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| Thanks to Mark Anthoney and Laura March for this infographic |
Part 1: Case Study Development
Brad has been teaching face-to-face EAP (English for Academic Purposes) courses in the academic preparation program at a Canadian university for the past nine years. This non-credit program is aimed at students whose first language is one other than English and who need to develop the language skills necessary to succeed in for-credit courses at a university. The courses he teaches are at the advanced level, meaning learners need to achieve an IELTS score of 5.5 or the equivalent on another test in order to be accepted into the course. With little notice, Brad was required to move the courses he was teaching online in 2020. This was his first experience teaching courses completely online.
One course he was teaching included 18 young adults from a number of different countries who were preparing to apply for admission to Canadian and American universities. The focus of this course was developing reading and listening skills and building vocabulary. An important component of the face-to-face course had been small group discussions in which students worked together to confirm comprehension of the reading and listening texts, to react to the ideas in these texts, and to delve deeper into the topics under consideration. This discussion is important to help students improve their fluency, and to build their ‘active’ vocabulary, and to develop their overall language skills. Many students reported that this was the most enjoyable aspect of the course.
When the course moved completely online, the discussion component of the course was partly moved to the discussion forum in the LMS, though there were still some limited synchronous components to the course, including small group discussions in breakout rooms on Zoom. Brad was aware that the discussion forum would not work exactly as the in-person discussions did, so he prepared the students for this component. He had them watch a video on netiquette, which explained how to behave appropriately in an online discussion. For example, students were encouraged to be respectful towards each other, avoiding personal attacks, and to be open to opinions that were different from their own. They were discouraged from using slang, emoticons, and from ‘shouting’, that is writing their messages completely in upper case letters.
Previously, in the face-to-face version of the class, Brad had assigned 10% of the final mark for participation based on how much students contributed to the in-class discussions in order to ensure that students would participate. When the course moved online, he retained this mark, applying it now to the online discussion forum. He assigned tasks for students to complete within the discussion forum. In the first task, students had to respond to a discussion question about a reading and also had to post reactions to the responses of two of their classmates.
Unfortunately, the online discussions did not develop as well as Brad had hoped or anticipated. The discussion board was dominated by three students who had quite a lot to say on the topics. Several of the students did not post at all and most of the others did not add much to the discussion. Many of the students’ reactions to their classmates’ posts were brief and superficial. Some others that expressed disagreement were very strongly and bluntly worded and did not come across as respectful.
The first topic was about research suggesting that what we think will make us happy does not make us as happy as we expect. The first question that students were asked to respond to was, ‘Do you agree with the idea that getting a great new job or having a lot of money don’t make people as happy as they think they will?’ One student reacted by saying, ‘The article is wrong. I got a new job and it made me very happy. The article does not give the correct conclusions about the research.’ A classmate responded by saying, ‘No, you’re wrong. You didn’t understand the article. That’s not what the research said.’ The response from the second student sounded like a personal attack. The discussion on this topic soon dried up apart from a few students making uninspired last-minute posts immediately before the deadline.
Brad realized that there was a problem and so he checked in with some of the students who were not contributing to the discussion to try to find out why they hadn’t posted. While many of the students said they’d been too busy, two of them admitted that they didn’t feel comfortable posting. They were afraid of the reactions they might get. Brad also talked to the person who had said, ‘You’re wrong,’ who explained he had not intended to sound like he was attacking his classmate. Brad then believed he understood what some of the problems were and why they’d arisen. He began to consider what he could do to improve the situation.
Part 2: Case Study Analysis
Course of action 1
Students don’t have much fresh to contribute to the discussion because the group is so large and the first few students give all of the obvious responses. The class could be divided into smaller groups so that there would be more latitude in each group for members to contribute. The group could then summarize their discussion for the whole class afterwards. Groups could be divided so that more reticent students are grouped with people they may feel safe with. This would make it more comfortable for everyone to contribute and would give people more scope to add new ideas to the discussion. This might be a little more work for the instructor as he would have to monitor more discussions, but the discussions are likely to be more productive and this change might reduce the tension within the class.
Course of action 2
One difficulty for the students is that it is linguistically challenging to make criticism or disagreement sound less direct and more respectful. Many of the students lack the language resources to do this. As a result, despite the instructor having posted a video about netiquette, some students are not coming across as respectful. One potential course of action is therefore to explicitly teach the students how to use the appropriate sentence structure and hedging language. The instructor could insert a mini lesson in using less direct language. Students could be taught language chunks such as:
• I’m not sure I agree with the conclusions.
• In my view,…
• I had a different understanding of what the article said. I thought…
• It could be the case that…
• The evidence suggests that….
Because being able to use this type of language is important for academic contexts, all of the students should participate in this lesson.
They could watch a short video identifying what language to use and comparing it to ruder, more direct ways of presenting information to see how the use of hedging language affects tone. They could then listen to pairs of sentences and decide which one sounds more polite and less direct. Following that, they could be given some controlled practice using the language, followed by some freer practice in a fresh discussion thread. This one particular discussion thread could be put under observation by the instructor and feedback on this thread could include feedback on the appropriacy of the language used.
Using more direct language was less of an issue in the in-person classes because the speaker’s intent could be judged from the tone of voice and their body language as well as their words, but it is a real problem in the written language. Once the tone of the posts has improved and become more respectful, hopefully some of the more reluctant posters will feel safe to add more posts and more in-depth posts. Overall, this could improve the atmosphere of the class, which had been affected by the tone of the discussion forum and it will also make life easier for the instructor as he will have fewer fires to put out on the discussion board. It seems to be well worth the time it would take him to create a lesson on this.
Course of action 3
The questions Brad posed did not allow for a wide range of responses and this may have suppressed the development of discussions. The questions only required students to say what they understood from the reading / listening and react to it or summarize it, which Riggs (2016) points out is a common problem. While the first two or three students were able to post fresh ideas, for the other fifteen students there was not much to add—all of the obvious ideas had already been presented.
To improve the situation, Brad could change the type of questions he poses so that every student would have more scope to contribute to the threads—not just the first one or two students. Questions could require more reflection and higher order thinking skills that go beyond eliciting factual answers or summaries, as suggested by U of MN | Academic Technology Support Services (2016). They suggest instead using prompts that require students to apply what they’ve learnt. Questions could be more open-ended, asking students for examples from their own lives that illustrated the phenomena from the article or speculating about areas of life other than money or jobs where the idea might apply.
The Best Course of Action
It seems clear that several factors have contributed to the stunted discussions on this class’s discussion board, probably including some that have not been identified above, and consequently the best course of action would combine a number of changes. If a choice has to be made, I would choose to work on equipping students with the language they will need to express disagreement and criticism appropriately in their academic futures. Developing these skills now while in the EAL program seems to be crucial since they are skills they are less likely to learn once they’ve left the EAL context. Hopefully they will have more guidance on other aspects of making productive posts once they move into credit courses. The best course of action therefore seems to be Course of Action 2.
References
Lieberman, M. (2019, March 27). Discussion Boards: Valuable? Overused? Discuss. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/03/27/new-approaches-discussion-boards-aim-dynamic-online-learning
March, L. & Anthoney, M. (n.d.) Online Discussions Doctor: Remedies for 8 Ailments. Center for Transformative Teaching. Retrieved on March 6, 2021 from https://teaching.unl.edu/online-discussions-doctor-remedies-8-ailments/
Riggs, S. & Linder, K. (2016, December) Actively Engaging Students in Asynchronous Online Classes. Retrieved from IDEAedu.org
U of MN | Academic Technology Support Services (2016, March 23). Planning and Facilitating Online Discussions. [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/sOkxbw1TzNk
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