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| CMC - Rika Diana (Question 1) |
| Mar 25, 2009 |
Question 1 (Summary)
Title : Asynchronous Forums in English for Academic Purposes(EAP): Assessment Issues
Author : Sara Kol and Miriam Schcolnik
(Tel Aviv University)
A) OBJECTIVE/PURPOSE
- The objective of this study is to supply a space where the students can contribute in the text discussion while encouraging critical thoughts in communicating with English plus gaining authentic scene for relevant writing experience.
B) RESEARCH QUESTION
These are the research questions that guided this research
1. Are reflection and interaction appropriate and suitable to evaluate student participation?
2. How do students react towards the forums?
3. Does contributing to the forums change the student’s writing style in terms of language complexity after one semester?
C) SAMPLE
- The correspondents for this study were 156 students from four advanced-level courses which are English for Mathematics and Science Computer, English for Engineering, plus two sections of English for Biology scheduled as 4 hours per week in a semester.
D) PROCEDURE AND METHODOLOGY
- In order to conduct this study, initially four tutorials were formed as guidelines to elaborate the aspect of reflection and interaction as well as to teach necessary language markers for those functions. The tutorials elaborate on how to agree and disagree, voicing out or supporting certain opinion and also interact with each other. They were taught and put online at the beginning of the semester.
- 156 students were involved in this study which came from four advanced-level courses namely English for Mathematics and Computer Science, English for Engineering and two sections of English for Biology scheduled as 4 hours per week in a semester.
- The courses are in mixed mode type which conducted either in the usual classroom or in the computer learning centre. Every class will be distributed with a number of homework assignments which requires them to use a site designed especially for each courses for the Internet-based tasks. One part of the course curriculum is instruction and practice of digital literacy such as skimming a digital article. Another part is the integrally graded forums which took place the text-based homework questions. Each student will be emailed their grade and teacher responses on the contribution after the forums are closed.
- The students need to write in four forums open for two weeks which categorized into two categories. One category is the practice forum in which they do their practice early on before receiving any messages to write in the forum. Another category is the real forums which consist of three forums. These two forums are designed as to observe the comparison between the two. The forums discussion participated by everyone in the class and each of the forums have their own guideline according to the necessity of that particular course. Basically, the students need to response to the forums based on their ideas as well as to others statement academically; formal language. The evaluation of the students is calculated through the quality of the messages evidently in the reflection of specific and general points including their reaction towards others. The objective for the evaluation is to study whether the students understand the text thoroughly, voiced out their opinion and agree to them.
E) DURATION
F) FINDINGS
- The findings for this study is 76 percent claimed that the tutorial on the forum were very helpful. A large percentage agrees if the forum were to be included in the courses. In addition, 70 percent of the students regard grading the forum as a motivation for them to post message regularly. The same percentage felt that they have improved their writing skills along the way. Less than half of the percentage commented that the forum is aiding them in understanding the text.
- The discussion is divided into two categories which is one the quantitative and another one is qualitative. The qualitative findings deal with several characteristics which one of them is academic registers. Students are required to use formal language in writing up the forum which means no abbreviations are allowed in the forum. Simultaneously the students need to give feedback to their peers hence resulted in the mixture of formal and informal language accompanied by emoticon as well as exclamation points. They have grasp a widely area of academic vocabulary including adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions in which they are intentionally incorporated with their messages writing in the forum. Secondly, the forum is interacted explicitly and constructively whereby most of the times students start with positive feedback before criticizing a statement. Thirdly, the forum is formed with various questions and need the students to answer them. Fourthly, audience awareness is clearly depicted in the forum based on the messages posted. Fifthly, other information from extra reading and peer participation are included in the messages.
- On the contrary, the quantitative findings deal with length of contribution which calculated by words that are written in a message. Next, extent of interaction looks into the thread-opening messages whether is being answered or the average number of replies to it. It is concluded that the responses that submitted by the students are according to the interesting level of a topic.
Question 2
Question 3 |
posted by PiNk ButTeRfLy @ 10:50 PM  |
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