Abstract
This study investigates the effectiveness of different online language teaching practices by comparing participation of four groups of learners and teachers in two tasks in asynchronous discussion forums. The tasks are carried out in the context of an online English as a Foreign Language (EFL) B2 course at a Catalan university. Teacher posts to the forums are analysed qualitatively with the aim of identifying different types of teacher posts; we then run inferential statistics to compare student participation data in classrooms with different course completion rates and in two types of task. Findings indicate that when teachers participate in forum discussions as peers and ask questions that generate discussion, they are more likely to encourage learners to participate, a pattern that seems to emerge more clearly in classrooms with higher course completion rates.
Highlights
Online language teaching employs a range of online tools for specific communicative purposes
For research questions 1 and 2, which focus on the learners, we compare their participation in the two tasks and the two different types of classrooms
In order to address research questions 3 and 4, which focus on the teacher, we analyse the type and amount of teacher posts in terms of the tasks and in terms completion rates
Summary
Online language teaching employs a range of online tools for specific communicative purposes. The present study focuses on one of these, namely the asynchronous discussion forum, which in the educational context studied in this article plays a central role throughout the course. Earlier research on forums focused on their use within online courses for content subjects (e.g. Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 1999; 2001; Meyer, 2003; Zhu, 2006), where the learners’ linguistic competence is not a core competence. This study explores discussions amongst learners of a second language and their teachers, in which communication in the second language is an essential pedagogical aim of the course. The rationale for choosing the forum space and analysing its discussion patterns is to help unveil effective online teaching practices in forum spaces used for language learning
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