others’ attention and make messages interesting by using colorful images, video clips and puns. Punctuation and emoticons were used for the same purpose.

Not only did unofficial postings show higher interactivity than those on the official website, but spontaneity also seemed evident through word and phrase repetition. The lexical density of Facebook postings was 35.9 percent, indicating a high level of repeated words, as compared to the 39 percent in French students’ self-introductions and 69.8 percent (French) and 49.9 percent (Taiwanese) in the introductions to the works of art. Readability of unofficial postings was easier than that of official postings as well, suggesting an effort by students to make their Facebook messages as accessible as possible. Judging from both interactivity and


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readability, it is probably safe to infer that participants’ Facebook interac-tion was closer to verbal communication. In addition, the participants used Facebook for relationship building much more often than project-prescribed interaction. The following Facebook posting typifies the brief interaction among participants:

FR: Hi everyone, do you know which plane Sam take/took? Thanks a lot! Which company? Kiss :X

Tw: Yeah~ he is very healthy now!!! FR: Liars! FR: He is here with us in class !!! :) TW: do not facebook in classXDDDDDD FR: we love facebook in class! ♥ TW: facebook is a more deadly disease then measles!

Tenor

To explore social networking tenor in texts produced by the participants, we looked into turn-taking, use of first names, speech functions (for example, statements, demands, offers, questions and so on) and pronoun choices that show closeness, solidarity and degrees of politeness or distance between the participants. On the official site, students posted self-intro-duction assignments, but did not interact by responding to postings. In introducing works of art, some Taiwanese students posted thoughts and comments in response to French students’ introductions only after their instructor reminded them. Hence interaction was neither spontaneous nor autonomous. The turn-taking pattern on Facebook , however, tells a different story. Of the 134 threads, 111 (82.8 percent of them) were followed. With 563 responses and 690 Likes , each thread received an average total of 9.4 responses. French students created the Facebook group and were responsible for initiating turns in creating the first 28 threads. Starting from the twenty-ninth thread, Taiwanese students took their turn in starting their threads. From thread 29 to thread 114, Taiwanese students dominated the turns (except threads 31, 27, 38, 43, 47, 90, 92 and 111). After thread 115, turn-takings alternated between both groups. Of the last 20 threads, the Taiwanese initiated 8 and French students did 12. Taking turns in initiating threads coincided with the period in which each side organized arrangements for their partners’ trip; whichever side was responsible for hosting the visit took control and initiated threads. French students dominated the initial turns and then Taiwanese students took over. When the visits were over, the students still kept in touch and turn-takings became more evenly distributed between the two groups.


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First names were not used in the students’ official postings. The students simply posted their writings without acknowledging their addressees. In the unofficial postings, however, use of first names increased after Taiwanese students visited Paris. First names were used most frequently after French students also finished their visit to Taiwan. In early postings, all students addressed the entire group; ‘Everyone’ and ‘dear all’ were commonly used. Afterward, first names were used to show appreciation and hence demonstrate intimacy. The following two post-ings exemplify the functions of first name uses 11 :

Posting 1

TW: French students you are so cute and enthusiastic. We have a pretty fun time with you ... Merci! Special thanks to Sarah. Because of you, the schedule runs well and today is replete. Thanks to Wayne for help me arrange today’s schedule ... Love you guys!

Posting 2

FR: Roses are red, violets are blue, who do we miss? YOUUUUU! TW: missmissmissmissmissmissmissmissmissmissmissmissyou!!!!!!!!! TW: S M D

Table 8.3 Examples of speech functions

Speech function Examples from Facebook postings

Referential TW: Eiffel Tower is one of the symbols of Paris. We can see it appear on so many kinds of products ... Once we get off the train at the station of Eiffel Tower, no matter where we are, we can see it clearly ...

Expressive FR: AAA (Name of Taiwanese student) you are killing me! Wish I were in the karaoke bus!

Directive FR: Please Taiwanese student, put also your english name in Facebook because sometimes it’s hard for us to know who you are with only your chinese name.

Phatic FR: 我要回來看你們所有的人 ! [Researcher translation: I will come back to see all of you.] TW : OMG!! Its Chinese!!! I’m sure that you can become a Taiwanese!! And if you don’t mind, you also can bring me back to Paris~~~ XD

Heuristic 1.1.1.1.1.1 FR: Hi everyone, do you know which plane Sebastien take/took? Thanks a lot! Which company? Kiss :X


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TW: what’s that mean FR: Shut Mouth David ? TW: its Smile My Dear FR: Professor David is sooooo romantic !!!

The speech functions of unofficial postings were more diverse than post-ings on the project website. The function of official postings was mainly to convey information. The unofficial postings, in addition to represen-tational features which provide information, also included expressive, directive, phatic and heuristic features. Table 8.3 provides examples for each of these functions:

Conclusions and pedagogical implications

This chapter reports the implementation and findings of a telecollabo-rative project between two groups of university students in Taiwan and France. We analyzed student interactions on the project website as well as exchanges posted on an ad-hoc Facebook group constructed by the students. Halliday’s (1978) social semiotic perspective was used to frame the specific linguistic characteristics students used to socialize. The field, mode and tenor of the texts were analyzed to observe how learning and socialization took place in both contexts. Quantitative and qualita-tive data analyses showed distinctive differences in participants’ atti-tudes and approaches to socialization in the two contexts. Confirming Thorne’s (2003) observation, changes in mediation tools also involved shifting communication style as well as altering socialization practice. On the official site, the participants only posted instructor-prescribed coursework and the topics of their postings adhered to the assignments. In these postings, both groups expressed their identities as individuals and groups as well as their assumptions about sociocultural values (Dervin, 2010). Nonetheless, interaction was mostly unidirectional, emitted from the students-writers’ perspective. Therefore, it did not foster interactive dialogue. In contrast, when students communicated via Facebook , they took ownership of the activity and actively chose the topics; thus, the texts became more interactional and informal, resem-bling oral communication. At the same time, the students successfully accomplished the tasks of arranging trips and building authentic inter-personal relationships that demonstrated intercultural competence of the skills of discovery and interaction (Byram, 2000; 1997). Halliday (1987) postulates that the processes of socialization put special kinds of demands on language. In particular, these processes must enable the


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individual to establish strongly affective identification with others they consider significant. As evidenced by the vibrant exchanges between the two groups of participants, the unofficial Facebook group provided an environment for learner-centered socialization and valuable opportuni-ties for target-language practice. Students did not have to be reminded to use the target language, English, for communication. Target-language use was authentic and focused on socialization. The speech-like func-tions of written exchanges became more diverse and it is arguable that they may have furthered the participants’ ‘hyperpersonal communi-cation’ (Walther, 1996) and their understanding of social pragmatics. Similarly, we hypothesize that socialization, perhaps due to the highly interactive nature of the conversations that took place, was furthered in the Facebook group, which would be expected in turn to support the learning process.

Similar to Downes’s (2005) observation, the language socialization in both contexts reveals participants’ preference for greater autonomy and connectivity for target-language use and intercultural experience. They actively sought out and used the more suitable mediation tool for this activity. The pervasiveness of social media and the fact that they make it easy to set up groups and pages for open interaction made these tools a natural choice. The use of social media, perceived as being informal, gave the students a stronger sense of autonomy and thus more effec-tively moved them ‘beyond the walls’ of formal learning. On the unoffi-cial site, interaction was multidirectional and spontaneous. Participants used first names to establish social presence, build solidarity and show closeness among themselves. Turn-taking was tactically managed with both sides engaged in forming collaborative interactivity (Hsu, 2008; Thomas, 2001). Since collaboration is a key component of a commu-nity of inquiry, the collaborative interactivity, afforded by the practical travel-focused tasks, could be termed ‘intercultural communication in the wild’ (Thorne, 2010, p. 144) and to a certain degree, it helped foster and sustain a learning community.

Social networking tools as well as the devices on which they are deployed are growing faster and ever more pervasive in daily life. As such, the watertight boundaries between the walls of top-down, formal academic instruction and bottom-up, informal student-driven produc-tions blur. Therefore, the scope of our study, by using an opportunity sample, is inadvertently constrained by the fact that our students did not write on Facebook knowing that their instructors would peek into it. Thus the results we obtained, both qualitatively and quantitatively, reflect radically different language usage in the two venues. This leads


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us, in spite of the optimistic findings of enhanced interpersonal interac-tion in an unofficial context, to indicate the caveats of which instructors who are interested in this approach should be aware. First, the language use in the social networking context might be of low lexical density and typified by incomplete clauses. In other words, the language used by students on Facebook did not share the features of formal, academic usage. As in CALL studies of chat (for example, Tudini, 2003), our study also suggests a discrepancy between the language used in the social networking context and the language production required for formal language learning. Second, we may need to adjust evaluation criteria as student-controlled informal learning also challenges the traditional defi-nition of what effective or successful language-based communication is. Third, associating out-of-class, informal learning with formal, in-class activities using social networking tools requires considerable commit-ment and open-mindedness on the part of instructors as students now have more control of the activities and the pace of their learning. Fourth, for sustained meaningful interaction in informal settings, guided prac-tices may still be a necessary stepping stone. The social networking on Facebook might not have been as successful without the prior ‘Walled’ activities. How to balance informal and formal learning remains an important topic in the didactics of interculturality in language learning and teaching.

Intercultural competence, as human experience, is fluid and open ended (Dervin, 2010). Its practice and learning never end. The devel-opment of interculturality does not necessarily take place in a formal learning setting. Even though it is not possible, nor is it the teacher’s job, to check on or control students’ learning in informal settings, we can still ponder ways to provide the necessary guidance for students to reflect on their cultural assumptions and find a range of strategies that they can use when navigating through intercultural communication.

Notes

1 . Researchers were also instructors in this project. 2 . However, we were able to access the data, as the students added the instructors

to their Facebook group after the project was over. 3 . Lexical density constitutes the estimated measure of content per functional

(grammatical) and lexical units (lexemes) in total. Lexical words are the so-called content or information-carrying words and, function words are the words that bind together a text. Lexical words include lexical verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs. Function words include auxiliary verbs, numerals, determiners, pronouns, propositions and conjunctions (Williamson, 2009).


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4 . In this study, the Gunning-Fog Index (Readability, 2012) was used, a tool commonly used to assess whether text can be read easily by the intended audience.

5 . French students discussed Taiwanese art at length in class, but refrained from actually posting their comments. It appears, from later informal discussion, that they had not felt inclined to write until they had ‘connected’ at a deeper level with the Taiwanese class.

6 . The Like button is a Facebook feature allowing users to give positive feedback. A button also allows Facebook page owners to see how many users and which of their friends like the page.

7 . Homo Modernus, Tractatus Philosophicus is a 9 min video associating concepts from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Marshall McLuhan

8 . Eight Generals is a traditional and religious ceremonial performance. 9 . The Cloud Gate Dance Group is a modern dance group that works with tradi-

tional themes. 10 . Prince Nezha is a Taoist protection deity in Chinese Buddhist mythology. 11 . In order not to reveal the students’ identities, the names have been changed

to pseudonyms.


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177

Introduction

As increasingly complex blends of tools and technologies – including chatlines, online video applications, multi-touch tablet computers and immersive virtual worlds – continue to take hold throughout second- and foreign language education (Lotherington and Jenson, 2011; Thorne, Black and Sykes, 2009), understanding the role of assessment in SNS for language learning has become ever more urgent. As socializa-tion becomes central to language acquisition, how can learner efforts – whether individual, in pairs, or in groups – be seen to progress? How can success be determined?

Bounded within SNS (boyd and Ellison, 2007), our first task is to define ‘assessment’ in a way appropriate to our purpose because assessment can touch on vast areas of educational activity. In this chapter, we use ‘assessment’ in relation to individual, peer and group learner achievement within the boundaries of a specific subject (for example, amongst students in a class of beginning Japanese), rather than, for example, in regards to the evaluation of an entire course of study against an agreed upon set of criteria (for example, the perform-ance of a Japanese course in relation to established institutional and/or government standards). Throughout this chapter, then, we set aside concerns to do with formal language proficiency testing, diag-nostic and summative high stakes assessments and program evalu-ation (for discussion, see, for example, Bachman and Palmer, 2010; Douglas, 2010).

9 Formative Assessment within Social Network Sites for Language Learning Paul Gruba and Cameron Clark


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178 Paul Gruba and Cameron Clark

In this chapter, we focus on the formative types of assessment that seek to enhance learning via immediate feedback. Formative assessment combines formal and informal processes to improve learners’ perform-ance through feedback (Frey and Fisher, 2011) and can be aligned with efforts to promote ‘assessment for learning’ that consists of ‘a process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there’ (Assessment Reform Group, 2002, p. 2). Among learners, formative assessment encourages learning and to take responsibility about their learning (Black and William, 2009) and may help students to develop intrinsic motivation, improve self-esteem, foster independent learning methods and aid in the ability to improve cognitive strategies in solving problems. In foreign language education, Carreira (2012) concluded that formative assessment is an essential part of a well-designed language curriculum.

Language assessment specialists have long been aware of the need to better recognize social interaction in their designs (McNamara and Roever, 2006). Nowadays modern language teaching practices are under-pinned by sociocultural theories of second language acquisition that emphasize purposeful interaction, contextualized understanding and authentic materials (Lantolf and Poehner, 2006). At times, individual learners are able to complete tasks alone and thus be self-regulated; at other times, the individual learner can be challenged by other- or object-regulated tasks that may well require assistance. In a sociocul-tural paradigm of learning, productive learning is held to take place in the gap between such tasks, within a ‘Zone of Proximal Development’ (Vygotsky, 1978b).

As Ohta (2001) argues, well-designed formative assessment tasks present learners first with the opportunity to judge their own level of development, then to work collaboratively with others to produce a higher level of language.

Such underpinnings have led to a view of thinking of language teaching and assessment as intertwined activities that, together, actively support learner abilities within an appropriate range of devel-opment (Poehner, 2008). Perhaps more so than sustained error correc-tion, Lantolf and Poehner (2010) propose that ‘equally important, if not more important, is the quality of interaction between learner and mediator’ (Lantolf et al., 2010, p. 29). That is, to be effective, learner needs must be met through a ‘range of mediation that is continually and systematically calibrated’ (Lantolf et al., 2010, p. 29) to develop language abilities.


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Formative Assessment within SNS 179

In this chapter we borrow from a number of assessment specialists, including Palmer (2002) and Brown and Ngan (2010), for example, who have set out a range of principled guidelines for good formative assess-ment. Boud (2000) provides an example of one such framework: 1) ensure that tasks enable all students to succeed; 2) encourage learners to believe in their ability to succeed; 3) design criteria to enhance the learning process, not for performance measurement; 4) allow for both self-evaluation and peer evaluation; 5) permit flexible teaching designs and patterns.

Frey and Fischer (2011) outline the key questions to consider when building a formative student-centered assessment plan, including, for example: ‘Where am I going?’, ‘Where am I now?’, ‘How am I doing?’ and ‘Where am I going next?’ With these questions in mind, Frey and Fischer argue, educators can integrate formative activities throughout a curriculum.

Brown and Abeywickrama (2010) provide a range of assessment prin-ciples for the second language classroom that includes advice on task design, validity and reliability and designs for specific areas of language skills such as reading and writing. In language programs, it is good prac-tice to assess learners in order to place them at a level that is appropriate to their abilities. As they progress through a course, learners should be told where they have been, where they are going and what lies ahead as a way to foster self-assessment and to build confidence. If they are working in a sociocultural curriculum, learners need to build and then calibrate, their interactional skills by having a range of opportunities to work with appropriate-level mediators.

The remainder of this chapter starts with an overview of technolo-gy-mediated assessment and then moves into issues to do with social language learning and assessment. After establishing research questions, we conduct an autoethnographic study focused on assessment practices in three prominent SNS. We then discuss our findings and suggest an agenda for further research.

Technology-mediated assessment

Elliot (2008) proposes that technology and assessment be understood in three incremental stages. In the initial stage, technologies are absent and assessment designs focus on individual performance. As such, they are paper based, formally administered and held within secure physical locations at specific times. Within an intermediate stage, technologies appear in the form of specially designed software within workstation computers that are configured to present ‘e-assessments’ such as online


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quizzes, testlets and portfolios (for example, Crisp, 2007; Chapelle and Douglas, 2006).

In an emerging stage, according to Elliot (2008), technology and assessment designs allow learners to demonstrate proficiency through social media tools that make extensive use of authentic materials, global networks and higher-order cognitive skills. The barriers to achieving such practices, however, as Elliot (2008) writes, are both large and familiar: a poor understanding of novel skills and constructs, immature task design frameworks, varying levels of digital literacies amongst teachers and students and difficulties in pinpointing individual contributions to sociocultural interactions. In short, Elliot argues, the innovative peda-gogical activities fostered by the spread of SNS have yet to meet the hard realities of developing efficient, reliable and valid assessment activities; indeed, developing effective assessments for new generation learners presents numerous challenges to mainstream education (Cumming and Wyatt-Smith, 2009).

Although research concerning technology and second language assessment has a long history (for example, Jamieson, 2005; Chapelle and Douglas, 2006; Ockey, 2009), it would be fair to argue that much work in this area focuses on the design of instruments that are intended to be delivered on secure personal computers for the purposes of high stakes outcomes. Clearly, one imperative for developing computer-based assessments is to better align them with modern language teaching practices; for language students taught in multimedia learning environ-ments, simple paper and pencil tests are often seen as antiquated and irrelevant (Douglas and Hegelheimer, 2007).

Technology-based learning and thus assessment, may be best situ-ated within a need to foster online learner interactions with a range of speakers and make sense of a wide range of online text types (Brown, Lockyer and Caputi, 2010; Kramsch and Thorne, 2002). Accordingly, at the heart of emerging views of language use, formative assessment would need to provide learners with feedback regarding ‘multimodal commu-nicative competence’ (Royce, 2007), or perhaps ‘new media literacies’ (Thorne and Reinhardt, 2008). Efforts to develop formative assessment may point us towards what Kern (2006) calls the ‘transversal relation-ships’ (p. 202) of abilities and skills from one communicative context to the other. How language teachers come to focus on what to assess and for what purposes, is often grounded in three dominant metaphors of language learning ( Table 9.1 ).

If SNS designers adopted language learning as ‘socialization’, then formative assessment tasks would consist of finely tuned, multi-staged


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activities that were sensitive to individual and group levels of devel-opment. Ideally, these assessment designs would make use of a range of text types and modalities in ways that would foster ‘new literacies’ amongst learners (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006). Through this, language learned on the site could more easily be transferred, from one context to another. In summary, language learning is increasingly social, online and directed to the development of a range of multifaceted abilities. With this in mind, SNS for language education may be an ideal loca-tion to foster assessment activities that have a basis in appropriate-level social interaction.

A survey of current practices

We now examine how SNS for language education set out assessment activities. In particular, we were alert to ways in which they made visible the metaphor of language learning as socialization in assessment. To survey current practices, we took on the role of critical learners in a sustained self-styled online autoethnography (Cann and DeMeulenaere,

Table 9.1 Dominant metaphors of language learning and assessment

Language learning as ‘instruction’

Language learning as ‘acquisition’

Language learning as ‘socialization’

Pedagogical goals

Accuracy and fluency

Skills and strategies

Performance and interaction

Pedagogical success

Native-like productions

Global proficiencies

Local accomplishments

Assessment focus

Error correction (demonstration of accurate use of target-language features)

Proficiency appraisal (demonstration of individual use of skill-specific strategies)

Performance outcomes (social participation to foster growth in a language community)

Focal units of assessments

Products and structures of a language

Competencies and processes in the use of language

Artefacts and outcomes made through the use of language

Example assessments

Drills and multiple-choice quizzes

Self-assessment of portfolios

Multi-stage, multimodal team projects

Source: Adapted from Gruba and Hinkelman (2012, p. 52).


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2012; Voulgari and Komis, 2010) that extended our understanding and experience of language learning within SNS from an earlier study (Clark and Gruba, 2010). Following a wide review of possibilities, we selected three sites that met the criteria as ‘structured Web 2.0 language learning communities’, incorporated staged pathways, or levels and thus were able to scaffold achievement (Zourou, Loiseau and Potolia, in prepara-tion): Babbel , Busuu and Livemocha . We directed our attention to three areas framed by Frey and Fischer (2011) and set questions to guide our enquiries:

1) Placement : How can I judge that I am in the right course, one that is neither too easy nor too advanced, so that I can learn at an appro-priate level and work with others who are in a similar stage of language development?

2) Progress : Where have I been and how am I doing and where I am going such that I can calibrate my own development?

3) Interaction : Where and how, can I try out my newly learned language skill and gauge my abilities to use the target language with other mediators within the site?

In the following sections, we take on the voice of critical learners to examine these three themes of formative assessment.

Placement

Being sure that we were in the right level within a course of study was our first priority. In the project, we set out to build on previous language skills (gained from years of living in Asia) as well as experience learning a language from the very start (hence, we tried Spanish courses). We found that each site varied in its initial placement process.

In our professional capacity as teachers, we were pleased to find that Babbel makes an explicit reference to the Common European Framework of References for Languages or CEFRL (Council of Europe, 2001) in the description of courses. Beginner’s courses 1 and 2, for example, are based on Level A1; Beginner’s courses 3–6 are linked to Level A2. In our initial stages of learning, we did not pay attention to the descriptors; as we progressed, we referred often to the descriptors to be able to tell others what we had gained after hours of learning at the computer. Communication about our progress and support from friends, was motivating.

We welcomed the chance to self-assess in Busuu with a simple tool that helped us to then place ourselves in the appropriate level. Although


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the tool allowed us to be in ‘A1, A2, B1 and B2’ levels, we could find no clear confirmation that Busuu levels corresponded to those in the CEFRL. Without that clear link, we felt a bit ‘short changed’: if it was the recognized reference to our proficiency level, then why was it not actually stated?

Livemocha allowed us to enrol in four distinct levels. To start Spanish, for example, Units 1, 2 and 3 can be found under ‘Spanish 101’ with the descriptor ‘For students starting with the basics with little or no expo-sure to the language’. Unit lessons each have a functional theme (for example, ‘Spanish 201, Unit 7, Lesson 3: Need/Want’). Despite the clear labeling, the lack of a placement test and an explicit link to a recognized standard caused us to lose some motivation. In our subsequent learning through Livemocha , the lack of a recognized standard made it difficult for us to self-assess and to report any of our progress with friends and colleagues.

Feeling confident that we were in the right course was important to our efforts. As indicated by the placement instrument, each of the sites caters to beginning and intermediate learners. In Spanish, we were clearly beginners and found ourselves much less worried about place-ment. However, when we undertook Korean and Japanese in Livemocha and Busuu , finding an appropriate level was important because we lived in countries where the target language was spoken. The question of placement, from our experience as both learners and teachers, mattered. For us, correct placement acknowledges past effort and motivates present work.

Progress

Throughout our efforts, the role of formative assessment in SNS was a focus. Spending hours at the computer, how could we tell if we are making headway as we learned a language? Within each site, there is ample provision for visual cues, such as bar charts, to indicate progress within lessons and throughout entire courses. On Busuu , a cartoon ‘language garden’ complete with trees, fruit and an animated spider appears to grow in tandem with overall learning progress. Individual lesson units appear as a series of boxes and the completion of a final review test results in the provision of a small gift. Time-sensitive goals can be set and, if unfulfilled, failed targets are represented as splattered berry fruit.

Babbel devotes an extensive section of the site to the self-moni-toring of progress and achievement through a ‘Review Manager’ tool


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( Figure 9.1 ) that sets automatic reminders for specific points in need of reconsideration. Words that have been learned appear on a knowl-edge level bar and move up when they have been successfully repeated and reviewed. Review buttons and audio clips of keywords, were avail-able on a single page. Success could be shared on other SNS, such as Facebook.

For Livemocha , a vertical bar ( Figure 9.2 ) fills in as lessons are completed and progress is expressed as a percentage. The constant visual reminder of our level of achievement and completion in-between lessons, or units, helped us to stay on track. Oftentimes, when returning to a lesson after a break, it was reassuring to know where we had left off, how much we had achieved and where we were going.

In each of the sites, we were encouraged to help others by correcting their exercises, initiating conversations and creating materials such as flashcards. Each of the sites employs a reward system to recognize member participation and contributions to the overall community ( Livemocha has Mocha Points; Busuu has Busuu berries ). In addition, teaching actions are recognized publicly through a similar reward system (for these, Livemocha has Teacher score ; Busuu has Badges ) based on members’ rating of the quality of feedback. The points can be used to receive discounts on paid membership offers, for example, or to enable

Figure 9.1 Babbel review manager


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access to materials that would otherwise be restricted as a non-paying member of the community. In Busuu , reward points can also be used to ‘bet’ against another member to see who is able to complete a particular language challenge in a timely manner; in Livemocha , points can be sent as gifts to other members.

On Livemocha, for example, there are a range of ‘tips for good reviews’ that include writing more than brief comments, employing editing tools and focusing on correct patterns of pronunciation and speaking. The sites offer many different ways to provide corrections. With a written submis-sion, for example, corrections can be expressed by changing text color, manually crossing out errors, writing the sentence in a correct manner, or writing out detailed suggestions. Providing audio comments is recom-mended. After completing literally dozens of reviews, we must admit that the quality of our feedback diminished; that is, we did minimum work and received the same amount of reward points. Notably, Livemocha provides double points for being the first to comment on work and we soon discovered that it was not worth ‘recorrecting’ work that had

Figure 9.2 Livemocha bar review


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been previously checked. Despite a self-perceived drop in quality (for example, simply providing brief comments), however, we earned quick points and our community ratings as teachers remained near perfect. As students ourselves on the sites, we were grateful for comments and always rated our assessors very highly.

As well-travelled language teachers, we found the somewhat formal and artificial nature of the online courses to be old-fashioned and alienating. Many of the photos and exercises were staged and unreal. In Livemocha, for example, we were instructed to use phrases in video conversations that included, in Korean ‘ ’ (‘the tree is orange’), or in Spanish ‘El á rbol es verde’ (‘the tree is green’). As our hours of learning continued, we began to chafe at the tight confines of lesson material that often consisted of bright smiling faces, super clean cities and shining bowls of fruits. Eventually, we found it difficult to calibrate our progress and completion; that is, the artificiality of the site itself blunted our ability to self-assess. As lessons continued, we began to yearn for the use of ‘messy, real life’ resources that may be found in photo-sharing sites, for example, or non-language SNS. Because of this

Figure 9.3 A Busuu certificate


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artificiality, perhaps, the certificates of completion that are available on Babbel Certificate (see Babbel, 2013) and Busuu ( Figure 9.3 ) seem to be promotional marketing rather than a true achievement of competency in language learning.

Interaction

Because we were beginners in Spanish, much of the initial time we were alone in front of the computer as we focused on learning vocabulary and basic grammatical structures. When we did gain some confidence in our language abilities, we tried them with some of our new friends. Soon we discovered that our ‘beginner’ language abilities were not sufficient to meet the demands of interacting with native speakers. Fast typing skills, for example, are required for online chatting and the different spellings and diacritical marks often slowed us down. Typing in another language requires a new set of motor skills and a great deal of time to reassign commands to our fingers. Our interlocutors would become impatient and we ourselves became defeated: simply put, we were not learning with others who were appropriate to our level as beginners.

As native speakers of English, we participated online in our native language with learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). In Livemocha , the audio-video facility is promoted as a way to ‘connect with native speakers around the world’ both through typed chatting and in an audio-video tool. When a window opens for the chat facility, model ‘conversation sequences’ are available in more than twenty topic areas (for example, ‘where is the bathroom?’ and ‘at a fast food restaurant’) in six major languages. Ideally, our online chats in Livemocha would have been interesting, fluid and bilingual such that they allowed for each side to calibrate an appropriate level of interaction. In reality, our chats in Livemocha were plagued by mutual hesitation, misunderstanding and running out of time and topics. We did not use the suggested model ‘conversation sequences’, nor did we easily progress to audio, or audio-video, conversations. Additionally, we found it difficult to reconnect with people we had previously met because we could not remember their names, because one of us was unavailable when contact was sought, or because earlier chats had been awkward. In short, we did not build any sustained relationships.

Busuu also allowed us to connect with others one-to-one through a chat and audio-video facility. Online chats were better directed, with the optional provision of recommended topics (in one exchange, we were prompted to debate whether global warming was the biggest problem


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facing the planet, but neither we nor the Spanish native speaker followed the suggested topic.) We also encountered the same challenges in Busuu as we had in Livemocha ; that is, as beginners, we were unable to partici-pate in any meaningful way in our target language. We accept that part of our failure to communicate Spanish is entirely our own in that our learning was at times sporadic and unfocused and our motives were more extrinsic as a way to produce research than intrinsic and personal. At times, though, our lack of motivation lay in the point that we had simply expected to have more successful interactions in the SNS.

On Babbel , a group chat discussion facility that included one forum as a ‘world channel’ was available in eight designated languages. As beginners, it was much less intimidating for us to add comments to an ongoing discussion amongst a range of speakers than to chat directly with one person. After some ‘lurking’ to establish topic familiarity and pace, we could ‘jump in’ when we wanted and then add as much or as little as we wanted to a given topic. In our observations, comments to the group chats were never corrected for misspellings, poor grammar, or cultural misunderstandings; that is, there was no explicit error correc-tion. Native and non-native speakers interact. During an afternoon, we participated in the Babbel chat group in English for several hours. For a period of nearly ten minutes one member, vegasvixen26 , dominated the chat board (that is, she was apparently a native speaker and responded immediately to nearly every posting) as other members were chatting about various cultures. Discussion revolved around a comparison of cultural traits and a member named wang , with a lower-intermediate proficiency level of English, sought to keep the peace as he insisted that everybody was equal. A brief excerpt from the chat illustrates the tone of interactions amongst the members:

1. vegasvixen26 : wang you are cute 2. wang : i’m no cute, whatever they say, no matter 3. vegasvixen26 : wang i gave you a compliment usually people say thank you lol 4. wang : haha 5. peter : vegas it’s the asian way of saying thank you by downplaying the compliment

[excerpt from Babbel Chat, in English, 26 August 2012]

As the excerpt shows, members used personal addressivity (for example, wang , vegas ), short message service (SMS) talk (for example, lol) and lower case to maintain interactional coherence as well as foster


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group affinity (Herring, 1999; Nardi, 2005). Chatting amongst several members in a fast-moving group discussion contributed to our language learning in several ways. It encouraged us to learn to read quickly, as postings were short and presented in quick bursts; it helped us to learn informal vocabulary and finally, the facility was less formal, less awkward and less stressful than one-to-one chat lines. Through chats, we were able to pick up culturally specific emoticons and SMS talk (for example, jajaja or its variations, such as jajajjajjajaj in Spanish).

At times, nonetheless, we were taken aback by questionable practices because they hurt the quality of member relationships. In chat lines, for example, we read combative discourse on topics related to gender, nationality, or mistakes in language use. Further, we received no fewer than four spam messages a day from users seeking sexual relationships or financial assistance. Although personally not threatening, the potential of abuse amongst members raises issues to do with both asynchronous and synchronous peer assessment. If we as learners are unable to trust our peers’ motives for interaction, our roles as assessors are jeopardised and act as barriers to learning. Without trust, we argue, peer assessment has little positive effect on the development of learning.

A recent revamp of Livemocha shows ‘expert reviewers’ can be paid to provide learners with ‘reviews they can trust’ and are provided enhanced visual recognition in the community of the site to signal that the work was ‘done by a pro’ (Livemocha Expert Reviews 2013b). For one partic-ular submission on a role play in Spanish, we used some of our earned ‘mochapoints’ to pay for an expert review. We received six reviews from members, including one from the recognized expert. When we logged in to see the feedback, we found that the expert review was highlighted and it contained more detail and depth than other member reviews. Oddly, however, such meticulous treatment of our work made us feel as if we were ‘back in school’ as the teacher’s favorite student, a bit detached from our community of learners. We did not use the expert review service a second time.

On each of the selected sites, member profiles could be accessed that report an aggregate of learner actions (such as the number of lessons completed, or exercises submitted), teacher actions (including the number of times feedback, both written and audio, was given) and other actions such as the creation of materials and chat interactions. In addition, a score for the quantity and quality of teaching – or, more specifically, peer satisfaction with feedback – could also be displayed. As learners/teachers ourselves, we were pleased to see the display of a holistic profile of each member. Too often, we see those in our


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classrooms solely as students, not teachers, material writers, or asses-sors. By viewing our students as peer instructors and giving them more credit for a wider range of abilities, we may find that sharing decisions about assessment with them may well add greater dimension our own sociocultural approaches.

In summary, as both ‘false’ beginner (in Asian languages) and ‘true’ beginner (in Spanish) language learners, we struggled to interact with intermediate-level learners and native speakers of these languages because of our own problems of proficiency. We could not interact quickly enough, for example, to participate in foreign language chat lines. When we took on the role of native speakers of English, however and thus could interact without language proficiency challenges, we had difficulty maintaining consistency in our online relationships in the free-of-charge spaces. Boundaries between ‘peer’, ‘co-learner’ and ‘tutor’ were blurred and at times we felt manipulated by those eager for unpaid interaction with native speakers of English who had formal ESL training and experience.

Discussion

Analyzing SNS for language learning with a focus on formative assess-ment activities allows us to see how the metaphor of ‘language learning as socialization’ may be enacted in online environments. Through an autoethnographic approach, we sought to see how assessment directs learning to take place in an appropriate ‘zone of proximal development’ through individual activities as well with peer (co-learner) interactions and, at times, with the assistance of tutor feedback.

We began our survey with a focus on placement. As complete begin-ners in Spanish, the tools available for placement confirmed what we already knew: we had to start at the very first lesson. Placement issues became more prominent for us when we tried, in Busuu and Livemocha, which offered Asian languages, to find a level that recognized our previous experience with the target language and culture. Notably, all three sites offer much material for beginner and lower-intermediate levels for most languages. Students who pursue English language skills appear to be offered a much wider range of materials and levels.

Turning to questions such as ‘Where am I now?’ and ‘How am I doing?’ in line with Frey and Fischer (2011), we examined how progress is seen on the three selected sites. For self-directed and individual activi-ties, there is an abundance of progress indicators. Examples of visual cues include large ‘gardens’ that grow with overall development ( Busuu ),


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an extensive Review Manager ( Babbel ), or a prominent point system ( Livemocha ). The progress indicators align with established levels, either with a clear external reference as in the case of Babbel , which uses the CEFRL (Council of Europe, 2001), or a self-styled internal system in the case of Livemocha . Self-directed and independent, the range of progress indicators helped us to be aware of our own language forms as we sought to develop competency (Kessler, 2009; Liang and Li, 2011).

Our experience with live interlocutors, either in our role as learners or as native speakers, varied greatly. As beginning level learners, our opportunities for productive interaction were admittedly limited. Perhaps because we were away from our own professional responsi-bilities, we found that moving from a learner to a teacher and back again was fun and enjoyable. Nonetheless, the dual identities that we performed in online sessions left us somewhat at a loss as effective assessors. That is, in moving amongst random language partners, we were conscious that we had to adjust our own styles and patterns to be able to gauge their proficiencies. Additionally, assessments were short and often patterned after material in a model answer. Despite giving and receiving full marks, we found peer assessment to be unsat-isfying and, with the exception of earning points and occasional notes of appreciation, unrewarding. Too much like work, peer assessment seemed rather to be an ideal than a reality of social network learning in free-of-charge spaces. As receivers of feedback, we found there was great variation in response to our postings from the harsh discipli-narian to the soft interlocutor. The lack of consistency, both as an assessor and an assessed learner, dampened our view that interactive formative assessment could help us to calibrate our own appropriate level of learning.

Agenda for research and development

Firstly, if SNS for language learning are to gain a permanent place in the language curriculum, any innovative designs in formative assessment will need to lead to measures that achieve validity, reliability and secu-rity standards (Bennett, 2002). More baseline research is needed before embarking on the development of formal ‘high stakes’ innovative meas-ures of language proficiency for the classroom and beyond (Chapelle and Chung, 2010; Shohamy et al., 2008). Meanwhile, as a way to justify designs to stakeholders, specialists will need to develop an ‘Assessment Use Argument’ to provide the basis for task construction, data collection and evidence (Bachman and Palmer, 2010, p. 104).


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Secondly, current sites offer tips on how to provide feedback (for example, in Livemocha , ‘be specific, make corrections and teach by example’) and they appeal to the community ideal of fostering a produc-tive learning environment for all. As an initial improvement, a greater display of model responses and criteria would be useful (for example, grammatical ones, or in speaking). Given our highly variable experi-ences, however, we would like to see SNS offer training in assessment, perhaps through awareness-raising exercises (Stiggins, 2008) within a dedicated module. Site members could earn ‘certification’ in assessment practices that could be shown on member profiles. Members who were certified would then earn more points per peer assessment and hopefully be better trusted and more consistent in their interactions. The growing availability of professional tutors (for example, Livemocha Tutors) is welcome and, hopefully, provides greater opportunities for site members to receive productive advice in formative assessment activities.

If Elliot (2008) is correct, emerging technology and assessment designs will require assessors to take into account a broad range of learner interactions across a wide range of media, not just spoken and written modalities. Such interactions may include posting comments and responses to pictures, audio files, video clips, or websites related to the task at hand. Assessing such ‘multiliterate’ interactions will require a framework that recognizes the complexities of online interaction and is sensitive to issues of technical proficiency (Cumming and Wyatt-Smith, 2009). Online multimodal communication and interaction includes, for example, posting gestures of acknowledgment rather than complete responses as can be found in the ‘like’ function in mainstream SNS. That is, we have at our fingertips a wide range of semiotic resources that provide us ways to respond to comments without language. Such inter-actions, often prominent in online social environments, provide many opportunities for multiliteracies practice beyond the face-to-face interac-tions of the classroom. Future designs could also assess a learner’s ability to search foreign language sites effectively, for example, or a language learner’s ability to scan a page for the most useful link (Stevenson and Liu, 2010).

Fostering affinity, connection and commitment in relationships helps to build the foundations of effective online communication (Nardi, 2005). Importantly in this context, ‘connection’ is ‘a subjective state in which a person experiences openness to interacting with another person’ that can be encouraged through face-to-face meetings as well as ‘informal discourse of low information content’ (Nardi, 2005, p. 92). In light of our unsatisfactory and stifled interactions on the SNS, further


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research concerning ‘connection’ specifically and the role of relation-ships more broadly within online assessment would be welcome. Research could involve both ‘strangers and friends’ through immersive ethnographic approaches, semi-structured interviews and chat logs (see, for example, Nardi and Harris, 2010).

With the growing use of non-standard grammatical forms and punc-tuations, assessments may need to take into account features of online discourse that include acronyms, abbreviations and emoticons (Dresner and Herring, 2010). For foreign language learners, expressing laughter or a sense of humor through LOL (English), jajaja (Spanish), kkk (Korean), or eieiei (Thai) may show proficiency in target-culture pragmatics. To spur the importance of learning these expressions, we would recommend that abbreviations, phonemic spelling, onomatopoeic expressions and slang be included within the formative assessment practices of SNS.

Using a participatory design approach, an examination of how stake-holders such as language learners, paid tutors and site developers perceive and make use of the assessment processes could be valuable (Cardenos-Claros and Gruba, 2010). Starting with traditional assessment tasks, collaborative sessions could bring together stakeholders to construct and evaluate assessment processes. SNS may start by imitating what is already being done in conventional online courses: to help develop reading, blogs could be a focus; for writing, contributions to wikis may be consid-ered. Speaking assessments, guided by stronger criteria, could take place through online video conferencing tools. Once a range of agreed upon prototypes was established, researchers could move through an iterative design and evaluation process alongside learners and site designers (for example, Conole et al., 2008; Phillips, McNaught and Kennedy, 2011).

Chapelle (2007a, p. 30) asked a key question: ‘How can those who are investing significant resources into learning and teaching be shown that innovation might be for the best?’ Indeed, innovative practices in assess-ment ‘have been notoriously difficult to sustain’ (Gardner et al., 2008, p. 1). Research on the perception and use of social network language learning sites, with a clear focus on assessment, may help educators to better ‘blend’ such innovation into their existing curriculum and prac-tices (Gruba and Hinkelman, 2012). Future innovations in formative assessment may well require language professionals to obtain advanced training in areas as diverse as software design, mobile language learning and new literacies practices (Douglas, 2010) alongside topics such as the management of educational change and the social shaping of technology (Corbel, 2007).


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Part IV

Overview


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197

This chapter brings a synoptic perspective to the volume and draws out questions that emerge from the work as being important for future research into online networking and language education. In the chapter we approach these first from a research perspective (types of research, themes explored and data collection issues), then from the perspective of design and pedagogy (mediation revisited, types of networking and community building, forms of interaction and genres and finally formal and informal learning).

Types of research

Recent meta-research into our field warned that technocentrism was still alive and that empirical work only counted for half of the published literature (Wang and Vasqu è z, 2012, p. 414). Therefore this book’s editors built into the call for chapters a strong orientation to data-based investigations. Projects could be researcher manipulated or naturally occurring and they could cover a handful of subjects or hundreds, but it was important that accounts should be underpinned by observations of real users networking. Thus all the contributions in the book are empirical, including some case studies. Theoretical frames used in different chapters vary widely, as do choices of disciplinary resources outside of CALL, including, for example, sociology, CSCL and semiotics (and Systemic Functional Linguistics), as well as educational technology and design. Across the contributions, conceptualizations of networking are also diverse, ranging from Musser’s (2006) typology

10 Social Media-Based Language Learning: Insights from Research and Practice Marie-Noëlle Lamy and François Mangenot


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198 Marie-Noëlle Lamy and François Mangenot

drawn from information technology (IT) use within business practice, to different models from telecommunication and information studies (Pettenati and Cigognini, 2007; boyd and Ellison, 2007), one from education management (Muijs et al., 2010) and finally the more socio-logical one offered in this chapter (Cardon, 2008, see further down). The fact that an effort to conceptualize ‘networking’ is widely shared among researchers, yet is not consensual, reflects the relative immaturity of the field. We may compare the field of social networking in language education with that of ‘interactive second language acquisition (SLA)’ in its early stages, where over two decades there gradually developed a consensus on a model of interaction setting out optimal conditions for learning. Working towards a consensus in networked-based language learning is similarly a priority for our young field and developing a common, appropriate and operationalizable model of networking is the next step it needs to take.

Assumptions about the nature of language learning underpin the different contributions. For example, in several chapters, scrutiny of the production by learners of utterances of increasing length and complexity is important to demonstrating learning and is achieved via quantitative methods (as in Zourou et al. or Wigham et al.) or through the use of standard research instruments (such as measures of density and readability, in Liaw et al.). However assumptions about learner development as a sociocultural phenomenon dominate the book and are associated with ethnographic (and, in one chapter, autoethno-graphic) methods, as in the work of Reinhardt et al., Harrison, or Gruba et al., or with narrative frames (in the chapter by Lima et al.). Overall qualitative methods are favored, reflecting an acceptance that more knowledge is needed about the contextual complexities of the field and the ecology of networked learning before acquisition of language can be assessed or measured.

Thematic foci of the research

Across the book two foci recur: identity and community building. Identity appears in different guises: identity seen through an individ-ual’s changing responses to the networking environment (captured through a ‘broadly ecological’ methodology, see Reinhardt et al.); identity as a visual artefact, seen in its relation to learning (revealed through quantitative analyses, see Wigham et al.) and identity seen as a tool enabled by designers and built by the individual user to secure preferred ways of interacting (in Harrison’s work). Second to identity


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Social Media-Based Language Learning 199

comes the topic of communities and their boundaries: whether between formal and informal course spaces (Liaw et al.), between online and offline networking (Lima et al., Gruba et al.), or between one platform and another (Fuchs et al.). Both identity and community building are lenses through which a very wide picture of the ecology of learning can be glimpsed. It therefore appears that when challenged to identify a research agenda for the new field of networking for language educa-tion, the researchers in this book have in their majority opted for the sort of more rounded situational approach that Wang et al. (2012) were deploring was not sufficiently evident in the literature.

Data collection issues

Access to subjects is a problem for all social media research. Several of this book’s contributions have solved the access problem through researchers’ explicitly adopting a participative stance. This carries a risk of observer bias, which in their study on SecondLife , Wigham et al. have ingeniously tackled by adopting a suitably visual method for minimizing their own impact on participants: they have chosen to appear as avatars shaped like small animals, moving about as little as possible, well below the gaze of the students’ taller avatars.

Access to participants is never more problematic than in matters of assessment since assessment mechanisms are rarely designed into SNS. Worse, in SNSLL some of them are only accessible in the pay-to-learn sections of the sites. The response by Gruba et al. has been to keep a journal of their own assessment experiences after registering privately to learn a language that they did not know. In this way they have been able to provide an autoethnographic account while preserving the authenticity of the learner’s experience, the learners being them-selves. Their approach had one unexpected result: the authors explain how they found themselves feeling negative towards Livemocha ’s new system of providing professional (‘expert’) teachers who can return much more professional feedback than the peer assessors: ‘oddly, however, such meticulous treatment of our work made us feel as if we were “back in school” as the teacher’s favorite student, a bit detached from our community of learners. We did not use the expert review service a second time’. This example shows that while researcher autoethnography does raise methodological questions, insights have resulted, which may not have surfaced otherwise. In other words, limi-tations on access to participants have encouraged the researchers to be creative, with useful results.


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Another problem with access to data relates to the scope of learners’ activity. We saw earlier from the contributors’ focus on communities that boundary crossing plays an important part in networking. Tracking partic-ipants’ activities after they have crossed a boundary is difficult and some-times impossible, making it a priority that researchers should anticipate learner migrations and set up data collection instruments appropriate to the nature of the external spaces likely to be visited by their participants.

Also, access to the material that appears on screens (for purposes of reproduction in research) is constrained by the copyright laws of the country where the SNSLL company is based. As all users know from the small print that they see on registration, website designs, logos and liveries are the property of the companies and permissions must be obtained before research is disseminated.

Finally, a third, unexpected problem is the ephemerality of data, that is, the fact that sites may not present the researcher with the same data every time s/he accesses the researched site. Fuchs et al. experienced this with Google Wave , where a social feature had been designed into the service such that ‘anyone could edit the blips and the wave at any point’. Successive snapshots were taken, which proved important for the find-ings, as what was an archiving difficulty for the researchers proved to be a valued affordance for the learners, who commented on successive edits. Further, authors doing research into sites commercially owned outside their institution may also experience site closures and renovation or inno-vation which inhibits or alters the course of their project (Zourou et al. and Gruba et al.). Collecting early and collecting often is the simple but practical lesson that researchers will draw from these misadventures.

Perspectives for designers and practitioners

In the introduction to this work the editors state that their objective is to meet three challenges (four originally). However it could be argued that the first of these challenges (‘understanding how digital social networking practices can contribute to the wider ecology of learning’) encompasses the other two – or three – hence we will now revisit it in light of what the chapters have contributed to its description. The main point in the bracketed quote above is that learning, particularly when mediated by technology, is part of an ecological system with different elements in interdependence (Mangenot, 2000), including:

learners, their personal usage of technology and their initial degree of ●

digital literacy but also their ability to learn autonomously;


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the institutional and more widely cultural and societal contexts ●

within which the learning takes place, that is, a world that is hyper-connected but frequently still rife with traditional representations of language learning; teachers, particularly ‘teachers Web 2.0’ whose competences as ●

described by Dooly (2010) must include an ability to know how to provide support as flexibly as possible; pedagogical tasks or scenarios and other types or genres of intended ●

verbal interaction; finally the social web ● 1 and particularly the role that its diverse appli-cations and innumerable users can play in relation to affordances (a term which, as Reinhardt et al. remind us, is key to ecological approaches).

The view taken in the present chapter is that although tools (and indeed genres, see below) do not determine interactions, they neverthe-less both constrain and guide them and that the term ‘affordance’ refers to the way in which users appropriate the tools, dealing with constraints as well as spaces allowing them opportunities for action.

Revisiting the components of computer-mediated language learning

A number of authors have tried to represent the systemic dimension of the use of educational technology by presenting three overlapping circles with the focus on the overlap rather than on the circles them-selves. From an e-learning design standpoint, Oliver and Herrington (2001, p. 20) showed an overlap between ‘learning tasks’ and both ‘learning resources’ and ‘learning supports’ as ‘constituent elements of learning settings’ (Oliver et al., 2001, p. 20). In the field of language learning more specifically, Lamy and Hampel’s (2007, p. 33) model of mediation in CMCL’ shows an overlap between ‘participant interaction’, ‘tasks’ and ‘technology’, with the latter playing a bigger role. Finally, in their attempt to define ‘Telecollaboration 2.0’, Guth and Helm (2010, p. 20) locate this practice at the intersection of three overlapping circles: ‘language learning’, ‘intercultural communicative competence’ and ‘online literacies’. A review of the differences between these representa-tions from the standpoint of the ecological challenge explored in the book helps to highlight the questions raised about the integration of digital social networking practices with language learning. Thus because it is now so diverse and pervasive, supporting not only content and


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structures but more importantly applications that enable social inter-action and networking, technology as such can probably no longer be represented as a self-contained circle. However, the ways different forms of networking and community building play out are now a central issue. Although in many cases learning tasks , as formerly understood within task-based approaches, are no longer really relevant since the priority now lies with the outcome, as achieved through action, it is neverthe-less still appropriate to be concerned about pedagogical scenarios, or more widely, learning settings , in order to point to the fact that in such spaces the learner is not let loose in the wilderness of the World Wide Web without a minimum of teaching support. Finally, regarding participant interaction (possibly including interactions with users external to the learning settings), it seems to us that it is more important than ever to plan for, or to retrospectively analyze, how these play out in relation to the wide diversity of forms and genres enabled by the use of a great variety of applications.

While the chapters in this book have generally prioritized other issues, the present synthesis is a good place in which to further explore this question true to an agenda first set in the conference series EPAL 2 as early as 2007, which was originally drawn up for research into language learning through more traditional online communication media and whose objective was to ‘scrutinise the links between blended or distance learning, the online verbal interactions produced and the settings through which these interactions can be instrumented’. SNS and SNSLL have brought with them fresh questions, yet have not eliminated the need to focus on interaction or to keep to the systemic and multidis-ciplinary agenda promoted by EPAL. In the remainder of this chapter we will therefore successively address these three interrelated dimen-sions: types of networking and of social connection, forms or genres of online interaction and learning settings, with a particular interest in the implications for varying levels of informal learning and of pedagogical support.

Types of networking and community-building settings

Almost all the contributors refer to Musser et al.’s (2006) features of Web 2.0, cited in Zourou (2012): participation and user-generated content, openness, network effects. However, although these categories serve to distinguish between Web 2.0 and non-Web 2.0 environments, finer distinctions are needed between different applications or sites and the forms of networking and social connection that they promote.


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Two lines of tension run through several chapters in the volume: one relates to the type of networking envisaged, another to the type of social connection which may be established, as discussed next.

Four of the chapters are devoted to SNSLL sites. Such sites can undoubtedly be said to borrow from the Facebook model. However the networking is based on a very different principle (as noted by Harrison): whereas Facebook and other applications of this type mainly bring together people who knew each other beforehand (and friends of friends), which establishes a comfort zone from the start, the SNSLL sites buck this trend since, as in the case of dating and chat sites like Meetic , the point is to bring together people who not only have not met before but do not speak the same language and often belong to different cultures. It is hardly surprising therefore to see that levels of resistance build up in some learners (Liu et al.) or to observe the frequent and highly disturbing practice of cyberflirting, possibly encouraged by the type of information expected in automatic personal profiles forms (Harrison, this volume; Chotel, 2012). Before interacting, for example, in a setting such as the Culture section of Livemocha , consensus elaborated among L2 professionals prior to the advent of the social web had it that it would be advisable to go through some ice-breaking self-presentation activi-ties. Similarly practitioners guiding learners towards learning in such a setting would want to know which community or what type of audi-ence is to be found in this section and precisely which tools are avail-able for the creation of a network of friends in an SNSLL site (Harrison). Not knowing who their audience are, learners in the Culture section of Livemocha are content to post photos and they interact little. There is no user generation of reusable content, which Zourou et al. ascribe to the weak ergonomy of the site, although we might argue that an equally convincing explanation lies with the absence of a community. Similarly, does peer evaluation, which is generally problematic anyway (Ware and O’Dowd, 2009; Mangenot, 2011) not also require a pre-existing basis of trust? All these limitations added to those documented, for instance, by Loiseau, Potolia and Zourou (2011) or Chotel and Mangenot (2011) are an invitation to query at worst whether SNSLL sites are simply unworthy of the attention of CALL researchers, at best whether the CALL commu-nity should invest time in shaping them to its needs as suggested by Zourou et al.

Whereas in SNSLL sites the social connections are to be built from scratch, which as this volume shows may produce questionable results, the situation is different in sites such as Facebook and Google Wave or SecondLife , studied by Fuchs et al., Reinhardt et al., Liaw et al. and


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Wigham et al. In the former study, Google Wave was used as a tool for telecollaboration between US and Taiwan-based trainee teachers. The project designers’ aim was to explore the participants’ use of Google Wave ,‘ beyond their pedagogical tasks’. However in spite of the fact that the participants were already experienced users of a SNS, had positive expectations of being able to network in the setting of this project and were given access privileges in order to network with a community of practice relevant to their future (run by the CALICO consortium), in the event very little social networking happened (7 instances out of 67 exchanges in the data). In this project, therefore, which produced types of interaction that the authors recognize was disappointing, it is diffi-cult to conclude that the SNS was used in any way differently from a conventional learning management system (LMS) such as Moodle, or helped create network effects or user-generated content.

In their chapter, Reinhardt et al. explore a different, indeed almost opposite situation, in that they deal with informal uses of SNS by a Chinese student studying for her doctorate in the USA ( Facebook and a Chinese SNS, RenRen ). Their main finding is that while this student carries on communicating with family and friends in China with RenRen , she also uses Facebook based on the network of acquaintances that she is beginning to build for herself in the USA, which contributes to her socialization and to the emergence of her identity as an Applied Linguistics doctoral student. Reinhardt et al. place much reliance on the notion of imagined community which, although not specific to social networking, provides a good metaphor for the feeling of belonging which may develop while engaging in SNS. In their contribution, Liaw et al. describe a telecollaboration project with intercultural learning objectives between France and Taiwan, comparing the parallel use by students of the ‘official’ site (involving specific tasks) and a Facebook group. This Facebook group was initially created by students them-selves with a view to preparing for physical visits by some participants to Taiwan or to France. This group therefore had specific objectives, distinct from the ‘official’ on-site tasks, even if communication in the group was not limited to that objective. Unsurprisingly the authors note that the language used on Facebook departs from academic English, a finding reminiscent of Kern’s (1995) in his study of chat. In their ambiv-alent conclusion they seem to accept – although with regret – that more informal uses of the language may develop without control or guidance from the teacher.

The case of SecondLife is slightly different, in that participation requires the use of an avatar, which inherently involves a role-playing


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dimension, thereby coloring the way encounters (some of which may enable the practice of the L2) are enacted. For Wigham and Chanier, the priority is to study identity construction as problematized by the use of avatars: they see SecondLife as a ‘networking environment’ only insofar as networking has been defined by Muijs, West and Ainscow (2010) as ‘at least two organisations working together for a common purpose’. As with Fuch et al.’s project, in the event, Wigham et al.’s students used SecondLife neither as a networking platform nor as a community-building tool. Nevertheless, by showing how, in SecondLife, user identity is bound up with the way users play with the appearance of their avatars and with gestural ways of making meaning, the authors offer a new perspective on identity construction, which several other contributors have seen as a key aspect of networking.

Next, the chapter by Lima et al. demonstrates that the use of tools that preceded the concept of Web 2.0, such as a forum, does allow networking to take place. The reasons for the success of the online reading group that the authors study may be linked to determiners that are socio-in-stitutional and psychopedagogical more than technological, such as the fact that the group is branded with the British Council’s reputation for quality, the balance between constraint and freedom managed by the group organizer and the ability to enter the community step by step, first as a simple reader, then as a commentator and eventually as an author.

Finally, let us offer for further attention a point which is underexplored in individual chapters, but which emerges forcibly from scrutinizing the piece as a whole: community building functions very differently depending on which social web application is used and it is important to be aware of this before planning to use SNS for language teaching and learning. A typology elaborated by an Internet sociologist Dominique Cardon helps to better understand this diversity. Cardon (2008) concep-tualizes social networking along two different dimensions, one of which he calls l’ext é riorisation de soi (self-display) and the other la simulation de soi (self-simulation) using five metaphors for forms (or ‘formats’) of visi-bility, explained below. He offers a matrix 3 with a horizontal dimension representing the tension between signs that refer to who the person is (gender, age, married status and so on) ... and those referring to what the individual does (their works, plans, productions)’, as well as a vertical dimension, representing the tension between what the individual is like in their real everyday environment, be it professional or social and what they project or simulate [ ... ], which allows them to express a part or a potential of the self’. In this scheme, SNSLL sites would appear to belong


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to the format expressed through the metaphor of ‘ Screening ’. Users are visible only through the information returned by a search engine that uses objective categories such as age, marital status and so on. They remain screened from others, revealing more personal aspects of them-selves in a piecemeal manner and only with interlocutors chosen by them. In a typical SNS, in contrast, the format would be akin to that of a ‘ Chiaroscuro ’, where participants expose to the light their intimate selves, daily activities and social lives, but only for the benefit of a close circle of friends, remaining obscured from onlookers in the wider world. SecondLife and World of Warcraft would seem to belong to a ‘ Lanterna Magica’ format where participants show up as avatars, which they endow with personal characteristics, yet dissociate their ‘real’ identity from the identity they take on in the virtual world. A fourth format 4 , ‘ Spotlight ’, whereby users display in full light and make easily acces-sible to all many of their character traits, their tastes and productions could be said to characterize the Online Reading Group (Lima et al.). In Spotlight formats,

[p]articipants allow many traits of their personalities to be visible, as well as their tastes and preferences and the content that they produce. Through content sharing these users create large networks of relationships that enable more frequent contacts and encounters with new people as well as the search for an audience. Photography ( Flickr ), music ( MySpace ), or video ( YouTube ) thus become a means of displaying one’s hobbies and skills and of communities based on shared content. (Cardon, 2008, n.p., our translation)

Forms of interaction

Most of the contributors to this work have priorities other than a focus on typologizing the second language (L2) online exchanges (or other productions) that may occur through use of the social web. The excep-tions are Gruba et al., who devote one section of their chapter to this and Zourou et al., who use such a typology as a criterion for their anal-ysis. Also, through the chapters, different views are held as to the mean-ings of ‘collaboration’, (human) ‘interactivity’, or ‘genre’. No consensus emerges, yet the real impact of different forms of interaction should not be ignored when aiming for a full understanding of L2 acquisition processes, whatever the setting. Mangenot (2008) in particular insists on the need for each pedagogical scenario to include a communication scenario, that is, a plan for the type of exchange aimed at. An important


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related question arises in the following section, which is the shaping – by certain applications of the social web – of productions or verbal interac-tions through genre: for a learner to have to adhere to a particular genre is of course a constraint, but can also be a form of scaffolding as long as the rules of the genre have already been understood by him or her.

In sum, it remains a principle that social learning of a language should be guided by tasks framed by specific communication expectations, set within an understanding of which genre is called for in a particular situ-ation. Before considering how task-related principles translate as far as the social web is concerned, we briefly revisit them in the context of non-networked online learning. According to Mangenot et al. (2009), the factor with most influence on online interactions is the general organization of the collective task. Communication within a small group tackling a common production task (Wigham et al.) is very different in character from that of a large group running a discussion (Lima et al.), or again from that between a professional or nonprofessional tutor and a learner in one-to-one exchanges (as is generally the case with SNSLL).

Are there, then, stable forms of the organization of the collective task? Mangenot et al. (2009) analyzed several online courses and identified four forms. The first is mutualization where learners give their point of view on a topic and read others’ productions, but do not interact with their peers. This form of learning can happen within very large groups without particular difficulty. With the second form, discussion , learners arranged in large or small groups must take account of others’ argu-ments and refer to them in their production. Moreover, discussion may lead to decision making. With both mutualization and discussion some researchers feel that ‘[i]nteractive participation occurs when participants build on each other’s contributions by making explicit or implicit refer-ences to each others’ messages’ (Bullen, 1997, p. 40). In these forms of work, researchers can then analyze the degree of interactivity of an online exchange. For outcomes produced collectively in groups of four or five, the terms cooperation and collaboration , as established by the CSCL community, remain useful ways of distinguishing between differing extents of task sharing. If the learners each take on a part of the overall task, then there is cooperation , whereas if they collectively negotiate all aspects of the production, then it is a case of collaboration .

Revisiting the chapters in light of these four definitions, it can be seen that many possibilities are illustrated: from situations where formal course tasks are set and implemented in SNS (Liaw et al.) to those where no formal demand is made and the structuring of the learning is left up to the learner (Reinhardt et al.), to others where learners navigate


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between formal tasks and informal activities with lesser (Liu et al.) or greater (Gruba et al.) degrees of self-determination. In spite of this variety, the degree of interactivity of the exchanges between members as formalized above may still be a useful criterion for characterizing the learning. Looking at many-to-many communication as it takes place in the Online Reading Group (ORG) of Lima et al. and in the Culture section of Livemocha (Zourou et al.), the former type of communication could be characterized as discussion , whereas the latter could be assimi-lated to a form of mutualization . The chapter by Wigham et al. presents a form of group work which the authors call a ‘macro task’, having all the features of collaboration , including a negotiated joint production (an architectural design).

So it does appear that conceptualizations of online learning gener-ated by earlier online experiences are stable enough to provide a frame for thinking about the social web. Yet they need to be refined to take account of the activities of learners repurposing set tasks (like the partic-ipants in Lima et al.’s project ‘developing an evolving open tool for writing skills enhancement’, this volume) or those in Liu et al.’s study, discussing hosting plans for visits and ‘successfully accomplish[ing] the tasks of arranging trips’.) One area for future research liable to further the work started by this book could be a revisiting of the shape of tasks and the nature of scaffolding in environments where informality is the cultural norm and spaces for collective decision making on the learning process (for example, a student-designed ‘corner’ of the forum in Lima et al., a student-created Facebook group in Liaw et al.) can be procured with one click or one tap.

Genres

In the conclusion of their chapter, Fuchs et al. suggest that genre-based pedagogy should be used with social web projects, echoing Thorne and Reinhardt (2008). It is therefore helpful at this point to revisit our understanding of the notion of genre. Bronckart et al. (1985) have used a Bakhtinian framework to show that genres are the product of finalized human activities taking place in social contexts using various communication tools. Genres therefore become stable in different ways, according to very diverse contexts, modes of communication and ulti-mate purposes. They progressively acquire a number of formal features which discourse analysis can describe. Thus they embody dimensions of both guidance and of normativity (that is, of respect for what is consid-ered appropriate and inappropriate in a given setting). Asking whether


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a communication tool may generate a genre, Mourlhon-Dallies (2007) answers negatively:

Discussion forums do not in our view constitute a genre. Discussion forums on the environment are very different from forums for aficio-nados of miniature wargaming or for football fans. Hence we consider that the communication setting known as ‘discussion forum’ is in fact traversed by various discursive genres, associated with communi-ties with online writing practices and that reasons for attending the forum may be on opposite poles to each other (such as game playing, socializing, debating, or information exchange). (Mourlhon-Dallies, 2007, p. 12, our translation)

Following Mourlhon-Dallies, we urge caution when considering Fuchs et al.’s suggestion that instructors using social networking tools in courses should ‘provide opportunities for students to analyze and apply models through genre analyses as way to prepare students for autonomous use of the tools’. If this is interpreted as an idea for enriching the interac-tion, then we would point out that Google Wave and Facebook simply amount to combinations of quasi-synchronous and asynchronous tools and as argued above, no tool can of itself be responsible for creating a genre. However, if trainee professionals are to take advantage of the opportunity to insert themselves into an online community of experts, then based on Fuchs et al.’s results, teachers should go beyond facili-tating the boundary crossing and actually provide the sort of genre scaf-folding that newbies need to know about in order to overcome shyness and find an appropriate ‘voice’ with which to take their first steps as ‘insider’ practitioners (Wegerif, 1998).

Mourlhon-Dallies’ observation above, then, applies today to SNS and more particularly to Facebook, which is a sort of ‘Swiss Army knife’ of communication, used for purposes and by communities that are immensely diverse. Other applications of the social web, in contrast, belong to very specific genres and constrain interaction more or less tightly. One extreme example is that of online games such as World of Warcraft (analyzed by Thorne and Fisher, 2012), which has a very constrained participation format. We may hypothesize that an analysis of interactions between players when they form alliances to bring down tough enemies would reveal recurrences enabling researchers to charac-terize them as an interactive genre 5 . Other strong generic constraints are present in articles in the collaboratively edited encyclopedia Wikipedia or in some types of discussion forums. For Wikipedia, Ollivier (2007) has


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shown that the encyclopaedic genre that characterizes it affords both guidance and constraints to learners trying to compose new entries. Similarly, Hannah and De Nooy (2003) have demonstrated that learners of French wishing to integrate into the political forums of the daily newspaper Le Monde , were required to accept the rules of the genre, in this case to join the political debate straightaway and to refrain from introducing themselves as coming into the forum in order to practice their French. Again, websites linked to tourism, such as Tripadvisor , provide settings where learners can publish reviews of their favorite restaurants in adherence to that particular genre, which they may learn through prior reading of existing critiques on the site 6 . In all these cases the idea is to conform to the format and to abide by the norms (linked to the genre) that are established by the sites. This more structured facet of the social web seems profitable for the practice of an L2, insofar as it provides a kind of guided immersion allowing non-native speakers the opportunity to appropriate the rules of genre and to negotiate them with the community within which they wish to integrate.

Learning settings and formal or informal of learning

In the Introduction to the work, Lamy and Zourou state that

For it to be possible to claim that ‘social networking’ is going on, we claim that it is necessary to embrace the interactional dynamics occurring in unrestricted situations, beyond formal, institution-led forms of interaction, including those offered through various peda-gogical scenarios.

Thus they establish two constraints: first, the opening of the commu-nication to extra-institutional interactants and second, the adoption of forms of learning that include greater or lesser degrees of informality, that is, not controlled or only partly controlled by the teachers and the institution.

Throughout the work, we see many examples of the opening up of communication channels to external interactants. Exceptions are Wigham et al., whose aim is not principally to network; Liaw et al. in spite of the use of a Facebook group and Fuchs et al. apart from the registration of the students on the CALICO Wave discussion list. Clearly in SNSLLs, opening up the community in these ways leads to mixed results and to encounters that are not always as fruitful as one might wish, for the reasons mentioned earlier. In the forum studied by Lima et al., opening


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up the group is much more successful, though again the community is key, in this case a homogeneous one, because it is limited to professional teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Illustrating yet another form of opening, Reinhardt’s Chinese doctoral student opens up her community to people she has met in ‘real’ life.

The other constraint mentioned earlier is the loosening up of institu-tional control. In Wigham et al.’s project the degree of control is very high where the pedagogical scenario is concerned, but it is lower as far as the development of the interactions goes – a typical feature of what we have defined earlier as collaboration.

Both Reinhardt et al. and Lima et al. deal with informal practices where the question of control does not arise: the former authors describe a private use of a SNS and the latter presents a situation where participa-tion is on a purely voluntary basis. As mentioned above, Liaw et al. seem to show some reluctance to lose control, faced with forms of communi-cation on Facebook which were much freer in character than exchanges on the university platform. We would argue instead that projects such as theirs offer the opportunity to fully support a language learner’s need to become fluent in several different registers (Thorne, 2010). As for SNSLL sites, three of the four projects dealing with these environments relied on the principle that these sites are specifically designed for autono-mous learning. The fourth, Liu et al.’s, involved teachers setting peda-gogical tasks, which seems to go against the nature of SNSLLs. However, the need to complete tasks which would be checked by their teachers caused their participants to engage, perhaps in a more focused way than would have been the case in a freer exchange, with the particular feed-back mechanisms available in such environments, thus providing some research data on this much underresearched aspect of networking for language learning.

In conclusion, the social web does seem to afford ‘unrestricted situa-tions, beyond formal, institution-led forms of interaction’, as claimed by Lamy and Zourou in the Introduction. Nevertheless, as we argued earlier, formal task-based learning and the scaffolding that supports it remain highly valued in the SLA and CALL communities (for example, the very abundant literature on telecollaboration is quasi unanimous about the need to set up learning tasks if one wants to be certain that exchanges happen). Yet when we use the word task we also imply deadlines, tutoring, assessment and therefore some form of control or another. Learners want to enjoy the freedom that social networks promise to offer them. They also want results. How to transcend this apparent contradiction? At least three different ways forward may be envisaged.


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Class-based exploitation of informal practices from the social web, for ●

example, using SNSLLs or online games in class, in the line of Thorne and Reinhardt’s (2008) suggested bridging activities 7 . Socket (2012) has his non-native English students create blogs where they are asked to ‘report on their experiences of using English in the course of their leisure activities online, in particular activities with a connection to that language’ (n.p., our translation). One limitation of this approach lies with the fact that not all learners practice online exchanges in L2 and attempting to create such practices for class purposes then incurs a loss of ecological authenticity. Borrowing from project-based pedagogy, one might set up small-group ●

collaborative projects to be carried out with social web tools. This could be done by leaving the choice of tools to the learners and by leaving a margin of manoeuvre as to the process to be used. With this type of approach, the less the autonomy of the learners, the greater the role to be played by tutors and vice versa, an important principle if one is to avoid failure, given how demanding online collaboration can be, as Mangenot et al. (2006) remind us. The third approach involves introducing learners to sites where a ●

certain amount of structuring of verbal productions and even genres models is already available, as Ollivier (2007) or Hannah and de Nooy (2003) have done, see earlier. In such situations, again, teachers need to play a scaffolding role which does not limit their stance to being the recipients of productions, but which requires of them that they support learners in such a way that productions have the best possible chances of being accepted by members of the community for whom they are intended. As Thorne (2010, p. 155) has noted, evalu-ation in this case is no longer dependent upon the teacher: ‘For the participants themselves, success is measured by their growing ability to meaningfully contribute to ongoing activity’.

In these recommendations the concern is with constructing pedago-gies around the tension that has generally been perceived as opposing the freedom, informality and conviviality of the social web to the more structured and controlling world of formally presented teaching and assessed learning. However, we end with this suggestion: rather than a tension between the opposite poles of formality and informality, we see a more fluid picture in which formal and informal processes are perpetually combining and recombining, as when teachers or peers help learners prepare for a task, then chat with them after comple-tion, or as users of Wikipedia can experience by toggling across the


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Article , Talk and Edit tabs. Specifically, we see a relationship between four elements: formal learning /informal learning and formal settings /informal settings . Typically, formal learning in a formal setting is the situation of a tutor-supported face-to-face or online classroom, while an example of formal learning in an informal setting might be a tutor-sup-ported Facebook group or assessed participation in a student-run forum (informal – or accidental – learning in both types of settings being too commonplace an experience to warrant exemplification). Some learning experiences may involve two or more of these elements, possibly with a clear boundary between elements (if, say, one is monitored/assessed and the other not), or possibly within a continuum (for example, if a student’s participation in a SNS is unmonitored, but there is a formal mark for the account that she/he writes of his/her experiences there). The potential range of learner experiences is so vast – and so dynamic in its continuing expansion – that rather than asking ‘is online social networking good for language learning?’ we conclude with an urgent plea for a new approach, looking at social networking-based settings as configurations of formal and informal learning opportunities whose benefits researchers can assess and which practitioners can orchestrate in a variety of fluid ways.

Notes

1 . We use this phrase in preference to ‘social media’ as it helps avoid debates on what is understood by ‘media’.

2 . Echanger Pour Apprendre en Ligne http://w3. u-grenoble3.fr/epal/ 3 . Available at http://www.internetactu.net/2008/02/01/ le-design-de-la-visibilite-

un-essai-de-typologie-du-web-20/ 4 . Cardon proposes a fifth format, not discussed here, which he terms the

‘Post-It’, typified by Twitter. 5 . Thorne et al. state that they intend to pursue this line of analysis, but have not

done so to date. 6 . An even more popular example is the microblogging site Vie de Merde, also with

‘rules’ of the genre given on the site, where users joke about the small problems of everyday life, for comment or rating by others. www.viedemerde.fr

7 . ‘Bridging activities attempt to synergistically unite students’ digital vernacular interests with instructor guidance to gain a better understanding of the struc-tural, functional and pragmatic dimensions of living language use’ (Thorne, 2010, p. 157).


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http://w3.u-grenoble3.fr/epal/

http://www.internetactu.net/2008/02/01/le-design-de-la-visibiliteun-un-essai-de-typologie-du-web-20/

http://www.viedemerde.fr

http://www.internetactu.net/2008/02/01/le-design-de-la-visibiliteun-un-essai-de-typologie-du-web-20/

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235

Index

academia.edu, 33application, 1, 2, 4, 17, 56, 77,

117–22, 137–8, 153, 177, 201–3, 205, 207, 209

Babbel, 3, 6, 78, 139, 182–4, 187–8, 191

blog, 15, 119, 122, 123, 126, 127, 131, 193, 212

boundary, 4, 199boundary-crossing, 56, 72, 200, 209Busuu, 6, 78, 100, 139, 142–6, 154–7,

182–4, 185–8, 190Busuutalk, 144

CALL, see computer assisted language learning

certificate, 167, 186–7certification, 192CMC, see computer mediated

communicationcommunity, 3, 6, 7, 11–17, 19–20,

22–3, 25–30, 32–3, 58, 60, 63, 67, 78–82, 84, 86, 96, 97, 101, 103, 106, 107, 110, 113–20, 127, 129, 132–4, 137–9, 153, 155, 156, 160–2, 168, 174, 180–2, 184–6, 189, 192, 199–200, 203–12

imagined community, 12–15, 25, 29, 204

language learning community, 6, 101

learning community, 153, 174community-building, 3, 35, 197–9,

202, 205computer assisted language learning,

1–4, 77–8, 80–1, 96–7, 117, 119, 121, 124, 175, 197, 203, 211

computer mediated communication, 1, 15, 34, 79, 101, 105, 117–18, 121, 123, 125–8, 130, 132–3, 201

computer supported collaborative learning, 80, 197, 207

content, 3–4, 6, 17, 19, 25–6, 28, 32, 35, 36, 53, 55, 60, 63, 77, 80, 86, 88, 94–5, 118–19, 134, 137, 139, 140, 144–9, 151, 153–6, 201–2, 204, 206

content management, 85, 95content re-use, 86, 95, 203content sharing, 79, 137, 206user-created content, 3user-generated content, 77, 139,

155, 202, 204CSCL, see computer supported

collaborative learningcustomization, 88

digital identities, see identitydigital literacy, see literacy

English café, 151ESL Café, 139

Facebook, 5–6, 11–12, 17–29, 33, 39, 57, 64, 67–8, 72, 82, 85, 87–8, 102, 105, 110–11, 113, 116, 131, 139, 141, 159, 163, 166–76, 184, 203–4, 208–11, 213

FB, see Facebookfeedback, 36–7, 55, 80, 87–9, 94–6,

99, 103, 109, 112, 115, 122, 125, 143–4, 146–7, 149, 153–7, 176, 178, 180, 184–5, 189–92, 199, 211

filter, see socialfriend, 11–12, 17–29, 31, 35, 38, 78,

86–7, 95, 103, 110–12, 127, 142, 144–57, 167–8, 170, 176, 182–3, 187, 193, 203–4, 206

friending, 3, 24, 26, 31, 35, 38, 57Friendster, 101

GW, Google Wave, 6, 118–19, 121–32, 134, 200, 203–4, 209–10


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236 Index

identity, 12–17, 19–20, 22–35, 39, 41–4, 48, 50, 54, 100–2, 104, 106–8, 112–13, 123, 158–9, 166, 169, 173, 176, 191, 198–9, 204–6

digital identity, 104, 107identity announcement, 32identity construction, 5, 31–3, 205identity development, 5, 11, 16, 46identity formation, 100–2, 112identity marker, 17identity management, 100–1, 105,

113, 116identity performance, 77identity placement, 32identity practice(s), 11imagined identity, 14

imagined community, see communityimagined identity, see identityimpression management, 77, 100,

104, 115informal, 7, 61, 63, 92, 96, 160–2,

173–6, 189, 192, 199, 204, 210, 213

informal activity (activities), 208informal context(s), 5, 126, 152,

160–1informal learning, 60, 72–3, 94, 120,

152, 159, 161, 175, 197, 202, 213informal practice(s), 120, 211–12informal process(es), 178, 212

informality, 133, 208, 210, 212interaction(s), 3–7, 12, 29, 31–44,

48, 50, 52, 54, 59, 60–1, 65, 71, 77–81, 83, 85–97, 99, 102–10, 112–15, 118–19, 120, 126, 130, 133–4, 138, 145, 153–4, 159–60, 162–3, 166, 171, 173–5, 178, 180–2, 187–92, 197, 198, 201–2, 204, 206–7, 209–10, 211

iTalki, 100, 139

L2 acquisition, see second language acquisition

Lang-8, 100language exchange site, 78language learning community, see

communitylearning, 1–7, 9, 11, 13–16, 29, 32,

34–6, 40, 47, 55–6, 58–63, 66, 69, 70–3, 77–80, 84, 86, 87, 92–7,

100–24, 126–7, 131–5, 137–42, 144–7, 149–56, 158–61, 163, 173–5, 177–84, 186–93, 197–205, 207–11, 213

networked learning, 198social learning, 73, 80, 87, 94, 207

learning community, see communitylike, 18, 25–6, 78, 82, 88–9, 98, 166,

170–1, 176, 192liking, 3, 18, 57literacy, 12, 14, 15, 16, 29, 57, 63, 158,

180, 201digital literacy, 102, 180, 200new literacy, 181, 193

Livemocha, 3, 6, 77–88, 94–6, 99–116, 139, 143, 145–9, 155–7, 182–92, 199, 203, 208

marketplace, 78media, see social mediamediation, 100–1, 103, 105, 113,

159–60, 173–4, 178, 197, 201mediational, 160mediator, 106, 178–9, 182microblogging, 213multiliteracy, 192MySpace, 39, 206

network, 6, 7, 17, 24–5, 31, 36, 42–3, 49, 54, 56, 64, 66–7, 86–7, 95, 104, 110, 114, 120, 126–7, 132, 137–40, 142, 144, 146–7, 154, 156–7, 169, 177, 191, 193

network-based, 2network dynamics, 5, 56network effects, 4, 36, 60, 63, 67,

79, 94, 202–4, 210networked learning, see learningnetworking, 1–5, 7, 11, 15, 17, 25–6,

29, 31, 33, 35, 42, 54, 56, 58–61, 63–6, 68, 72–3, 77–80, 84, 88, 94, 96, 100, 104, 107, 117–20, 123, 126, 127–9, 131–2, 134, 144–5, 147–8, 151–2, 159–61, 163, 166, 171, 174–5, 177, 197, 198–205, 209–11, 213

networking environment, 31, 42, 198, 205

networking tool, 3–5, 56, 72, 119, 134, 159, 174–5, 209


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Index 237

new literacy, see literacynewsfeed, 21, 31, 87Ning, 124–7, 131, 139notification, 86–9, 94–5

off-task, 61, 72openness, 4, 60, 68, 192, 202

Palabea, 3participation, 4, 15–17, 26, 28–9,

31–2, 35, 40–1, 44, 49–50, 54–5, 59, 60, 66–9, 72, 95, 119, 134, 181, 184, 202, 204, 207, 209, 211, 213

participatory, 15, 60, 63, 138, 152, 158, 193

peer, 37, 50, 79, 80–1, 86, 88, 92–4, 101, 106, 113–14, 124, 126, 137, 152, 154, 170, 177, 189–90, 207, 212

peer assessment, 189, 191–2, 199peer evaluation, 179, 203peer expert, 6peer feedback, 122, 125

photo-sharing, 186points, (in reward systems), 184,

185–6, 189, 191, 192presence, see socialprivacy, 87, 103, 111–12profile, 6, 17, 31, 33, 36, 86–7, 91–2,

95, 100–4, 106–16, 120–1, 137–8, 142, 146, 150, 189, 192, 203

recommendation (systems), 3, 6, 78RenRen, 5, 18–21, 25–8, 204re-use, 60, 63, 68, 86, 94

see also contentreview (of submissions by users), 157,

183, 184–5, 189, 191, 199reviewer, 189reward, 184, 185

score, 184, 189second language acquisition, 34, 90,

118–19, 121, 138, 154, 178, 198, 206, 211

Second Life, 31, 35–9, 40–1, 43–5, 48, 50, 52, 54, 78, 160

SL, see Second LifeSLA, see second language acquisitionsocial feature, 200social filter, 87, 95social interaction, 3, 29, 33, 65, 78,

96, 103–7, 113–14, 138, 178, 181, 202

social learning, 73, 80, 87, 94, 207social media, 1–3, 5–6, 56, 77, 101,

161, 174, 180, 197, 199, 213social presence, 174social reading, 5, 59, 72social software, 77, 118social web, 1–4, 7, 77, 201, 203,

205–12sociocultural, 15, 105, 138, 154, 158,

169, 173, 178–80, 190, 198socio-digital, 2socio-experiential, 160socio-literacy, 29sociotechnical, 1, 77–8, 80, 97space, (digital area), 6, 16, 28, 33,

35–9, 56, 58, 60, 62, 67–8, 72, 78–9, 81, 84, 87–8, 95, 99, 101–2, 106, 113, 155, 159, 160, 190–1, 199, 200, 208

networked (or networking) space, 1, 5, 54, 78, 80, 96

social(ization) space, 138, 152status (on a social networking site),

17–21, 25–6, 29, 57, 87, 92, 111

tag, 26, 86tagging, 3, 60, 78, 86trust, 103, 106, 110–14, 189,

192, 203Twitter, 4, 39, 67, 83, 139, 141, 213

user-created, user-generated, see content

Wall, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 25, 33, 64, 88, 131, 158, 170

Web 2.0, 2, 4, 6, 15, 60–1, 63, 68, 72, 77–80, 86, 88, 94, 99, 101–3, 113, 118, 122, 125, 127, 134, 137–9, 152–4, 158, 182, 201–2, 205

wiki, 15, 119, 126, 127, 193


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Documents

Social Networking for Language Education ||