Teacher Immediacy and Participation in Online Remedial American Culture Tests in the EFL Context of Taiwan

Abstract

The past L2 studies had emphasized that verbal teacher immediacy (TI) can be considered as an effective strategy to shorten psychological distance between teachers and students, and the use of TI may increase students' perceptions of online classroom community, course satisfaction, and willingness to communicate or discuss online. However, there is little information about the processes and difficulties, and the role of teacher immediacy in the adoption of the online test-writing software to generate online quiz remedial test items. The aim of this study was to conduct an action research to explore how the author as a teacher of American Culture implemented an online test-writing system (i.e., Question Writer 3.5 Basic hereafter QW) via Moodle in a central college in Taiwan, and to investigate the difficulties in increasing students' participations in online remedial tests from September 2010 to February 2011. The subjects of the study were composed of 50 college sophomore students studying in the Applied Foreign Language Department at Ta-Hwa Institute of Technology. The subjects had an American Culture class two hours per week on Mondays plus one additional hour for group discussion on Wednesday mornings. Three low and high frequent users of Moodle were interviewed to elicit their responses to the uses of online remedial tests and their participation via Moodle. The results of the study indicated that the uses of verbal TI offline (i.e ., in-class and consulting-hour instructions) and online (i.e. in online remedial tests) via e-learning systems (i.e., Moodle) were crucial to influence students' performances and participations during the online remedial tests. Moreover, it was found that 76% of the students (N= 38) enrolled in the online American Culture course while among them, nine students (25%) did not take any online tests, It was noted that eight participants (21%) with a positive perception of teacher immediacy were encouraged to take the remedial tests though they had passed the online tests. Another significant finding was that the lack of in-service teacher education training of the uses of QW software and insufficient help from professionals and tutor students via Moodle were two main sources of the difficulties in 54 implementing the online remedial tests. Besides, high frequent users of MoodIe reported that they were satisfied with teacher immediacy (e.g., the reminders of online remedial tests, and immediate feedback via mails), and most frequently used TIs included interactive immediacy indicators (i.e., invitation) and affective immediacy indicators such as paralanguage (i.e., punctuation) and non-verbal TIs such as words'/ background colors. Nevertheless, low TI was perceived by low frequent users of MoodIe due to a lack of the opening systems for student-posting and student-to-student discussions. and time limits online at home. Finally, educational implications and suggestions to reduce test anxiety and to enhance teacher growth were given.