7. ESL STUDENTS' COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION PRACTICES: CONTEXT CONFIGURATION

7. ESL STUDENTS' COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION PRACTICES: CONTEXT CONFIGURATION
Dong-Shin Shin
Language Learning & TechnologyVol.10, No.3, September 2006, pp. 65-84

Summary: This paper examines how context is configured in ESL students’ language learning practices through computer-mediated communication (CMC), how the students jointly constructed the context of their CMC activities through interactional patterns and norms, and how configured affordances within the CMC environment mediated their learning experiences. It was conducted in an intermediate adult ESL class with 16 students at a university in the northeastern United States attending a program designed to help international students and scholars adjust to American life and to develop English proficiency by focusing on oral communication. The researcher attended both CMC and face-to-face (F2F) class meetings without being involved in any of their activities and observed the teacher managing chat sessions without logging onto the chat program. Recursive patterns through triangulation of field notes, transcripts of recorded F2F class meetings, interview data, and electronically saved chat data were employed. The analytical categories include constructed interactional patterns and norms, configured affordances regarding the CMC environment, and utilizations of CMC activities for linguistic, academic, and social goals. These analytical categories are based on interactional sociolinguistics (Goffman, 1959; Gumperz, 1982; Scollon & Scollon, 2001), and ecological perspectives of language learning and language socialization (Kramsch, 2002; Leather & van Dam, 2003; van Lier, 2000).
In conclusion, this study propose that the context for any learning activity is an interconnected relationship among contextual elements of the learning environment that learners configure for learning tasks. The ways in which learning contexts are jointly configured within group dynamics by participants illustrates their identities/subjectivities regarding co-constructed norms, rules, and goals, as well as specific interests and concerns embedded in their language socialization processes through CMC. Ecological perspectives are not only concerned with participants' online lives, but their offline lives, too. Examining how language learners carry their interests and life stories over to online language learning spaces requires more research into how online and offline lives of participants are interconnected, while shaping affordances regarding their CMC activities (Lam, 2000, 2004; Leander & McKim, 2003; Ware, 2005).

Relevance: Most of the research about CMC in ESL instruction focuses on the learners’ language proficiency after the implementation of CMC in the classroom instruction; however, the study of using CMC in ESL or EFL instruction should be expanded to the broader context apart from the learners’ output behaviour into how the students constructed the context of their CMC activities and how CMC environment mediated their learning experiences. Since the learners come from multiple social roles, they posses different approached to their CMC activities. Its findings suggest constraints to consider in planning CMC tool use in their teaching practices. Class size is also a critical factor in having productive CMC discussions. This point emerges from the observation that a large group of chat participants generated multiple strands of dialogue, creating confusion and frustration. It reflects the conclusions of other studies (Kitade, 2000; Kötter, 2003) of synchronous CMC suggesting that no more than five should be in any single synchronous virtual meeting at one time. Lastly, this study highlights how important the teacher’s role is in designing and delivering an appropriate pedagogy using CMC tools for any kind of learning activity (Kern, 2000; Kramsch & Thorne, 2002; Ware & Kramsch, 2005) in that it is crucial for language educators to thoroughly examine the appropriateness of a selected CMC tool for the purpose of an activity, as well as the opportunities and constraints in students’ uses of that tool for the planned learning task. Using CMC tools in the class is entwined activities between the learners’ multiple backgrounds and the teachers’ pedagogical view towards the use of CMC technology to afford the language learning.