Educational dialogues have been in the limelight of research in the past decade due to its influence on learners’ thinking and academic performance. The recent breakthrough in technology prompts the need for educators to maximise the affordances of digital tools for the benefits of the students. Leveraging the fully asynchronous online environment may be particularly valuable for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners since the confines of the traditional classroom may be lifted to facilitate more interactions and encourage varied language use.

This qualitative study analysed the asynchronous online dialogues among Hong Kong (HK) ESL students using microblogs to reveal the characteristics of this type of classroom talk. Twenty-five secondary school students were solicited to express their views on various news articles. Engaging in open-floor discussions, they responded to each other’s contributions. Subsequently, they were invited to self-evaluate their interactive processes. Inductive coding was utilised to code the online discussions and self-evaluations, with a focus on extrapolating talk moves and instances of dialogic learning. Data revealed that this type of classroom talk were reasoning-laden in nature. There were also numerous attempts in questioning, as well as instances of students capitalising the use of multimodal resources to support their argumentation. However, there seemed to be a clear lack of positioning and coordinating statements when ideas were introduced. Hence, asynchronous online dialogues seem to be distinctive of other types of classroom talks commonly found in ESL instruction.

Authors:
Zenia Chan, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

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Posted by Clive Staples Lewis

Last updated: 2023-02-23 23:45:00

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