Abstract
Vietnamese high school students have few opportunities to use English outside class and in class they are often reluctant to speak in class. This paper describes and explains the students’ willingness to communicate (WTC) and relates this to varied perceptions of social presence. Eighteen high school students in Vietnam took a six-week online course using Facebook and Skype. They were interviewed individually before and after the course about their experiences, focusing on their perceptions of their own WTC. The results show that the students were more willing to use English spontaneously in the online environment in contexts where they perceived that they had less social presence. Text and audio chat were felt to be less face threatening than video chat, and consequently, students were more willing to speak in conditions of lower social presence. It can be concluded that the more social presence students felt they had in the online environment, the less their WTC. This was true for both synchronous and asynchronous online environments. Allowing students to control their social presence in online communication can embolden shy students and increase their WTC.
Highlights
In Vietnam, English is a foreign language, so there is little opportunity for students to practice English outside the classroom
The results show that the students were more willing to use English spontaneously in the online environment in contexts where they perceived that they had less social presence
Students did not perceive that the online environment was less inhibiting or a safer environment in which to express themselves than face-to-face classroom situations, which is what other studies concluded
Summary
In Vietnam, English is a foreign language, so there is little opportunity for students to practice English outside the classroom. Students have little interaction in English, and so have little opportunity to develop communicative competence, fluency and confidence in English in negotiation for meaning (Long, 1996). This study describes student experiences of an online summer school course, designed and delivered by the first author to give Vietnamese high school students an opportunity to develop their spoken and written English proficiency through interaction on Skype and Facebook. We are interested in seeing whether and how working online, with the disinhibitory effects of limited social presence (Cunningham, 2011), affects the students’ willingness to communicate (wtc) in English, since some researchers have found Asian students to be passive and reticent (Cao, 2011; Shao & Gao, 2016; Zhong, 2013). We ask: How does students’ willingness to communicate relate to varying conditions of social presence during an online course?
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