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| CMC - Afifah (Question 1) |
| Mar 25, 2009 |
Question 1 (Summary)
Title : Student Interaction through Bulletin Boards and Discussion Lists
Author : Richard Watson Todd
(King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi)
A) OBJECTIVE/PURPOSE
- There are two main purposes of this research paper, namely to compare the length of communication, complexity and patterns of interaction of students from four universities in Asia through two asynchronous communication media; bulletin boards and e-mail discussion lists.
- The second objective of this paper is to examine the causes of problems that occurred throughout the project and also to provide some solutions.
B) RESEARCH QUESTION
- Which medium has lengthier contributions, the bulletin boards or the e-mail discussion lists?
- Is there any similarity or difference of the two media in terms of syntactic complexity?
- What are the patterns of interaction produced by the students?
C) SAMPLE
- The sample for this research is 76 students from four different countries; Thailand, Japan, China and Australia. These students come from five classes of different universities.
D) PROCEDURE
1. The researcher put a message on a discussion list for English teachers in Asia after he decided to gather the international students that he taught with students from other countries in order to make them communicate.
2. He got four responses from interested teachers who are teaching in Thailand, Japan, China and Australia.
3. The project involved 76 students from five classes including 23 students from the researcher’s class at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT).
4. All the five teachers agreed to divide the project into two parts; part 1 requires students to communicate via bulletin boards while they will be asked to take part in interacting through e-mail discussion lists in part 2.
5. In November and December 2001, a class site was created on Nicenet (www.nicenet.org) which needed students to use bulletin boards as a means of communication with each other. The initial topics for this task were about the way of learning English.
6. In January and February 2002, students were required to take part in e-mail discussion lists using Yahoo groups (groups.yahoo.com). The topics for this task were left open primarily and appropriate subjects or issues educed from students at suitable time.
E) DURATION
- The researcher took four months to observe the students’ communication via bulletin boards and e-mail discussion lists.
F) METHODOLOGY
- The research methodology of this research chosen by the researcher is qualitative. He gathered the data through students’ contributions and participations in these two tasks. After that, he analysed the data received in terms of the length of contributions, syntactic complexity of contributions as well as various aspects of discourse and interaction.
- Furthermore, the researcher restricted the data to only 10 actively participated students who have most contributions in the two computer-mediated communication (CMC) media.
G) FINDINGS
- There are three major concerns of this paper and all of them showed the comparison between bulletin boards and e-mail discussion lists. Firstly, the researcher compared these two media in terms of length of contributions while the second aim is syntactic complexity and the last criterion is to compare those two through the students’ discourse and interaction.
- The first concern was measured in three ways; counting the average number of words in the messages, the average number of syntactic constituents and the average number of T-unit per message. The findings showed that the e-mail discussion lists are roughly three times more than the bulletin boards in terms of the length of contributions for all three criteria.
- Secondly, the same three means of measurement were used to see syntactic complexity of both asynchronous CMC media. The findings proved that there is a great similarity between bulletin boards and e-mail discussion lists and no significant difference shown by a T-test.
- The final criterion compared discourse and interaction produced by students throughout this project. In order to see the way the messages were linked, the researcher examined the insertion of prompts from starter messages in students’ replies. He also investigated the extent to which the students replied to other messages and which other messages they replied to in order to get the messages’ purposes. In addition, to observe the overall patterns of communication within each media, the researcher completed the analysis by recognising several functions typical of CMC communication like greetings, introductions of self or signatures and farewells.
- The findings gained from the third comparison showed a depressing image of interaction in these two media as large majority of messages were replies to the starter messages created by the teachers. This situation ended the expectation of the researcher to enhance student-to-student communication because this project proved that students only communicated with their teachers.
H) REACTION
- The reactions produced by the researcher are to stimulate student-to-student interaction in CMC and the timing to set up international CMC projects should coincide.
Question 2
Question 3
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posted by PiNk ButTeRfLy @ 11:01 PM  |
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