Introduction

With the shift in education “from an interest in cognitive and developmental theories of learning to a social and collaborative view of learning” (Ortega, 1997:82; cf, Warschauer, 1997) and the gradual integration of computer technology in classrooms, synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication (for definitions, see Warschauer & Healey, 1998; Burdeau, 1997) has been more and more widely used in language learning classrooms, as well as virtually across all disciplines. Among the various forms of synchronous, ‘real-time’ communication in language classrooms is one particular kind, which is called computer-assisted classroom discussion (CACD), which use special software programs for local area networks, such as Daedalus InterChange by Daedalus Inc.

When using programs like InterChange, each student sits in front of a computer terminal. The computer screen is divided into two halves. The student composes messages on the bottom half, and when ready, hits the send button. The message appears immediately on the upper half of every participant’s screen, which also contains all the entries posted by all the participants. The screen is scrollable, so that it is very easy for students to read or re-read carefully what others have been talking about. The entries are listed in chronological order, with identifiable names of the senders and the time code of each entry. The participants can read each others’ entries at their own pace on the upper screen and type in messages at their own leisure on the lower screen without being interfered by the incoming messages. This kind of programs have introduced the possibility of real-time, synchronous, many-to-many written discussion used either in a whole class or by small groups within the class (Huang, 1998; Chun, 1994; Warschauer, 1996a; Kern, 1995).

Research on the use of computer-assisted classroom discussion for language teaching and learning has focused on the general benefits or advantages of CACD. These include questions of learners’ motivation, participation, language-production. This paper reviews these relevant findings.

1. Learners’ motivation

In order to test the much alleged motivational benefits of SLA students’ use of CMC, Warschauer (1996b) surveyed 167 university ESL and EFL students in 12 university writing courses internationally (in the U.S., Hong Kong and Taiwan). It was found that students overall had a positive attitude toward using computers and this attitude was consistent across a number of variables, including gender, typing skill, and access to a computer at home. Further analysis showed that two variables in particular relating to computer experience, self-reported knowledge of computer and amount of experience using electronic mail, correlated positively with student motivation.

From a factor analysis of the survey, Warschauer found that factors that influenced students’ positive attitude toward computers included the following three aspects. The strongest factor was the perceived benefits of communicating via computer, which seemed to include “feeling part of a community, developing thoughts and ideas, learning about different people and cultures, and students’ learning from each other” (Warschauer, 1996b). The second factor he analysed was the feeling of personal empowerment coming from using computers. This involved issues such as “enhancing personal power, overcoming isolation, and making it less threatening to contact people” (Warschauer, 1996b). The third factor involved the perceived enhancement of learning opportunities which arose from using computers. Warschauer (1996b) found,

“Using computers, they feel can learn faster, become more creative, and write better essays. They feel they have more control of their learning and more opportunities to practise English”.

Warschauer also identified another factor, which he named ‘achievement’. Interestingly, it seemed not to be any gain or achievement closely related to the curriculum or course; rather more to do with students’ idea of career or life-long ability. It was more like the instrumental benefits and students’ perceived intrinsic satisfaction of accomplishment of their personal power, in Warschauer’s own word, ‘empowerment’ (1996b). The only distinction Warschauer made between these two factors seem to be that the later is more involved with learners’ affective perception.

A careful examination of Warschauer’s motivational study would reveal that the No.1 highest score item in his 30-question survey was “learning how to use computers is

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Survey Questions Mean
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Learning how to use computers is important for my career 4.437
I enjoy seeing the things I write printed out 3.994
I enjoy using the computer to communicate with people around the world 3.982
An advantage of email is you can contact people anytime you want 3.976
Using email and the Internet is good way to learn more about different people and cultures 3.976
Computers help people overcome weakness and powerlessness 3.939
I am less afraid to contact people by email than in person 3.928
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Warschauer’s highest mean-score items

Important in my career (4.437)”. One can expect such a response not only from language students, but from any students, indeed most people in any discipline, any field, with today’s wide spread use of all sorts of electronic means of communication, synchronous or asynchronous. One could argue, indeed, most of his highest mean score items are not language learner specific, therefore, the fact that students like using computer for communication can not convincingly be said to show that using computers can in someway enhance learners’ language learning experience. It certainly does not tell us in what way the learners’ learning is enhanced.

2. Learners’ participation

A generally-accepted finding of CACD literature is that CACD discussion generates more equal participation from all participants (Kern, 1995; Chun, 1994; Beauvois, 1992; McComb, 1993). There may be some reasons for this equalising power of CACD. Ortega (1997) attributes the more equal participation pattern to the following two features of CACD:

“(a) Interactants are less apprehensive about being evaluated by interlocuters, and thus more willing to participate at their leisure; and (b) they are less affected by wait time, turn-taking, and other elements of traditional interaction, enabling them to participate as much as they want, whenever they want, with opportunities for contribution being more equally distributed among participants” (p.85).

The equalising feature of CACD, researchers find, includes the following three aspects. First, there is a more democratic distribution of conversational power, hence, the traditional teacher-fronted, teacher-dominant classroom can give to a more student-centred, less teacher-authoritative conversation pattern (Kelm, 1992; Kern, 1995). In these studies, the teacher is merely another participant in the discussion, contributing to the CACD discussion the similar way as the other learners do. “The traditional figure of the teacher as authority source and expert is subverted in that the role of the teacher during the electronic discussion is that of a mere participant” (Ortega, 1997: 85). After careful analysis of his data of second semester French four-skill course, Kern (1995) finds that the style and organisation of CACD discussion has an important effect on student-teacher dynamics, and that the instructors do not “occupy a focal position in the Interchange sessions” (Ortega, 1997:79), and that “teacher control is compromised” (p.79).

The second aspect of the equal participation pattern is closely related to the first one. Due to the changes in teacher role, students during CACD sessions assume more control and more responsibility for the electronic discussions. It seems that talking to each other, rather than asking (more frequently answering) teacher’s display questions, students during electronic discussion were able to “express themselves freely, comfortably, and creatively” (Warschater, 1996a:16). Further, according to Warschauer,

“participating in electronic discussion assisted their thinking ability, and that they (participants) did not feel stress during electronic discussion” (ibid, p.16).

The third, and probably the most frequently addressed feature of students’ participation pattern in electronic discussion is the equal distribution of turns among participants. Researchers (Kelm, 1992; Kern, 1995; Huang, 1998; Warschauer, 1996a) find

“all speakers share the floor more equally, and students that do not normally participate much in traditional classroom discussion seem to dramatically increase their participation in the electronic mode” (Ortega,1997:85).

Among L1 education literature, Bump (1990) found that the level of participation of English literature students in InterChange sessions increased and this increase was particularly obvious among students who were normally categorised shy and reticent in oral discussions. This increase was measured by turns students took during electronic discussions. He attributed this increase of participation among shy students to the fact that there was no pressure on students before they responded to any of others’ postings, that they were not interrupted by, nor interrupting anyone while they tried to contribute to the discussion, and that the anonimity of comments sometimes also had a facilitating effect.

Studies in the foreign/second language context also provide evidence for an equal participation pattern among FL/SL students. Kelm (1992), Beauvois (1992) and Kern (1995) explored the use of InterChange in Portuguese and French classes. The former two found that students who were supposed to be shy, with low-motivation and labelled as unsuccessful, and who were less willing to participate in traditional teacher-led oral discussions, increased their participation greatly during CACD discussions. In her summary of these benefits of CACD, Beauvois (1997:64) maintains,

“students who are shy or otherwise inhibited in the traditional classroom state they find a ‘voice’ on the computer and tend to participate more. In fact, there is usually 100% participation in the lab sessions” (see Beauvois, 1992; Kelm, 1992; Kern, 1995).

The fact that most of these studies have been conducted in whole class setting, may have decreased the credibility and validity of the conclusion because most of the normal classroom practice of oral discussion is done in small groups. Therefore, at least in comparing with normal language teaching classroom-based discussion, studies of participation patterns of CACD discussions should be more informative if the CACD is conducted in small groups. Warschauer (1996a) and Huang (1998) are among the few researchers who compared small group interactions in both face-to-face and CACD discussions. Their findings provide some further evidence that CACD generates more equal participation patterns among participants within small groups. Warschauer (1996a) compared open-ended discussions in both face-to-face and electronic mode by four groups of four participants each. He found that three of the four groups showed “substantially” (Warschauer, 1996a: 20) greater equality of participation during CACD sessions. Huang (1998) also found that “on the computer, students participated in prewriting discussions equally, while in face-to-face context, some students participated more than the others”.

To sum up, this equal participation pattern of CACD can be attributed to the following aspects that CACD discussions present participants.

·Less anxiety

“InterChange is probably the single most helpful aspect of the Daedalus system, in that it vastly improves relations in the classroom by creating a non-threatening and supportive forum for the exchanges of ideas, which seems to greatly improve both the students morale and their willingness to participate” (Butler, 1993).

“Students reported feeling that they could express themselves freely, comfortably, and creatively during electronic discussion, that participating in electronic discussion assisted their thinking ability, and that they did not feel stress during electronic discussion” (Warschauer, 1996a:16).

·More control

Participants can choose when, what and who to “ talk” to. “They could take as much time as necessary to compose their responses before posting then to the whole class discussion. I expected InterChange to encourage some of the quieter participants to speak their minds more forcefully than they did in oral class discussion. And they did” (Hughes, 1994). Students can also choose and change their own topics and negotiate more freely on how to proceed.

·Authenticity of tasks

Rather than the IRF (initiate, response and feedback) (Mehan, 1985) interaction pattern in traditional classroom discourse, in CACD sessions

“Students are actively writing, practising and receiving immediate feedback. When communicating to an authentic audience of their peers, students are more likely to write for a real purpose, to take ownership of their writing and to articulate their ideas fully. Such writing experience prepares students for careers in business and many other fields, including academia, in which wide area networks are increasingly used both for discussion and collaborative writing projects” (Sommers, 1997).

3. Learners’ production

In SL/FL teaching and learning contexts, with the emphasis on the use of the language rather than the form of it, students’ communicating and interacting in their target language has become more and more the focus of most language instructors. Learners’ production of the target language, especially, of “comprehensible output” (Swain, 1985), is believed to be able to push their interlanguage system one step further in its development. Researchers (cf. Kern, 1995) have found that CACD discussions provide learners with opportunities to be engaged in meaningful interaction and with authentic purposes, and that these opportunities for learner output are more abundant than in traditional face-to-face settings.

There is also unanimous belief that the language produced by participants during CACD sessions belongs to a hybrid language variety, which displays both characteristics of written and oral language. Hence, it is hoped that “the written competence from CACD can gradually be transferred to the students’ speaking competence as well” (Chun, 1994:29). CACD may well be an effective forum for facilitating the acquisition of the various components of communicative competence. Ferrara, Brunner and Whittemore (1991) term it as ‘interactive written discourse (IWD). They maintain that IWD

“is a hybrid register that resembles both speech and writing (displaying characteristics of both oral and written language), and yet is neither” (p.10).

This “hybrid” can be shown through “features of heavy involvement (e.g., deictics, adverbs of time, and direct questions) traditionally associated with oral language and face-to-face interaction” (Ferrara, Brunner & Whittemore, 1991:22) and the fact of language being edited and written (ibid: 26). When noting students’ indifference to the appropriate usage of the target language, Beauvois (1992) concludes that

“computer-assisted classroom discussion is neither really speaking nor is it exactly writing. The problems that arise are therefore of a different nature from those common to the spoken or written domains” (p. 460).

Baym (1995) also points out that

“CMC has generally been understood through a ‘talk’ metaphor, which compares on-line interaction to face-to-face conversation. While CMC is obviously not talk, it is in many ways more like conversation than writing because it is interactive, relatively spontaneous and generally unplanned.”

Drawing from the above researchers, it appears safe to say that the language produced by participants during CACD sessions has its own unique characteristics which are similar in some aspects to those of oral language and in some other aspects to written language, and yet are not totally oral, nor written. What is needed is more research identifying exactly what characteristics this IWD as a unique language register have.

CACD literature about learners’ language output has focused on both quantity and quality of the language participants produce through the networked computers during CACD discussions. Some researchers find that CACD discussions provide more opportunities for communicative practice of the target language and more opportunities for learners to produce meaningful output than traditional L2 classroom practice, thus resulting in an increase in the amount of participation, hence an increase in participants’ language output.

In his study, Kern (1995) compared electronic and face-to-face discussion of the same length in his university French class and concluded that “there were striking differences in quantity of production between InterChange and oral discussions” (p.464). Students had from two to three and a half times more turns and produced two to four times more sentences in the InterChange sessions than in the oral discussion. He also found that

“a less marked, but substantial, difference is also shown in the number of words produced (216 to 316 average words per student in the InterChange discussions vs. 111 to 137 average words per student in the oral discussions)” (Kern, 1995:465).

There are also different findings in terms of whether CACD increases the total amount of learner output. Huang (1998) did a comparative study of her EFL students in both CACD and oral discussions. She found that

“in groups that consisted of four members, the FF (face-to-face) discussions produced four times more speech than the CM (computer-mediated) ones. There did not seem to be much change in the speech production rate over time within either context.”

Students in her FF sessions produced 108.1 words per minute while those in CM sessions did only 27.3 words per minute. Fortunately, studies reporting less language production in CACD are fewer than those reporting increases in quantity of language output.

On the other hand, other studies anecdotally reported dramatic increase in students’ language output (Beauvois, 1992; Bump, 1990; Kelm, 1992). So far, then, it seems still unclear whether or not CACD generates an increase in learners’ productivity. Even if it does, it is difficult to say whether or not this increase in the total amount of learners’ output facilitates or enhances learners’ language learning experience. Learners’ output has to be carefully examined to see whether or not learners ‘push’ their present linguistic repertoire and extend any components of communicative competence. It has to be determined that learners are not merely practising what they have already known well enough (Fernquest, personal communication through emails, July, 1998).

Naturally, researchers have also devoted much of their attention to the quality of the language output learners produce during CACD sessions. Besides the characteristic of a different register discussed previously, researchers have also looked at the quality of CACD discourse in terms of the length of turns, the length of sentences, and the complexity of sentences (Kern, 1995; Kelm, 1992; Warschauer, 1996a; Chun, 1994).

It has been reported that CACD discussions yield discourse of a better quality. Researchers have compared face-to-face and electronic discussions and some find that CACD discussions produce longer turns than face-to-face ones, and that students in CACD sessions use language that is both more formal and more complex, both lexically and syntactically (Warschauer, 1996a). CACD participants use language covering a wide range of discourse and communicative functions (Chun, 1994; Kern, 1995).

“ Learners are definitely taking the initiative, constructing and expanding on topics, taking a more active role in discourse management than is typically found in normal classroom discussion. In addition, learners exhibit the ability to give feedback to others, as well as sociolinguistic competence in greeting and leave-taking, requesting confirmation or clarification, and apologizing” (Chun, 1994:28).

Kelm (1992) finds that his Portuguese students’ accuracy is greatly improved in CACD sessions. He notes that certain grammatical errors, like incorrect uses of gerunds and progressives, were greatly reduced at an 80% rate.

There are also, however, some conflicting findings in terms of the complexity of the language used by participants in CACD sessions. In contrast to Warschauer’s (1996a) finding, Kern (1995) and Chun (1994) find that participants during electronic discussions produce a higher proportion of simple sentences than complex ones. On the other hand, Kern (1995) also concludes that

“students’ language output in InterChange was of an overall greater level of sophistication than in oral discussion, in terms of the range of its morphosyntactic features and in terms of the variety of discourse functions expressed” (p. 470).

This paper has made a brief review of CACD literature in terms of learner motivation, learner participation and learner production. It is aimed to draw a general picture of what we know, so far, about CACD participants and their interaction. As can be seen from the above discussion, if one accepts that interaction, especially, negotiation of input message meaning between learners is relevant to SLA processes and conducive to interlanguage development, one is forced to conclude that there is a general lack of concern in these studies about the interactional features of CACD discourse (as was pointed out in relative studies by Kern, 1995; Chun, 1994; Kelm, 1992; Warschauer, 1996a; Huang, 1998). Further investigations of such electronic discussions will need also to consider the task-specific context in CACD lab. It may be that different tasks will bring about different interactional discourse features. It is to this end, that a specific CACD corpus is examined in another paper titled “Language functional features identified in a CACD corpus”.

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