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AN EXPLORATION INTO FACTORS THAT AFFECT STUDENT
PERCEPTION OF THEIR ONLINE FOREIGN LANGUAGE
LEARNING EXPERIENCE

presented by
Chun Lai

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment
of the requirements for the

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6/07 p:/CIRC/Date0ue.indd-p.1

AN EXPLORATION INTO FACTORS THAT AFFECT STUDENT PERCEPTION OF
THEIR ONLINE FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING EXPERIENCE

By

Chun Lai

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
In partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
For the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education

2006

ABSTRACT

AN EXPLORATION INTO FACTORS THAT AFFECT STUDENT PERCEPTION OF
THEIR ONLINE FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING EXPERIENCE

By

Chun Lai
Distance foreign language learning has been growing at a fast speed with the ever-
increasing demand on the foreign language education and the paucity of foreign language
teachers. A course design framework is much needed to promote and safeguard the
quality of distance foreign language education. An optimal distance foreign language
design framework could borrow from research ﬁndings from decades of distance
education research and second language education research, and a test of such framework
could not only identify crucial factors to effective distance foreign language learning but
also help test the applicability and utility of those guidelines in those research areas. This
study constructed an online foreign language course design framework, tested this
framework through building a distance Chinese course and together with several existent
distance foreign language courses. Students and instructors from several distance foreign
language courses at a virtual high school in the spring semester of an academic year. Data
were collected through surveys, classroom observations, interviews, and class
participation and artifacts analyses. It was found that the course communication
component of the design framework, interaction with the instructor and with classmates
in particular, was a major component that inﬂuenced students’ perception of their online
foreign language learning experience. Some student and contextual factors
like students’ attitude and conﬁdence in distance foreign language learning were also

found to have inﬂuence on students’ satisfaction with their course. In addition, this study

pointed out some issues and problems related to the implementation of the designed

framework.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My graduate studies at Michigan State University have been a great growing
experience for me, both academically and personally. I am very fortunate to have all those
professors and friends beside me to help me along this process.

I am deeply indebted to my academic advisor, Dr. Yong Zhao, who had served as
a great role model with his great enthusiasm for and dedication to education and with his
endless brilliant ideas. He led me into the ﬁeld of educational technology and broadened
my horizon in the application of educational technology to second/foreign language
education. He taught me how to be a successful researcher and led me through the process
of becoming a member of the research community to contribute to the ﬁeld. Without him,
I would never become today’s me. I am eternally grateful for his guidance, support and
inﬂuence on me.

I would like to thank Dr. Punya Mishra for his constant support and
encouragement during my graduate studies. I greatly appreciate his valuable academic
and personal advice throughout my graduate years. He is a great mentor and friend to me.

I would also like to thank Dr. Patrick Dickson for his help and advice with my
dissertation. He encourages and helps me to view things from different perspective. I
want to thank Dr. Susan Gass for serving as an academic role model for me and for
helping me with my study and research throughout the years. I also want to thank Dr. Ken
Frank for his help with the statistic analysis for my dissertation.

I want to thank my terriﬁc friends. I would like to thank Xi Chen for all the happy
gatherings and for serving as a great model for taking positive attitudes towards life. I

would like to thank J ing Lei for her support, encouragement and valuable friendship. I

iv

would also like to thank all my “China Town” friends, Ruhui Ni, BoYan, Wei Qiu, Yi
Chen, Qiu Wang, and others for their friendship and moral support along the way.

My family is the source and driving force of my study. I would very like to thank
my parents, Shuping Wang and Yon gshi Lai for encouraging me to embark on the road
towards today’s achievement and for their endless love and support. I owe a lot to my
dearest husband, Jun Su, for his love and support throughout this process. Finally, no
words can express my thankfulness for my son, Andrew Hao Su. He is born during my
graduate study and he basically accompanies me throughout the whole graduate study
years. He is the source of my happiness and his smiling face encourages me to keep going,

keep working hard, and keeping improving myself to get better and better.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................... VIII
CHAPTER 1 RESEARCH PROBLEM AND INTRODUCTION ..................................... 1
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM ......................................................................................... 1
INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY ......................................................................................... 3
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY ........................................................................................... 4
CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS ...................... 6
COURSE COMMUNICATION ............................................................................................... 6
Interaction .................................................................................................................... 6
Communication Mechanism ....................................................................................... [2
COURSE STRUCTURE ...................................................................................................... 13
RESEARCH QUESTIONS ................................................................................................... 19
CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY ..................................................................................... 20
PARTICIPANTS ................................................................................................................ 20
INSTRUMENTS AND DATA COLLECTION ......................................................................... 21
ANALYSIS ...................................................................................................................... 25
Data Cleaning ............................................................................................................ 25
Reliability Check ........................................................................................................ 25
Data Integrating ......................................................................................................... 26
Data Analyzing ........................................................................................................... 27
CHAPTER 4 WHEN THE IDEAL MET THE REALITY .............................................. 29
THE DESIGNING OF THE ONLINE CHINESE COURSE ........................................................ 29
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED ... ................................................................................... 45
Schedule Change and Technical Problems ................................................................ 45
Students ' Reactions to Different Components of the Course ..................................... 48
CHAPTER 5 CRUCIAL FACTORS TO ONLINE FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING
........................................................................................................................................... 58
REGRESSION AND CORRELATION ANALYSES ................................................................. 58
Students ' Positive Perception of the Course .............................................................. 59
Reduced Feeling of Isolation ..................................................................................... 61
Course Grade ............................................................................................................. 62
STUDENT PERCEPTION OF CRUCIAL FACTORS TO ONLINE FOREIGN LANGUAGE
LEARNING ...................................................................................................................... 63
Opportunities for Interaction ..................................................................................... 65
Need for Edutainment ................................................................................................ 69
Need for F ocus-on-F orms .......................................................................................... 69
CHAPTER 6 THE ONLINE CHINESE COURSE .......................................................... 72
STUDENT BACKGROUND ................................................................................................ 72

vi

STUDENTS’ OVERALL PERCEPTION OF THE COURSE ...................................................... 73

ISSUES OF IMPLEMENTING THE PROPOSED DESIGN FRAMEWORK ................................... 75
CHAPTER 7 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS ............................................................. 86
SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION OF THE FINDINGS .............................................................. 86
Course Communication ............................................................................................. 86
Course Structure ........................................................................................................ 90
Student Characteristics and Contextual Factors ....................................................... 94
LIMITATIONS .................................................................................................................. 95
IMPLICATIONS ................................................................................................................ 96
Implications for Online Foreign Language Course Design and Implementation ..... 96
Implications for Future Research .............................................................................. 99
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................ 102
APPENDICES ................................................................................................................ 104
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 125

vii

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1 Design Principles for Distance Foreign Language Courses ................................. 18
Table 2 Timeline for Data Collection ................................................................................ 25
Table 3 Reliability Check for Resarch Designed Scales .................................................... 26
Table 4 Reliability Check for Variables after Data Integration ......................................... 27
Table 5 The Instructional Layout for Each Episode of Chengo Chinese .......................... 45
Table 6 When the Ideal Met the Reality ............................................................................ 56
Table 7 Crucial Factors for Positive Perception of the Course .......................................... 59
Table 8 Crucial Factors to Students Reduced Feeling of Isolation .................................... 64

Table 9 Student Perception on the Important Factors to Online Foreign Langauge Courses
.................................................................................................................................... 64

Table 10 Student Perception of Chinese Course Components ................................ 83

viii

CHAPTER 1
RESEARCH PROBLEM AND INTRODUCTION
Statement of the Problem
Nationwide there is great increase in demand for foreign language education as
more and more people realize the need for internationalization and the importance of
building global citizenship. National statistics shows that from 1982 to 2000, enrollment
in advanced foreign language classes has increased and the percentage of students who
had not completed any foreign language study has decreased (N CES, 2003). A national
survey of elementary and secondary schools has shown that there has been a signiﬁcant
increase in the number of elementary schools offering foreign language programs
(jumping from 22% in 1987 to 31% in 1997) (CAL, 1997). Nationwide there is a great
amount of effort to enhance the foreign language skills of American students, ranging
from the $114 million budget plan to boost foreign language education in the 2007 ﬁscal
year announced by President Bush to the increased amount of states (more than 19 states)
making foreign language a state graduation requirement for at least some students. With
new national, state and local standards calling for all students everywhere to have the
opportunity to become proﬁcient in a foreign language, the shortage of resources and
qualiﬁed foreign language teachers is becoming an ever-increasing concern and a big
hurdle. In NCSSFL’S words (2003), “Foreign language education cannot afford to look
solely to conventional solutions to overcome the shortage of resources and qualiﬁed
teachers to realize its goals. The foreign language profession must look to technology as
one possible avenue for meeting the goals set forth in the national standards”. Distance

foreign language learning has been elected a viable solution to this problem, and has been

continuing to increase at an exponential pace with this ever-increasing demand for foreign
language education.

With more and more students taking distance foreign language courses, the quality
of distance foreign language education is crucial to the overall quality of foreign language
education. Furthermore, the concern for course quality is also found to be one of the
major reasons that keep schools from offering or expanding distance courses (NCES,
2003; 2005).

Currently the majority of distance foreign language courses are carried out in the
following way: pre—built courseware, either designed speciﬁcally for distance learning or
simply adapted from existent language learning CDs, is hosted on some sort of course
delivery systems like WebCT, Blackboard or Angel, and then teachers, who are either
currently teaching the foreign language in K-12 setting or had similar teaching experience
before, are recruited to “teach” (to be exact, to provide email feedback to the assignments
and grade the students) the distance course with some technical help from the institution.
However, since most of the existent language learning CDs are not originally designed
with distance learning in mind, the ﬁtness of existent language learning CDs to distance
learning situation is questionable. The poor and simple bridge the instructors provide
between the courseware and the students becomes a great concern to the overall
effectiveness of those distance foreign language courses. To promote distance foreign
language teaching and to safeguard the quality of such foreign language learning
environments, empirically-based guidelines and principles for designing optimal/quality
distance foreign language learning environments should be readily available, the usability
and utility of which should be systematically tested. Thus, a distance foreign language

learning design framework is much needed, but at the same time also theoretically ready

since a large volume of literature has been accumulated through decades of research in

both distance education and in second and foreign language education. A design

framework that integrates the research ﬁndings from both ﬁelds could yield valuable

suggestions for the design of distance foreign language learning environments.
Introduction to the Study

This study attempted to construct and test a distance foreign language course
design framework drawn out of current distance education literature and second language
education literature, and to identify some crucial factors to effective distance foreign
language teaching and learning.

A series of narrative reviews and meta-analyses of distance education literature
have identiﬁed some crucial factors to guide the design of distance learning environments
in general, which can be applied to distance foreign language teaching and learning
(Allen et al., 2002; Bernard et al., 2004; Berge & Mrozowski, 2001; Cavanaugh, 2001;
Jung & Rha, 2000; Saba, 2000; Shachar & Newmann, 2003; Ungenleidor & Burns, 2003;
Zhao, Lei, Yan, Tan & Lai, 2005). However, the guidelines are scattered and need to be
synthesized into a framework for distance learning environment design]. At the same time
second language education literature has yielded a lot of guiding principles for second
language education, which could also be used to guide distance foreign language
education. However, those principles have been mainly tested in the traditional
instructional situation and their utility in distance foreign language education has seldom

been investigated.

 

' Here, distance learning environment was used in a narrow sense, referring only to the design of mediated
learning materials and activities as well as course management and class interaction. Issues like faculty
support and institutional support were not included in the framework

Thus, although distance education literature has rich suggestions on the teaching
and learning issues in distance education, and second language education literature has
abundant guidelines on foreign language education, the applicability of those principles
has not been fully explored in the distance foreign language environment, and a
systematic framework on individual distance foreign language course design is not in
place. This study intended to construct a framework of distance foreign language course
design through integrating the suggestions from both distance education and second
language education. More importantly, this study planned to test this framework through
designing a distance foreign language course and examining whether and how each
design principle got realized or failed to materialize. Furthermore, this study also elicited
the opinions of students from a series of distance foreign language courses on their
perception of their online language learning experience and the factors that they regarded
as important to their online foreign language learning. By thus doing, this study was
expected to test the applicability and utility of the synthesized framework so as to enrich
our understanding on how to construct optimal distance foreign language learning
environments.

Signiﬁcance of the Study

Through constructing and testing a design framework, and thus identifying crucial
factors to distance foreign language learning, this study can help to guide us to make
informed decisions on the design of optimal distance foreign language learning
experience. Furthermore, this study also holds several theoretical contributions to distance
foreign language education. First, this study can inform distance foreign language
literature, where theoretical argumentations and analysis of individual technologies

abound while empirical tests of how different components and technologies work

together to construct an optimal learning environment is absent and much needed. Second,
this study could also test and push the further reﬁnement of current distance education
theories and the application of current second language learning theories in the distance
learning context. Third, this study can also inform distance education at the K-12 level,
where the dearth of research calls for more systematic examination into this ever-
increasing distance learning population (Ungerleider & Burns, 2003; Canavaugh et al.,

2004)

CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Any distance course design, the design of distance foreign language courses
without exception, includes issues that revolve around two major components: the course
communication component and the course structure component. The course
communication component includes issues about class interaction and communication
mechanism that helps to reduce class confusion and frustration commonly reported
among the distance learners. The course structure component encompasses issues
concerning the design and organization of the learning materials and activities (refer to
Appendix A for course design principles in several inﬂuential distance education
frameworks). This chapter will integrate research suggestions from both distance
education and second/foreign language education to construct a design framework with
design principles on the issues around these two course components.

Course Communication

Course communication component includes both the design of opportunities for
interaction and the design of mechanism that facilitates effective communication within
the course, such as the clarity of learning activities and assignment instructions, the
feedback mechanism and the availability of learning support that helps to reduce
confusion and frustration in online learning.
Interaction

Language is both the means and the ends of interaction, the dual role reinforcing
each other and making interaction the core of foreign language learning. The potential of
interaction in enhancing social presence and the sense of community also makes it critical

to distance foreign language learning.

In language learning, interaction is valued not only as a “medium of practice” to
reinforce what has been learned previously, but also “the means by which learning takes
place” (Gass, 1997, p. 104). The association between interaction and learning is
conceptualized and expounded in two major perspectives to second language learning:
Interactionist perspective and Sociocultural perspective. Interaction provides the
opportunities for instances of miscommunication that trigger conversational negotiation
either of meaning and of form, a process that Interactionist perspective holds to be
beneﬁcial to second language learning. According to this perspective, this type of
interaction connects all the necessary conditions for successful language learning: quality
input, quality feedback, opportunities for practices and respect for learner syllabus
(Egbert & Hanson-Smith, 1999, Zhao, 2003). Empirical studies that test the association
between interaction and second language development (Gass & Varonis, 1994; Mackey,
1999) have led us to the point where we can safely conclude that negotiated interaction is
facilitative of second language learning (Gass, 1997). Sociocultural perspective also
emphasizes the role of interaction in mediating language learning, since language is one
primary semiotic tool that human uses to mediate their cognitive processes, including
language acquisition (Lantolf, 1994). According to van Lier (1996), learning and using a
language is both an intrapersonal process and an interpersonal (social and interactive)
process. Language learning is a mental activity that is carried out in the joint activity
between experts and novices, with the former assisting the latter, using language as a
major mediating tool. Therefore, it is right in conversational interactions that learners
intemalize/appropriate the second language, both the linguistic features and the

appropriate use of the language in various social contexts.

F urtherrnore, the pivotal position of interaction in distance education has been
ﬁrmly established both in theoretical conceptualizations (Holrnberg, 1989; Moore, 1993;
Garrison, 1989) and via meta-analyses of studies on the effectiveness of distance
education (Bernard, Abrami, Lou, Borokhovski, et al., 2004; Zhao, Lei, Yan, Tan & Lai,
2005). As Bernard and his colleagues (2004) pointed out, “instructionally relevant contact
with instructors and peers is not only desirable, it is probably necessary for creating
learning environments that lead to desirable achievement gains and general satisfaction
with DE” (p. 38). In addition to stressing the importance of instructional interaction,
distance educators also argued for the importance of social aspect of interaction in terms
of social presence and sense of belonging (Byers, 2000; Mayes, 2004; Wegerif, 1998). In
Muilenburg and Berge’s (2005) large-scale factor analysis on barriers to online learning,
perceived lack of social interactions was found to be the most severe barrier to distance
learning as perceived by all types of learners regardless of their previous experience with
distance learning. Tinto (2002) stressed that both academic and social experiences are
important to student learning, and that promoting connected academic and social
experiences is an important consideration when constructing learning environment to
promote student learning. Distance foreign language learning parallels the general trend
in distance education, a shift from supporting independent learning to supporting
interconnected learning, and is now putting even greater emphasis on interaction due to
the consideration of the crucial role of interaction in language learning. White (2003)
pointed out: “A central issue in distance language learning is how to maintain sufﬁcient
learner contact and ongoing interaction” (p. 55).

Amount of interaction. Due to the crucial role of interaction in language learning,

language educators are advocating the provision of large amount of interaction within the

language learning environment. As a matter of fact, the current orthodoxy in language
pedagogy, task-based instruction, promotes extensive use of interactive tasks as basic
components of language cun'iculum (N unan, 2004; Ellis, 2003). Language educators not
only called for large amount of interaction opportunities but also stressed the importance
of abundant opportunities to interact with various interlocutors (with the instructor, with
other native speakers and with peers) in the language learning environment since different
interlocutors may provide different types of opportunities and conditions for language
learning (Mackey, Oliver & Leeman, 2003; Oxford, 1997; Tudini, 2003) and are also
needed to meet the variety of needs for interaction in distance learning (Bernard et al.,
2004; Cummings, Bonk & Jacobs, 2002). Furthermore, diversiﬁed interaction formats —
dyadic interaction, small group interaction and whole class discussions — also provide a
variety of social conﬁgurations for learning and using the target language (Kramsch, 1987;
Doughty & Pica, 1986). There should be opportunities for both written and oral modes of
interaction since these two modes of interaction target different language skills (reading
and writing skills vs. speaking and listening Skills), provide language input of different
nature with different complexity, and impose varying demands on the complexity,
accuracy and ﬂuency of language production. As for what language to use during
interaction, it depends on the proﬁciency level of the learners. The use of ﬁrst language
(L1) in second language learning should be recognized (AntOn & Dicamilla, 1999), but at
the same time there should be a gradual progression towards a second language-only (L2)
learning environment.

Quality of interaction. Distance educators have come to the consensus that merely
having interaction is not enough and what’s more critical is the quality of the interaction

(Bernard et al., 2004; Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2001; Pawan, Paulus, Yalcin &

Chang, 2003). Garrison and Cleveland-Innes (2005) stressed the importance of the
conﬂuence of “cognitive, social and teaching presence” and using teaching presence to
transit social presence to cognitive presence in distance learning environment. In
language education, this cognitive presence could be speciﬁed as negotiation of meaning
and enhanced cultural understanding.

As have been elaborated previously, not all interaction is facilitative of second
language learning, but rather those that trigger negotiation of meaning, function and form
are held to be beneﬁcial to language learning. Negotiation of meaning is the interactional
efforts in which learners use negotiate devices like clariﬁcation request, conﬁrmation
check, recasts, etc. to reach mutual understanding when they encounter difﬁculty in
communicating or comprehending in the target language. This type of negotiated
interaction is believed to be facilitative of second language learning because:

Negotiation of meaning, and especially negotiation work that triggers

interactional adjustments by the NS or more competent interlocutor,

facilitates acquisition because it connects input, internal learner

capacities, particularly selective attention, and output in productive
ways. (Long, 1996, p. 451)

Pica, Kanagy and F alodun (1993) found that communicative tasks, in which both
interlocutors hold a different portion of the information and are required to request and
supply the information to each other so as to achieve the common goal of reaching the
only one acceptable task outcome, were more likely to elicit negotiated interaction.
Robinson (2006) further pointed out that tasks with different levels of complexity in
different dimensions (Here/Now vs. There/Then and Resource-directing vs. Resource-
dispersing) would elicit language production with varying level of accuracy, complexity

and ﬂuency, and trigger different levels of attention to form. A combination of tasks with

10

varying complexity and sequenced in accordance with incremental complexity would be
needed to facilitate interaction with appropriate level of negotiation of meaning.

Another dimension of quality interaction would be interaction opportunities that
were created not only out of the consideration of language itself but also out of the
consideration of enhanced culture understanding, both in terms of little “c” (i.e., patterns
of behaviors as to “what to do, where and when”) and in terms of big “C” (i.e., tangible
and intangible cultural products like music, education system, etc.) (Herron, Cole, Corrie
& Dubreil, 2000), since language learning and culture learning are intimately intertwined
and indispensable to each other (Curtis, 1999; Lange, 1999; Herron et al., 2000).

Thus interaction in an online foreign language class should provide opportunities
for social interaction, both online and ofﬂine, formal and informal, to enhance social
presence and sense of belonging (Bielman, Putney & Strudler, 2003), and at the same
time should be arranged, facilitated and guided towards more negotiation of meaning and
cultural understanding both through the task design and the active role the instructor plays
in the learning environment.

Interaction media. In distance courses, interaction is mediated through media, and
what media are used for what purposes plays an important role to the overall quality of
the course. Distance educators have been advocating media diversity in online learning
environment (Zhao et al., 2005; Gunawardena & McIssac, 2004). In an online foreign
language environment media diversity might be even more important, since different
media might foster the development different language skills (Zhao, Albarez-Torres,
Smith & Tan, 2004). The synchronous chatting might be best used mainly for
pedagogical tasks due to the time constraints in distance learning and the cost it would

incur, and the asynchronous discussion forum might fare better to be mainly used as

11

preparation for pedagogical tasks and for community building. Both asynchronous and
synchronous interaction media should be used since synchronous interaction alone would
not be enough to meet all the language learning and social needs in an online foreign
language learning environment. Even within synchronous interaction, both written and
oral formats should be used to capitalize on the reﬂective function and the enhanced
attention to form in tasks conducted in the written format like text-based online chatting
(Hawkes, 2001; Lai & Zhao, in press; Reynard, 2003) and to meet the needs for the
development of oral proﬁciency in foreign language learning and for enhanced social
presence (Wang, 2004).
Communication Mechanism

An effective communication mechanism is of great importance not only in
facilitating learning, but also in reducing online learners’ confusion, frustration and
anxiety. The nature of distance education makes clear and timely communication
extremely important for distance courses, since “[s]tudents reported confusion, anxiety,
and frustration due to the perceived lack of prompt or clear feedback from the instructor,
and from ambiguous instructions on the course website and in e-mail messages from the
instructor” (Hara & Kling, 2001, p. 68). According to them, the primary communication
medium of distance education, written text, ‘ampliﬁed’ the difﬁculty of resolving the
inherent ambiguity of human communication, and any means to reducing this ambiguity
and alleviating the confusion and frustration caused by the ambiguity is key to promoting
greater satisfaction with the distance course and reducing attrition rate. Thus, when
designing an online foreign language course, it is crucial that the class objectives and
expectations be communicated explicitly and clearly, and the rationales for the

expectations be provided so that the learners would have a clear sense of where they are

12

going and what they are doing and why, and thus can constantly monitor their learning
progress. Furthermore, timely technical support from either the instructor or other
learners or the institution Should be readily available and a mentoring system should be
set up to provide emotional and learning support and reduce confusion and ﬁ'ustration
(Hara & Kling, 2001).

Distance courses should also provide immediate and constructive feedback.
Thurrnond et al. (2002) identiﬁed “timely comments (p. 186)” as one of the important
environmental factors that are highly predictive of student satisfaction of a web-based
course. The value of negative feedback has been ﬁrmly established in foreign language
learning (White, 1989; Doughty & Williams, 1998; Long, 2004). Doughty and Long
(2003) argue that implicit negative feedback, like recast, would be an ideal form of
feedback to provide during computer-mediated communication. Abundant access to
immediate negative feedback in the form of negotiation of meaning, recast and meta-
linguistic feedback, both from the instructor and from other peers should be made
available. Feedback on the assignment should be uploaded in a timely fashion. Peer
feedback should be recruited as a valuable venue for feedback in online learning
environment (Sawatpanti, Suthers & Fleming, 2004), and could be encouraged through
creating opportunities for peer writing review and collaborative work.

Course Structure

In Moore and Kearsley’s (2005) transactional distance theory of distance
education, structure is one of the three major dimensions in distance learning. Structure
encompasses elements like information presentation, learning activities and projects, and
assessments. Current take on course structure design is to take a leamer-centered

approach (Strambi & Bovet, 2003).

13

T ask-Based Instruction

Doughty and Long (2003) proposed task-based language teaching as “a
psycholinguistically optimal” distance foreign language learning environment. They
argued that task-based language teaching is by nature a leamer-centered approach, with
learning materials and activities focusing on supporting learners to execute their
individual learning trajectories within the domain of the target language. Thus, task-based
language teaching and learning should be a viable direction to approach. But at the same
time, there is this issue of how to select and sequence the tasks. Doughty and Long
suggested that there Should be an overarching “target task” and some “pedagogical tasks”,
with the former stringing the latter together. Furthermore, the pedagogical tasks
themselves Should not be discrete but rather be a coherent interrelated whole (Zhao, 2005,
personal communication, November, 24), which according to Tinto (2002), is crucial in
promoting student involvement and engagement in their educational experience. The
sequencing of the tasks is an issue that is currently under investigation. Nunan (2004)
proposed arranging the tasks in terms of units or themes and within each theme
sequencing them in the sequence of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Robinson
(2006) proposed sequencing the tasks in reference to the increment of the performance
and developmental complexity of tasks.
Focus on Form

Doughty and Long (2003) advocated for the use of focus on form in online foreign
language learning environment. According to them, focus on form, deﬁned as “during an
(otherwise) meaning-focused lesson, and using a variety of pedagogic procedures,
learners’ attention is brieﬂy shifted to linguistic code features, in context, to induce

‘noticing’, when students experience problems as they work on communicative tasks” (p.

14

64), is a viable option to mitigate the limitations of the lax focus on meaning that leads to
deﬁcient productive skills especially in grammatical competence and the limitations of
traditional rigid focus on forms whose primary focus is to learn and engage in intensive
practice of pre-selected language structures, which may or may not be contextualized
(Ellis, 2001). In addition, Doughty and William (1998) provided a list of focus-on-form
techniques: input ﬂooding, input elaboration, input enhancement, corrective feedback on
error and input processing. Research has suggested focus-on-form might be facilitative of
the acquisition of certain linguistic structures (Ellis, 2002; Doughty, 2003; Norris &
Ortega, 2000; Spada, 1997). Thus an online foreign language learning environment based
on learner syllabus would base the linguistic instruction on the problems and needs raised
by the learners and those emerged during their pedagogical task performance rather than a
set of pre-planned prescriptive linguistic items (Reynard, 2003). Emergent and leamer-
based linguistic instruction could also be achieved through guiding learners discuss lists
of various examples of problematic language items emerged during their pedagogical task
performance.

Variability of Assignments and Assessments

Course structure should match with various learning needs and styles through

adding ﬂexibility and variability into course structure design. Moore (1993) emphasized
that it is important that the design of the course structure should match learners’ desire for
structure. Stein et a1. (2005) concurred with his point and suggested that certain degree of
ﬂexibility should be introduced into the structure design, and “class activities,
assignments, instructor guidance, and the opportunities for interaction built into the
course should be considered ﬂuid at the beginning of a course rather than ﬁxed” (p. 115).

Variability in course structure design means that the course should allow for various types

15

of learning activities, assignments and assessments in various formats (e.g., individual or
group work) mediated by various means (Sawatpanit et al., 2004). Different types of
pedagogical tasks will add variability in learning activity. Various types of assessments,
in the form of quiz, class projects, audio ﬁles, and so no, could also be helpful.
Furthermore, giving students the choices over the types of assignments and the ways to
approach the assignments could also add to the ﬂexibility of the course structure.
Learner Self-Management Skills

Activities that help learners to develop the ability to select appropriate distance
learning strategies and manage their own learning should be an indispensable component
of the course. According to Bernard et al. (2004), lack of self-management and
independent learning skills is one of the factors that contribute to high attrition in distance
education. Curtis et a1. (1999) asserted that distance educators should try to give learners
the conﬁdence and learning strategies to help them continue learning beyond the end of
the course. Hurd et a1. (2001) pointed out that whether learners can persist and keep
energy in rough times of distance learning depends largely on the learners’ ability to
“make the most of that support in terms of developing as a learners” (p. 342). Lamy and
Goodfellow (1999) argued that in the case where learners have little chance to interact
with other target language learners, learner autonomy could be promoted through
reﬂection on one’s own learning strategies. Kotter (2003) and Little (2001) further
suggested that language learning autonomy could be facilitated through interaction and
collaboration, i.e., independence develops out of interdependence. Thus, in an online
foreign language environment, opportunities should be given to the students to
consciously reﬂect on their language learning process, their experimentation with

learning strategies, self-assessment of what they have learned and what they need to

16

improve, and share what they have learned with each other. F urtherrnore, learners should
also be given the opportunities to share their strategies and frustration with each other and
help each other to better adjust their learning strategies. It would also be helpful if
instructors can introduce speciﬁc and contextualized learning strategies as opportunities
emerge during class discussion.
Constant Formative Assessments

Formative assessment of learner performance can give learners a sense of how
they are doing and thus give them a better chance to gain control over their learning.
Formative assessment can also help instructors to adjust their course structure to better ﬁt
students’ learning needs. Egbert and Thomas (2001) have stressed that the process of
instructional design must be “inherently iterative and evaluative in nature” (p. 404) to
accommodate the changing needs of the learners.
Co-construction of Learning Experience

Activities that invite learners to co-construct their online learning environment
and experience are also important to online foreign language learning. Encouraging
learners to co-construct their learning resources and experience can not only alleviate the
sense of isolation but also provide the support much needed by the learner during distance
learning (McPherson & Nunes, 2004). Felix (2003) suggested giving learners the
opportunity to contribute to their learning resources and social environment and the
opportunity to engage learners in collaborative work in experiential and constructivist
projects as suggested by a growing body of successful examples in the distance education
literature. Inviting learners to co-construct their learning experience not only respects
learners’ existing knowledge and but also gives them a sense of “their presence as having

signiﬁcance in the learning environment” (p. 6), which according to Reynard (2003)

17

should be an important aspect of course design. When designing an online foreign
language learning environment, we should give learners the chances to share information
related to the target language, the culture and the target task, and encourage them to help
and support each other during the learning process. Moreover, opportunities to share
learning difﬁculties and frustrations and to offer strategies and solutions to each other
would also help (Strambi & Bovet, 2003).

The proposed design principles for effective distance foreign language courses are

summarized in table 1.

Table 1

Design Principles for Distance Foreign Language Environments

 

 

Components Principles
Course Provide lots of opportunities for various forms of interaction with
communication different interlocutors in both written and oral modes.

Facilitate high quality interaction with lots of chance for

negotiation of meaning and cultural understanding.

Provide clear instructions, course expectations and technical

support.

Provide quality feedback in a timely manner and encourage peer

feedback.

Mediate interaction through various communication media and

different media will be used for different interaction purpose.
Course structure Apply task-based instruction to foster a leamer-centered learning

environment, and the tasks themselves should be interrelated and

coherent.

Strive for focus on form and emergent and leamer-based linguistic

“instruction”.

Vary the course structure to cater to various learning needs and

styles.

Incorporate activities that help learners to strengthen their ability

to manage their own learning.

Conduct constant formative assessment to construct individualized

learning support.

Encourage learners to co-construct class resources and their

learning environment.

 

 

l8

Research Questions
This study intends to test the proposed framework through designing an online
Chinese course and to examine the critical factors in quality distance foreign language
learning. In speciﬁc, the following research questions will be addressed:
1) How well will the proposed design framework be materialized in an online
Chinese course?
2) What factors affect student perception of their online foreign language
learning experience?
3) What are students’ perceptions of the different course components of the

online Chinese course?

19

CHAPTER 3
METHODOLOGY
This chapter explains the participants, instruments and data collection, and data
analyses for this research.
Participants
Students who were taking foreign language courses from a state virtual high
school were recruited for this study. The foreign language course enrollments of 2006
spring semester in this virtual high school were 283 students by the time of announcing
the study and sending out study permission. The languages offered were French, German,
Spanish and Chinese. French, German and Spanish had four levels of courses ranging
from basic level to intermediate level, whereas the Chinese course was a basic-level pilot
course. It turned out that 147 students ﬁlled out the ﬁrst survey at the beginning of the
semester and 93 students ﬁlled out the second survey at the end of the semester, among
which 79 students ﬁlled out both surveys2 and 14 students were “interviewed” via follow-
up email open-ended questions. Seven instructors were surveyed and interviewed.
The students in the Chinese class were also given an end-of—semester course
survey to elicit their satisfaction with and perception of different components of this

Chinese course, and 19 out of 22 students ﬁlled out this end-of—semester course survey.

 

2 The small response rate might threaten the representativeness of the sample, and there was no hard
evidence to show that the sample was representative of the potential pool of students in those online foreign
language courses. That being said, the participants in this study did represent a wide range of demographic
background, and distance and foreign language learning backgrounds. The percentage of participants in
different language groups virtually paralleled the distribution of the potential student pool (Appendix B),
which suggested that the participants were representative of the student pool as far as language group was
concerned. The distributions of the ﬁnal scores of participants in different language groups resembled those
of the ﬁnal scores of all the students in those different language groups (Appendix C). Moreover, student
characteristics, learning background and demographic data were compared between the participants and the
147 students who ﬁlled out the ﬁrst survey, and it was found that the 79 participants represented the 147
students quite well (Appendix D), which suggested that the 79 participants could at least represent more
than 50% of the potential pool.

20

Instruments and Data Collection

Data were collected over one semester from three sources: surveys, follow-up
emails and class artifacts in the Blackboard’.
Surveys

Surveys were administered to both students and teachers. Students were surveyed
at the beginning of the semester4 and again at the end of the semesters. The two surveys
were both administered online through Survey Monkey". The instructors were surveyed in
the middle of the semester.

Student survey. The beginning-of-the-semester survey included the following
constructs: 1) Demographic data, such as grade, gender, age, native language. 2) Student
traits7, such as organization and self-regulation skills. 3) Student foreign language and
distance learning background, including number of foreign language courses and distance
courses completed before and their rating of their previous learning experience. 4)
Student general achievement motivation, and reason and motivation for taking the course.
5) Student attitudes towards distance foreign language courses and conﬁdence in their

ability to take distance foreign language courses. 6) Social resources (in terms of ﬁiends

 

3 All the foreign language courses in this virtual high school were delivered through Blackboard.

4 Due to the fact that those courses allow three-week span for students to register and drop, the ﬁrst survey
was actually announced at the fourth week of the semester. Since the surveys were administered online,
students did not ﬁll out the survey at the same time. However, the majority of the ﬁrst surveys were
collected within four to six weeks.

5 Considering that a time span was needed for students to ﬁll out the online surveys, the second survey were
made available six weeks before the course’s ofﬁcial ending date. And it turned out that the majority of the
students ﬁlled out the survey two weeks before the end of their course.

6 Survey Monkey is an online survey engine which hosts customized survey questions and collects and store
survey responses. It also provides a summary report of the responses and allows export into excel ﬁles.
Administering online surveys made it hard to enforce the students to ﬁll out the survey at a speciﬁc date,
and as a result for the majority of the students, the two surveyed were ﬁlled out with less than two-month
time lapse in between. However, since the two surveys did not have much constructs in common and the
ﬁrst survey targeted at student traits and contextual factors that were relatively stable and were generally
not expected to change over one or two months.

7 The items in this part were taken from the ESPRI survey developed and tested by Roblyer & Marshall
(2003)

21

and family members) available to the students to support their learning of the foreign
language. 7) Student time constraints in terms of the time they spent on part-time job,
sports and other social activities. Questions in the survey were mostly Likert scale
questions using a scale of 1-7 with 1 indicating “strongly disagree” and 7 indicating
“strongly agree”.

The end-of-the-semester survey included the following constructs: 1) Student
satisfaction with the course, including their overall satisfaction with and enjoyment of the
course, their satisfaction with speciﬁc aspects of the course like amount of interaction
with classmates and the instructor, the organization of the course, etc., and their intention
of taking the next level of the distance foreign language course and of continuing to learn
the language through other means. 2) Student attitude change in terms of their perception
of the effectiveness of distance foreign language learning and their conﬁdence in taking
distance foreign language courses. 3) Student perception of improved skills through
taking this distance course, such as understanding of the language and the culture, online
learning skills and online foreign language learning skills. 4) Student evaluation of the
effectiveness of the course in teaching language and culture. 5) Student perception of
certain aspects of the course design, such as amount of interaction, clarity of the
instructions, feedback from the instructors, Opportunities for collaborative work and so on.
6) Students perception of crucial factors to distance foreign language learning. 7) Student
comments on the areas that their courses needed improvement. 8) Student actual behavior
in the learning process, such as social resources used (frequency of studying together with
other classmates and practicing with family members and friends on the language),

frequency of emailing the instructor, time spent on study the course each week, and so on.

22

Questions were again mostly Likert Scale from 1-7 with 1 indicating “strongly disagree”
and 7 indicating “strongly agree”.

The course evaluation survey speciﬁcally for the Chinese course elicits students’
overall satisfaction with the course, perceptions on the various components of this course,
and things they want to improve for this course.

Instructor survey. The instructor survey was administered mainly for the reason to
get a better understanding of how each of the instructors delivered the courses. Instructors
were asked on issues related to the manner they handled interaction with the students, the
way they gave feedback, group activities or collaborative work they organized and so on.
Furthermore, the instructors were also asked on their perception of the crucial factors to
distance foreign language learning. Most of the questions were again Likert Scale from 1-
7 with 1 indicating “strongly disagree” and 7 indicating “strongly agree”.

Student F ollow-up Email Questions and Instructor Phone Interviews

Mid-of-semester “interviews” were conducted on 14 students and seven
instructors. Student “interviews” were conducted through follow-up email
correspondences on a set of open-ended questions. The students were selected to
represent a wide range of previous distance learning and foreign language leaming
experience based on their ﬁrst survey responses. Students were “interviewed” on their
perception of the strength and weakness of their courses, of the factors that they regarded
as critical to effective distance foreign language learning and the reasoning behind them,
and of an ideal distance foreign language course in their mind (see Appendix E). Around
40 students were contacted via email to check whether they would be interested in
answering some questions about their learning experience in their online foreign language

class, and 14 students gave consent, thus there was a 35% response rate for “interview”.

23

Among the 14 students, seven were from the online Chinese course and the rest seven
were from the other courses. Based on their responses to those open-ended questions, ﬁve
students were emailed back for clariﬁcation on their responses. Telephone interviews
with the instructors were conducted after they ﬁlled out the instructor survey, and the
interviews were basically for the purpose of clarifying some of the responses in the
survey. In addition, they were also asked on their vision of an ideal distance foreign
language course. All participants were interviewed individually. The email interviews
with the students were saved and the telephone interviews with the instructors were
audio-recorded.
Class Artifacts in the Blackboard

For all the distance foreign language courses, the course materials and activities
were organized in the Blackboard. The grades of each activity and the overall scores were
recorded in the Gradebook in the Blackboard. Furthermore, for the Chinese courses, all
the postings on the discussion board forums were saved in the Blackboard. All the grade
information and discussion board entries were retrieved at the end of the semester.

Data collection started at the end of February and ended at the beginning of June.

Table 2 presents the procedure and timeline of data collection.

 

8 The other foreign language courses did not use Blackboard forums embedded in Blackboard, and there
were no entries in this area. Thus only the discussion board entries in the Chinese course were saved and
retained for analysis.

24

Table 2

T imeline for Data Collection

 

 

Date Week Data Collection
Feb. 20th 4” week Send out the announcement and open the ﬁrst
survey.
Mar. 20th 8th week Send out instructor survey.
Mar. 20th 8m week Email student “interview” invitation.
Mar. 28th 9th week All but a few students ﬁnished the ﬁrst survey.
Apr. 10‘h 11th week Phone interview with the instructors.
Apr. 10th — 17th 11th — 12th week The majority returned the “interview” questions.
Apr. 17‘h 13th week Open the second survey.
May 17th 17th week All ﬁnished the second survey.
May let 18th week Collect the course artifacts and class survey

responses from the Chinese course.

Data Analysis

Data Cleaning

Only the students who ﬁlled out both surveys were included in data analysis. And
heritage language learners were excluded based on their native language backgrounds.
Altogether 79 students were retained for the analysis, 57 (72%) females and 22 (28%)
males; 8 (10%) students were 9th graders, 23 (29%) were 10th graders, 21 (27%) were 11‘h
graders, and 27 (34%) were 12th graders. The students’ age ranged from 14 — 18, with the
average being 16.
Reliability Check

Research designed scales were checked for reliability. The outcome scales were

all around 0.90, and the predictor scales were mostly above 0.60.

25

Table 3
Reliability Check for Research Designed Scales

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scale Factor (1 n

Satisfaction 0.90 1 1

Outcome Attitude change . 0.93 5

Percerved Improved skrlls 0.95 10

Evaluation of effectiveness 0.87 2

Attitude 0.70 5

- Conﬁdence 0.84 3

Student Variables Achievement motivation 0.55 4

Organization and self-regulation skills 0.64 5

Contextual Variables Social resources and support 0.58 4

Course Variables Course communication 0.87 10
Data Integrating

Final predictors and outcome variables. Based on the study design and through
factor analyses, the outcome scales were reduced to two variables: positive perception of
the course9 and reduced feeling of isolation. The predicator data were reduced to the
following variables: 1) course variable: course communication”); 2) student variables:
organization and self-regulation skills, achievement motivation, motivation for taking the
course, positive attitudes towards distance foreign language learning, conﬁdence in taking
distance foreign language courses, gender, grade; 3) contextual variables: perceived social
resource availability, social resources used, after-school activity, online learning
background, language learning background, level, frequency of emailing the instructor,

and hours of study per week (see Appendix F for detailed information).

 

9 This outcome variable was a composite score of students’ overall satisfaction with the course and with
various components of the course, students’ positive attitude change towards distance foreign language
learning and distance learning, students’ perceived language learning and online learning skill
improvements, and students’ evaluation of the effectiveness of the course.

'0 Course communication was a composite score of both the opportunities for interacting with the instructor
and other classmates, and the effective communication mechanism (timely and informative feedback; clear
instructions; and technical and mentor support). The reason for this was that the communication mechanism
indicators were highly correlated with the opportunities for interacting with the instructor and other
classmates, and could not be used as separate predictors. And also it made sense to combine them
theoretically since they are all about ways of ensuring that the communication in the whole learning process
is clear and smooth.

26

Table 4
Reliability Check for Variables after Data Integration] I

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scale Factor (1 # of items

Outcome Positive perception of the course 0.98 25

Reduced feeling of isolation 0.76 2

Course Variables Course communication 0.87 10

Student Variables Attitude 0.74 4

Conﬁdence 0.84 3

Achievement motivation 0.59 3

Organization and self-regulation skills 0.64 5

Contextual Variables Social resources possible 0.67 2
Data Analyzing

The designing process of the online Chinese course and students’ use of and
reactions to different components of this course as revealed in the end-of-semester course
survey and their discussion board entries were recorded to answer the ﬁrst research
question, i.e., how well the design was materialized in the context of a virtual high school.

Linear Regression Analyses on the survey responses from participants in different
foreign language courses were conducted to identify crucial factors that may predict
students’ perception of their online language learning experience and feeling of isolation
during the learning process. Correlation analyses were also conducted on the online
Chinese course.

Qualitative analyses on student rating on the importance of a variety of factors to
their online language learning experience, their interview data and selected survey
responses were conducted to provide ﬁrrther look into factors that were perceived to be

important. Furthermore, analysis of students’ perception of the various components of the

 

” The new a for achievement motivation and social resources possible were calculated after throwing away
a few variables in the construct.

27

online Chinese courses was conducted to add further insight into the implementation of

the design framework at beginning-level foreign language courses.

28

CHAPTER 4
WHEN THE IDEAL MET THE REALITY

The proposed design framework stands for the theory-suggested ideal version of
what an optimal language learning environment should look like. When it was
implemented in real contexts, a lot of contextual variables played a role in shaping the
ﬁnal materialization of the design framework. This chapter records such a process and
presents a story of what happened when the ideal met the reality.

The Designing of the Online Chinese Course
At the heart of design is the idea of dialogue: dialogue between theory and
practice, between constraints and tradeojfs, between a designer and his or her
materials, between the designer and the user or learner.
-- Mishra, Zhao & Tan (1999, p. 221)

The designing of this online Chinese course was such a reiterative ‘dialoguing’
and balancing process. The materialization of the design framework in this course was
subject to the designers’ interpretation of each principle, the constraints of the designers’
capacity and the resources at disposal, and the instructional context of this course. The
design goal was to realize the design principles delineated in the synthesized design
framework, and the following section would focus on the designing and redesigning of
each design principle.

Course Communication
Principle 1: Various Opportunities for Interaction

Sub-goal one: abundant opportunities for interaction. Since this course was a

semester course and the virtual high school decreed the students be asked to study for this

course one hour each day and ﬁve days a week. Thus, it was envisioned that the students

29

would Spend the ﬁrst two days studying the e-textbook on their own. Then the students
needed to spend the next three days interacting with the instructor and each other through
virtual meetings. The ﬁrst virtual meeting would focus on students raising both linguistic
and cultural questions that appeared while studying the e-textbooklz, and discussing those
questions with each other and with the instructor. To give learners abundant opportunities
to interact with each other and provide them with more learning opportunities from each
others’ questions, this session was envisioned to be in the whole-class format. The second
virtual meeting would focus on chatting with invited Chinese-speaking guest(S) on the
cultural theme highlighted in the e-textbook for the particular week. To give learners
chances to get various input from different native speakers so as to better capitalize on the
collective intelligence of the native speakers, it was envisioned that the chatting would be
in several groups with several native speakers respectively. The small-group chatting
would be followed with a whole-class sharing and discussing session with the instructor
to provide an opportunity to elaborate on the culture issues and to explain the linguistic
problems encountered during chatting. Considering the language proﬁciency of the
learner, the chatting would be conducted mainly in English at the beginning and then
gradually transit to more and more Chinese. The third virtual meeting would focus on
group collaboration over some projects to provide more opportunities to interact with

each other. In addition to those synchronous in-class interaction opportunities, to provide

 

’2 The e-textbook used in this course is Chengo Chinese, a web-based online Chinese program co-
developed by the US. Department of Education and the Chinese Ministry of Education for middle school
students. This program takes a “model, practice, and apply” design. It integrates animation, gaming and
voice recognition techniques to illustrate the story of several students in a language camp and their
experience during six month’s home-stay in China. In this course, this electronic text-book is used in a self-
study fashion. The particular e-textbook was chosen because this was quite a web-based Chinese learning
program with much authority and was developed with both self-learning and classroom instruction in mind,
and thus was a good ﬁt for this semester online Chinese course format.

30

more chances for learners to interact with each other “outside-of-class”, opportunities for
asynchronous interaction would be created as well.

However, the conﬂicting schedules of the high school students made it impossible
to arrange whole-class virtual meetings. Even for one virtual meeting session, ﬁve time
slots were needed to accommodate the schedules of the students. Thus, the plan on whole-
class session could not be implemented. Now, the instructor had to take ﬁve separate slots
to ﬁnish one virtual session. It was impossible for the instructor as well as the students to
have three virtual class sessions each week as laid out in the original plan, since doing
such would impose daunting demands on the instructor’s time, which was all but
impossible. AS a result, the three virtual class sessions had to be condensed to one virtual
class session each week. Because of this, the content planned to be covered in one week
had to be extended to two weeks. Thus the pace of the course had to be slowed down: two
one-hour virtual class sessions over two weeks needed to be taken to cover the learning
content for one episode of Chengo Chinese”. A corresponding adjustment on the time to
spend on each speciﬁc virtual session activity was also called for. Since the students were
going to spend four days self-studying one episode for two weeks, each virtual meeting
needed to set aside some time for e-textbook problem troubleshooting. The cultural
chatting needed to be shortened to leave enough time for group collaboration which
required a lot of time when conducted online. Busy schedule of the high school students
also made several students unable to attend some virtual meeting sessions, and thus it was
decided that the virtual class sessions each week would be recorded and posted on

Blackboard so that the students who could not make their virtual class sessions could

 

'3 Two weeks’ virtual sessions to cover one episode was decided on because one virtual session would
deﬁnitely be unable to cover all the contents planned and more than two weeks’ session would slow down
the pace of the course too much.

31

access the virtual class sessions at any time and that students could use those recordings
as review materials as a compensation for the limited opportunity for synchronous
interaction and as additional learning resources: learning through listening to the
interaction during classmates’ classes.

In addition to the virtual meetings, the students were expected to use the
asynchronous interaction each week to share learning resources and engage in social talk
with each other. The asynchronous interaction was intended to be realized through
posting on the discussion board embedded in Blackboard. And this design plan was easy
to realize with Blackboard. Several discussion forums were built in the discussion board
within Blackboard. Furthermore, the students could also send their instructor messages in
the message center embedded in Blackboard.

Sub-goal two: the opportunities to interact synchronously in both written and oral
mode. The realization of this sub-goal was reliant on the proﬁciency level of the target
learners and the technological capacity in the instructional context.

The target learners of this course were absolute beginners of Chinese. Their
extremely low proﬁciency in Chinese made it unreasonable to expect written mode to be
the major interaction means in Chinese. Furthermore, at this proﬁciency level, the most
reasonable means of written interaction was pinyin, and written chatting in pinyin was
hard to authenticate since current chatting programs did not support automatic conversion
and representation of the tones of pinyin. Oral mode of interaction in Chinese might be a
better ﬁt for learners at this proﬁciency level, and it could also help develop learners’
communicative competency in the target language, which was a major motivation and
motivator for learning the foreign language especially at the beginning level. Because of

the above considerations, it was designed that this course would focus on oral mode of

32

interaction but use written mode of interaction intermittently, mainly on the instructor’s
and other native speakers’ side, as explanation aids.

This course was the ﬁrst course in this virtual high school to request virtual
meetings, and thus this virtual high school was not well prepared to provide stable and
well-established conferencing system for this purpose. The virtual high school suggested
using the embedded virtual classroom module in Blackboard since they wanted to keep
everything within the course management system used in this high school. However,
although this module had whiteboard and text-based chatting functions, it did not support
audio conferencing. Stressing the importance of oral communication in this course to the
virtual high school persuaded them to search for audio conferencing systems. Due to the
price consideration and the consideration that it would be better to use the current system,
Blackboard, that they were already licensing, they only searched for a simple audio
conferencing system as an add-on to the virtual classroom module in Blackboard. Thus,
an audio-conferencing system, TeamSpeak 2, was licensed for this purpose. TeamSpeak 2
was chosen due to the consideration of “local server hosting, functionality, ease in
management, scalability, and pricing” (CTO, virtual high school, personal
communication, 2006): this audio-conferencing system had the ability to scale to
thousands of simultaneous users supporting online gaming, and its price was extremely
low. However, the kick-off sessions on the virtual classroom module in Blackboard
revealed that its performance was not very stable and it constantly disrupted the ongoing
of the virtual meetings (the instructor and the learners were constantly ‘kicked-out’ of the
session without their awareness regardless of their connection speed). Reporting this
problem to the virtual high school led to the drop-off of the use of this virtual classroom

module on the second week. The virtual high school decided to open a conferencing

33

system -- Picture Talk, which was currently used by the staff in the virtual high school for
internal conferencing purposes, for the use of this class. Although Picture Talk had an
audio interface, it was only designed for one-to-one usage. This conferencing tool had
great documentation presentation features and embedded text chatting features, thus could
serve as the teaching platform and supplementary text chatting purposes. However,
Picture Talk did not allow students to draw on the blackboard or working on the same
document on the whiteboard, and thus was not very ﬁiendly for group collaboration
activities. Nonetheless, the short time frame did not allow the searching and testing of
new conferencing systems for stable performance. As a result, the virtual class sessions
were hosted in two platforms: Team Speak 2 for audio conferencing and Picture Talk for
text conferencing and document presentation on the side of the instructor.

Sub—goal three: interaction with various interlocutors. In order to capitalize on the
collective wisdom of the native speakers of Chinese in addition to the instructor so as to
provide more language and culture input to the learners. It was originally designed that
several native speakers of Chinese would be invited into the cultural chatting sessions to
interact with small groups of students before the students reconvene into whole-class
session to share information they acquired from their respective chatting sessions.
However, because of the change on the time span that can be allotted to the cultural
chatting activity due to the time constraints and schedule conﬂicts elaborated above, the
limited time available for this activity and the impossibility for whole-class session did
not allow the original ﬁrst-small-group-then—whole-class design. And also because
students had to take this class on one of the ﬁve time slots each week, inviting ﬁve
different native speakers of Chinese for each time slot was not very economical and

implausible since it meant either inviting a lot of native speakers of Chinese or asking the

34

ﬁve native speakers of Chinese to join the class every other two week at a ﬁxed time.
Neither of these two options would work since it was not easy to ﬁnd enough volunteers
to come to the chatting session to meet the needs for this course, to say nothing of
keeping them come back constantly at the time of the virtual meeting for those different
time Slots. Thus, it was decided that every other two weeks one native speaker of Chinese
would be invited to cover all the ﬁve culture chatting sessions. However, it turned out that
we could not ﬁnd native speaking guests who could come at all of the ﬁve sessions, and
in most cases, the invited native Speaking guest could come to two time slots at the most.
So the instructor had to cover the rest of the time Slots using the same cultural materials.
Thus the original intention of giving students opportunities to interact with more native
speakers of Chinese did not really work out.

Principle 2: High Quality Interaction (Negotiation of Meaning and Culture
Understanding)

To provide students with opportunities for negotiation of meaning, we envisioned
using some communication tasks that would invite students to co-solve some language
problems and/or interact with each other to reach some communication purposes. The
selection of those tasks was sort of a struggle. One the one hand, the literature suggested
that tasks in which the interlocutors hold different portions of the information and are
required to request and supply the information to each other so as to achieve the common
goal of reaching the only one acceptable task outcome would be the ones that facilitate
negotiated interaction (Pica, Kanagy & Falodun, 1993). Thus, ideally, to fulﬁll our design
goal of eliciting negotiation of meaning, we need to provide students with two-way
communication tasks. However, the target students were beginning-level high school

students of Chinese online who had little Chinese proﬁciency to start with and who did

35

not have physical cues at their disposal to help them comprehend and communicate in
Chinese since no video-conferencing system was utilized in this class due to the high
demands of such system on connection speed. Thus practically speaking, it was
impossible to use such communication tasks at the right beginning. It was decided that to
scaffold the learners into active engagement in negotiation of meaning in Chinese, it
might make more sense to start with more structured language tasks and allow learners to
talk about the language problems in English but encouraged and guided them to gradually
use more and more Chinese to engage in negotiated interaction. Thus in this course, both
highly structured language tasks and more open-ended communicative tasks were
designed: reordering the words in a sentence, reordering the sequence of sentences in a
dialogue, dictogloss tasks, give instructions based on a picture, picture description tasks,
picture difference tasks, and so on. The focus of each language task was to be consistent
with the language and cultural theme of the week reﬂected in the e-textbook. The tasks
were sequenced according to the following rules: to proceed from the more structured to
the less structured with those that involve mechanical manipulation of linguistic
structures at the beginning followed by those that elicit more L2 productive languages,
and to transit from the use of English to more and more use of Chinese to solve those
tasks. This sequencing of the tasks was based on the consideration that, with the linguistic
limitations of beginning-level language learners, it would make more sense to gradually
increase the linguistic and cognitive load of the tasks to ease the learning process. Those
communicative tasks were expected to elicit negotiation of meaning both among the
learners and between the learners and the instructor.

To enhance cultural understanding, bi-weekly cultural chatting was designed. It

was also designed that students would exchange and share cultural questions and

36

resources asynchronously in discussion board. And thus a discussion forum was
established in the discussion board in Blackboard, and students were encouraged to post
their questions and answer each others’ questions about culture in this forum.
Principles 3: High Quality Interaction (Timely and Informative Feedback and Effective
Communication of Assignment Instructions and Expectations)

Weekly virtual meeting sessions were expected to serve the purpose of providing
timely and informative feedback to the students. The way the virtual meeting sessions
were designed (inviting and answering students’ questions about the e-textbook, engaging
students in language tasks, and inviting students to discuss about native speakers to
culture issues) was expected to encourage students to ask questions and produce Chinese
so that the instructor and other peers would have chances to provide feedback, either
negative or positive, to their questions and on their language production. To compensate
for the limitations that some students could not attend virtual meeting sessions and that
the time available for virtual meeting was quite limited, asynchronous means of feedback
were also made available through discussion board Q&A, instructor feedback to
assignments in Gradebook in Blackboard and emails between students and with the
instructor through the message center in Black board.

The virtual meeting sessions were also expected to give students convenient ways
to ask for clariﬁcation on assignments and on project expectations. To make the course
expectations clear to the students ﬁ'om the right beginning of the course, a syllabus with
detailed explanations on what to cover during each week was provided on the ﬁrst day of
the class. To make sure that the students would have a clear understanding of each week’s

assignments and expectations, a “start from here” link was created that arranged the

37

assignments for each week in week folders and provided step-by-step instructions on
what assignments to do and how to do were provided for each week.
Principle 4: Various Communication Media

In this course, in addition to the synchronous means of communication, Team
Speak and Picture Talk, asynchronous communication means was also designed to
complement synchronous communication media to provide learners with rich means of
interaction. The selection of the synchronous communication means went through some
twists, as elaborated above. Likewise, the selection of the asynchronous communication
means also met some problems. It was originally designed that some asynchronous
interaction would be open to the public so as to capitalize on the collective wisdom of the
public, such as eliciting the public’s feedback on the students’ product, tips on learning
Chinese, possible Chinese learning and culture resources, and so on. Thus it was
envisioned that public Blog and collaboration tools like wiki would be used in addition to
the discussion board forums and message center embedded in the Blackboard to make
some activities more authentic and meaningful to the students and to enhance students’
ability to live in a digital world.

However, this design was not able to be carried out due to virtual high school’s
consideration for student privacy, as exempliﬁed in an email correspondence with a
virtual high school administrator on this issue:

“Your students are minors, i. e., underage children. As such, we must
take great care in protecting their identities. Any external activity
that may expose them to a sexual predator is to be strictly avoided. If
a student wishes, on their own, to create a blog for their own
personal use, that is between the student and their parents. However,

XX should never encourage students to post information on any web
server that XX doesn't own. So, no blog. ”

38

Thus in the end the plan on both the public Blog and the wiki was not able to materialize
and the relevant activities were instead hosted in the Blackboard.
Course Structure

Principle 5: T ask-Based Instruction

To materialize Doughty and Long’s (2003) conceptualization of task—based
distance foreign language learning, we aimed at designing a series of interconnected
language learning tasks and an overarching task connecting all the tasks together. The e-
textbook itself adopted a task-based instruction format, revolving around the adventure
story of a boy in China and a series of relevant language and cultural tasks. However,
since the e-textbook was designed for self-study, those language and culture tasks were
more of independent nature and the majority of them belonged to mechanical language
practice. What was lacking in this e-textbook was language and culture tasks that were of
more communicative nature and would call for group collaboration and meaningﬁrl
language use. Thus group problem-solving language tasks and group cultural chatting
tasks that revolved around the language and cultural themes in the episodes of Chengo
Chinese were designed to make up for this limitation. The e-textbook was used as the line
that threaded those different tasks together. An overarching task was also designed to link
all the tasks in this course. We expected that the most appropriate overarching task for
language learning would be tasks that required learners to use the language and culture
knowledge they have accumulated throughout the course for either communication and/or
cognitive purposes. Thus we designed that, throughout this course, the students would
work on an overarching task, i.e., to write about Chinese culture using Chinese. Each

group of students was supposed to write something related to living or traveling in China

39

or description of Chinese culture and practices with around 60% of the text in Chinese.
The students were free to choose the genre and content for the writing project.

We wanted the group problem-solving tasks to be inherently connected so that
what the students could get out of those tasks were not just isolated and separated pieces
of conversation, but experience that were internally linked and worked together towards
one goal. Doing individual communicative tasks without embedding them into
meaningful contexts in a coherent way always made the tasks feel artiﬁcial and boring.
But embedding those tasks within a coherent story and making those tasks an integrative
part of the story would give more sense to those tasks and make the students feel more
motivated to continue those tasks and perceive those tasks as related and meaningful. We
envisioned that it might be viable to embed those language tasks in stories, and to make
those language tasks part of the story and students must solve those language problems
before continuing with the rest of the story. By thus doing, more Chinese input could be
provided to the students in an intriguing way and more impetus was provided for learners
to solve those language tasks. However, the selection of the story itself was not an easy
task. We basically had two choices: a Chinese classic story which would provide more
cultural input to the students and give students a great sense of accomplishment; or an
English classic story which would provide more contextual and background cues for the
students and was easy for learner to relate to. Since we decided on the story itself as a
way to provide additional target language input, English classic story was chosen as a
more appropriate option since reading a familiar story would reduce the cognitive load of
the task and facilitate the linguistic part of the task, which was crucial for absolute
beginners, and that familiar context could also help learners to guess the meaning of the

new Chinese vocabularies in the text and make the task less daunting to those beginning-

40

level students. Once we decided on an English classic story, we were challenged with
another decisiOn: which speciﬁc English classic story to choose? Wizard of Oz came to
our mind as an option since it was a story that was very familiar to the target population,
and the uncanny and imaginary nature of the content held lasting glamour to people of all
ages, youngsters in particular. Once the speciﬁc classic was chosen, another problem
arose: how to keep faith to the original plots and at the same to observe the sequence of
the corresponding language themes in the e-textbook that those language tasks needed to
feature? It was decided that the former had to be sacriﬁced to keep the connection
between the e-textbook and the language tasks in this group problem-solving project, and
thus the story was changed to serve the latter. As for the technological representation of
this story, due to our limited technology capacity and the short time frame for the
preparation of the course, we decided to present each chapter in the form of Power Point
with some pictures from Wizard of Oz cartoons as rough background cues, with audios
embedded, and with English translation of the text available as learning aids. The Power
Point ﬁles were saved into Power Point Show ﬁles so that students could open them
directly within Blackboard and view it through the browser, which avoided the potential
script incompatibility problem and saved students from going through the trouble of
installing Chinese language pack on their computers.

The group writing project was originally envisioned to be hosted in wiki so that
the public might serve as great channels of resources, feedback and motivation, and that it
could provide a more convenient and efﬁcient means for such group collaboration.
However, due to the student privacy problem elaborated above, this plan was not able to
be carried out. The group writing project had to be conducted in the form of group

discussion forums.

41

Principle 6: Emergent and Learner-Based Linguistic Instruction

The e-textbook itself followed emergent linguistic instruction principle and only
provided brief grammar instruction on limited items. To realize this principle in the other
learning activities, all the linguistic instructions and explanations were designed to be
conducted in an emergent fashion. The activities during virtual sessions basically
followed a learner syllabus. The troubleshooting of the e-textbook during the virtual
sessions was designed to be mainly based on the questions students raised about each
particular episode of the e-textbook. The group activities, i.e., the cultural chatting, the
problem—solving project and the group writing project, were designed to be conducted in a
chatting fashion among the learners and between the learner and other native speakers,
and the role of the instructor was set to facilitate the discussion and answer emergent
questions about the language and the culture.
Principle 7: Variability in Course Structure

To enhance the variability of the learning activities, various forms of learning
tasks, ranging from self-study of e-textbook to group online chatting for different
pedagogical purposes with different interlocutors were designed. The variability of the
assignments and assessments was materialized through designing a range of language and
culture assignments: different group projects; audio recording of the spoken assignments;
interview assignments, several quizzes throughout the semester. Furthermore, students
were allowed to approach the assignments in different ways, the group writing projects in
particular. The writing project was designed to be open-ended and students were given
freedom to basically decide everything about the writing project expect for the
expectation on the portion of Chinese in the ﬁnal product. Although the types of activities

in the virtual meetings were ﬁxed, most of the speciﬁc contents were to be determined in

42

an emergent fashion (e. g., the troubleshooting of the e-textbook depended on the
questions students raised; and the focus and the progress of the cultural chatting depended
on the questions students raised and the speciﬁc issues that raised their interest).
Principle 8: Strengthening Learning Management Ability

To strengthen students’ learning management ability, a weekly self-reﬂection blog
was designed to engage students in active reﬂection of their learning processes,
successful and unsuccessful strategies, the items they needed to pay particular attention to,
and ﬁ'ustrations they encountered in each particular week.

It was envisioned that the self-reﬂection blog be hosted in a public blog to invite
help not only from fellow classmates but also from the public at large. However, this
design was also not able to be realized due to the same student privacy concern discussed
above. Thus all the self-reﬂection blogs had to be conducted in discussion board within
Blackboard. A self-reﬂection blog forum was set up in the discussion board for students
to enter they weekly reﬂection. To make those postings keep the blog ﬂavor and serve as
a better record of the learning paths and progress of each individual learner, it was
designed that each student was required to keep only one entry in the forum and they
were to update their reﬂection for the rest weeks on the same entry.

Principle 9: Formative Assessment

The group projects, weekly assignments and regular quizzes would all work
together to serve as the formative assessment mechanism in this course.
Principle 10: Co-Construction of Learning Environment and Experience

To encourage learners to cO-construct the learning environment and experience, a
language and a culture forum were set up to encourage students to share the language and

cultural problems they encountered during studying. A help forum was also set up for

43

learners to share their frustrations with each other, help alleviate each other’s frustrations
and address each other’s problems, and socialize with each other. It was also expected
that students would read each other’s self-reﬂection blog and share strategies with each
other and help each other along the learning process. A learning resource forum was also
set up to encourage students to actively seek Chinese learning resources and share those
resources with each other. In addition, it was designed that students would be able to
construct communal learning resources together through adding vocabularies relevant to
each week’s topic to the glossary. However, Blackboard did not allow students to edit or
add entries in the glossary, and hence made glossary a closed system and not friendly to
such co-construction design. Thus this design was not able to be realized in this course.
Summary of the Design

All these design dialogues resulted in the following design of the online Chinese
course (see Table 5):

The students self studied one episode of the e-textbook, Chengo Chinese, every
two weeks, and each week each student attended one small-group virtual class session.
Every one episode of the e-textbook was expanded and elaborated in two virtual class
sessions: in one session, students discussed the linguistic and cultural problems about the
Chengo Chinese episode, chatted with a native speaker guest on Chinese culture theme of
the week and cross—cultural differences, and worked on the problem-solving project; in
the other session, they continued discussion on the episode, discussed their group writing
project, and continued to work on the problem-solving project. Each virtual class session
used Team Speak for audio conferencing and Picture Talk for text conferencing and

instructor document presentation from the instructor.

44

Recordings of the weekly virtual class sessions were updated on the Blackboard.
Students posted their language and cultural questions on the Blackboard and updated their
self-reﬂection blog and group-writing project each week. Throughout the semester, the
students were encouraged to contribute learning resources and connect to each other

through posting on the discussion boards.

 

 

 

 

Table 5
The Instructional Layout for Each Episode of Chengo Chinese
Time Span Content
Week 1 Four days Post and discuss language and cultural
questions on Chengo Chinese on discussion
board
Self-reﬂection blog
One day Q&A on Chengo Chinese
(1 hour virtual meeting) Cultural Chatting
Problem-solving project
Week 2 Four days Self-study of Chengo Chinese

Post and discuss language and cultural
questions on Chengo Chinese on discussion

 

board

Self-reﬂection blog
One day Q&A on Chengo Chinese
(1 hour virtual meeting) Group-writing project

Problem-solving project

 

What Actually Happened
Schedule Change and Technical Problems
Slowed-Down Schedule
Some students had encountered problems getting into Blackboard, and quite a few
of them had difﬁculty getting into the other two conferencing systems. Due to those
technical problems, the class slowed down on its progress and the original schedule was
postponed to three weeks behind. For the ﬁrst three weeks, the class mainly worked on

introducing pinyin and practicing pronunciation of key words and phrases from Chengo

45

Chinese episodes during the virtual meeting. It was not until the fourth week that the
group writing project was introduced, and not until the Sixth week that the cultural
chatting and the problem-solving project were introduced. Although the ﬁrst 20 minutes
of each virtual class session were planned on troubleshooting student-raised questions on
Chengo Chinese, few of the students actually raised any questions. So for this time slot,
the instructor focused again on the pronunciation of the words in addition to answering
questions, if any.

Furthermore, a major obstacle to teaching language online is the assessment issue,
as reﬂected in some instructors’ survey response: “I do have a problem w/ cheating in my
class”; and “(the students) are less afraid to cheat because they don’t know me
personally”. Because the students in this online Chinese were dispersed here and there,
this course was designed to hold the quizzes and exams during the virtual meeting
sessions to avoid potential cheating issues. Since there were altogether 4 quizzes and
exams, it took away quite a portion of the virtual meeting sessions, which also led to the
slowing down of the course schedule.

Technical Problems

Throughout the semester, learners encountered various technical problems with
the e-textbook and the conferencing systems.

E-textbook. Quite a number of students encountered a series of technical problems
with this program like “It keeps closing me out,” “I had a very difﬁcult time to get the
Chengo Chinese program to work, since according to the little monkey, the system could
not ‘recognize my voice’,” and “It will randomly Shut down on me when I play certain
games or do certain things on it. Its really frustrating especially when my time schedule is

very tight.” Even far into week 7, some students still commented on the technical

46

problems with Chengo Chinese in their self-reﬂection blogs: “Technically I am still
having trouble with chengo Chinese,” and “Again the Chengo Chinese is frustrating.”

Team Speak and Picture Talk. Team Speak is an audio-conferencing system, and
it requires learners to download it onto local computer in order to run it. The downloading
requirement caused problems for those students who attended the virtual session at school.
Since the majority of K-12 schools had strict ﬁrewall conﬁgurations and most local
schools had to coordinate with the district tech department to resolve the ﬁrewall issues,
some students encountered problems downloading Team Speak onto their school
computers. Some students could not get into Team Speak until several weeks later. One
student had problem installing it permanently on the school computer due to the ﬁrewall
issues and did not get on Team Speak until the 9th week.

Picture Talk did not cause much problem since it only required a computer with a
Web browser and an Internet connection to join Picture Talk. No downloading was
required. Picture Talk had cross-platform capabilities and accommodated all connection
speeds. Thus students did not encounter much problem with this software.

Combining two conferencing tools to serve the virtual meetings caused some
technical overload that offset the effect of virtual meetings: “It was good for learning to
speak the language but the technology was too much for my computer, I couldn't get
Picture Talk to work which made things very difﬁcult;” “but the online connections
sometimes got messed up;” “However, it did get frustrating when my microphone would
refuse to work for some reason or another;” and “I didn’t like them because of the
technical problems the ﬁrst couple weeks.”

Class recordings. As mentioned previously, each week’s virtual session was

recorded and posted in Blackboard to help those who cannot make the virtual sessions for

47

some sort of reasons to catch up with the class. The virtual session was recorded using
Audacity, a shareware, and then converted to MP3 ﬁles. However, the converted audio
ﬁle was quite big, and a 15-minute audio ﬁle would be around 13 megabyte. Thus, it
turned out that although those recordings were available online, some students found its
ﬁle size too big to download with their Internet connection.
Students ’ Reactions to Different Components of the Course

Virtual Meeting Sessions

Students met in small groups of 3-7 in a ﬁxed one-hour virtual session each week
based on their schedules. Among the 19 students who ﬁlled out the survey, 11 of them
attended all but 1-4 of the virtual meetings due to “Spring Break” or “conﬂicting
schedule;” and 10 of them accessed the recordings of the virtual meetings either for quiz
preparation purposes or to make up for the sessions missed. The log ﬁle in Blackboard
also showed that the click rate of the virtual class recordings was somewhere around 450
times, and a few of the students clicked on this section more than 20 times.

Generally speaking, students’ reactions to the virtual meeting were quite positive.
When asked about their opinions on the virtual meeting sessions, all of them expressed
enjoyment with this component. For instance, one student wrote: “The virtual meeting
sessions were invaluable in my learning of the Chinese language.” Another remarked: “I
like how they are set up and how efﬁcient they are.” And another noted: “The virtual
meeting sessions were the most helpful of all, I really liked the format.” During the email
“interview”, when asked about the strength of this online course, several students
nominated the virtual meetings: “I think that the strength of this course is the class
meetings that we have weekly. They often vary in material, and are therefore always

interesting and infonnative;” and “I think the strength of this course is being able to talk

48

to the teacher directly. Because Chinese is such a hard language to learn, the student
needs to be able to talk to someone who does speak Chinese. TeamSpeak accomplishes
that.”

Students’ comments also revealed that the weekly virtual meetings played several
roles in their online language learning. First, students felt the virtual meeting sessions
served the language learning purposes. 84% of the students agreed in the end-of-semester
survey that weekly virtual meeting helped them improve Spoken Chinese competency. As
students remarked, “I like the virtual meeting sessions because you get to know if you are
pronouncing the words right and you can get more help from the instructor;” “Actually
speaking it to each other is extremely important though! We do this during our weekly
meetings, this is essential to the learning of a language, and especially the tones in
Chinese;” and “It was also important to actually speak and repeat the Chinese words
spoken from an actual person.” 74% agreed that weekly virtual meeting helped them
acquire vocabulary and sentence structures: “I felt that they really helped me with
pronunciation and learning how to structure sentences.” And 74% agreed that weekly
virtual meeting helped them with understanding of the culture, as one student remarked:
“I especially enjoyed the culture sessions.”

Second, students also felt that virtual meetings helped to build a sense of
community and strengthen the connections with the instructor and with other classmates.
As revealed in the end-of-semester survey, 68% of the students agreed that weekly virtual
meetings gave them a sense of belonging to a group. Some students remarked that virtual
meetings gave them a sense of “real” class: “I liked them because it gave everyone in the
class a time to come together to feel more like a class;” “I liked the interaction between

instructors, group members, and lectures. It felt like I was truly attending a class;” and “I

49

like them because it’s actual time with the teacher, like in a normal class.” Other students
liked the virtual meetings for the increased interaction with the instructor and the
classmates: “I liked the meetings because they allowed me to interact with my classmate
and teachers;” “I like being in complete contact with my group, and getting to know them
as people;” and “I liked that everyone was able to get together and talk about concerns
and help each other in the class.”

Third, virtual meetings also helped to ease the ﬂow of the communication in this
course through clarifying assignments and providing immediate feedback. In the end-of-
semester survey, 84% of the students agreed that weekly virtual meeting helped them
clarify the assignment, for instance, “The weekly virtual meeting is a must just to catch
up and touch base to make sure everyone is on the same page.” In addition, “The virtual
meetings every week are great to get ‘human’ help on issues that you are not able to
troubleshoot by yourself and with the software,” since “a program can only do so much.”
Furthermore, students also frequently commended virtual meetings on its function to
provide immediate feedback: “The virtual meetings are great. I love being able to follow
along, correct my mistakes, and also have the teacher answer my numerous questions
right away;” “I like being able to talk to my Chinese instructor because I can get direct
correction in all my tones and such;” and “I liked also that we could ask questions that we
had, with out having to email and wait for a response.”

Group Problem Solving Project

Students’ opinion on the Wizard of 02 project was kind of split. Among the 19

respondents of the end-of—semester survey, 13 liked this project, but 5 of them expressed

dissatisfaction with it. The majority of the complaints about this project was its lack of

50

clarity. Some students felt it was “confusing,” and they “didn’t understand it and how to
make it work.”

3, ‘6

This project was liked for it being “challenging, engaging and enjoyable,”
“something new to the class,” “use what we have leamed form the past classes and apply
it to the story,” “a recognizable story,” and for its ability to help “learn a lot about the
structure of the sentences” and “broaden vocabulary.” Thus the project did fulﬁll part of
its purposes, i.e., to present a chance for learners to use what they learned in other
materials in new situations and to increase the language input to the learners. It also
served the formative assessment function, as reﬂected in one student’s blog entry “I am
having some troubles with the Wizard of Oz part of the group meetings, due to the fact
that I don’t know all of the pinyin by heart. I do feel though that I am getting better at this
so I know im improving.”

However, a major purpose of this project failed to realize in this course. The main
purpose of this project was to create an opportunity for focus-on-forrn through instances
of negotiation of meaning. The design was to encourage students to read the story
together and ask each other questions on the part they didn’t understand, and then to work
on the language puzzle together, challenging each other on their hypotheses and
clarifying each other’s understandings. At the ﬁrst session when the instructor introduced
this project, she intended to go as planned and let the students work on the project
themselves with her providing help when necessary. However, she was greeted with
enormous silence and had to start leading the students through the story, guiding them to

understand each sentence. When it came to the language puzzle part, it was mainly the

case that one or two students provided the answers and the others simply remained silent.

51

Thus not much interaction was going on, not even in L1, to say nothing of negotiation of
meaning. This same situation stood regardless of the size of the group.
Group Writing Project

The group writing project was intended to give the students a chance to
collaborate together and apply what they learned about the language and culture through
writing a story related to China in Chinese. The students communicated with each other
mainly through the group writing forum in the discussion board and occasionally through
discussion during the virtual meeting sessions.

Overall, 63% of the respondents of the end-of-semester survey believed that the
group writing project helped them a lot in learning the language, 58% agreed that group
writing project helped them a lot in learning the culture, and 68% of them held that the
group writing project helped them to relate to other classmates in the course. Their
general impression of this project was that it was a fun and creative project to do, that it

3’ 6‘

helped to “get closer to a few students, able to communicate more with (my) group,”
and “feel like a real class”, and that it helped “understanding how to create sentences.”
But the major complaints about this project included group management and coordination
issues, procrastination and hard to communicate solely online.

Due to the fact that students had to work on the group writing project mainly
asynchronously through posting on the Blackboard, there had been great frustration over
the management and responsibility issue. First, due to its asynchronous fashion, it took
almost all the teams more than a month to get through the idea stage although the students
were quite diligent in posting ideas in the discussion board, which might be easily

decided on in one or two small portions of virtual sessions. Also all the teams proceeded

through designating each member to be responsible for one paragraph and then

52

scrambling the paragraphs together to form the ﬁnal product. Thus to some extent, this
project was transformed into individual works under the disguise of group project, and
thus deviated ﬁ'om its collaborative intention. Second, due to its asynchronous fashion,
some students procrastinated, which led to one or two members ending up doing the work
for all. As reﬂected in some students’ postings, “All weekend I worked on translating the
Group Writing Project, since it seems like some of my teammates have simply
disappeared;” and “okay seriously we have to turn this in today where is everyone...and
why am i left here with the assignment to do all by myself....i cant speak Chinese as well
as you two or at least shian...help! !! if im forced to turn this in without you guys its gonna
stink.”

Discussion Board Postings

The discussion board postings included students’ weekly self-reﬂection blog,
postings on their questions about e-textbook and about culture, and postings to share
concerns and offer help to each other. The purpose of the postings was to encourage
students to regulate and manage their learning through reﬂecting on their weekly learning
experience, and to encourage them to co-construct a learning community in which they
share learning resources and help each other.

In all, discussion board postings fulﬁlled, to some extent, the social part of the
learning community, i.e., to relate to each other, help each other with concerns and
encourage each other, whereas they failed to realize the intellectual part of the leaming
community, i.e., to help each other with language and culture problems and to share
learning resources with each other.

Students had mixed feelings about the self-reﬂection blog. They could see some

good aspects of self-reﬂection blog: 1) monitoring one’s own learning process both

53

cognitively and emotionally: “I think it really helped me see where I was and what I
needed to be doing;” “It also always gets me ﬁred up for the week to come;” and “(It)
helped me to release stress and to face the work that I had to do;” 2) providing a chance to
help each other: “You could ﬁnd people to help you and people you could help;” 3)
relating to others: “It helped me connect to the other classmates seeing the problems they
had;” and 4) serving as a vent of feelings: “It lets me get my concerns out;” and “I liked
that it gave me an outlet for my frustrations”. However, at the same time, they also
expressed their frustration of having really nothing important to say at times, especially
towards the end of the semester where they were not having many problems, and quite a
few of them just took it purely as another assignment to do.

Most of the students have kept their blogs from the beginning to the end. The
majority of the self-reﬂection blogs were about expressing their problems, venting their
stress and voicing their concerns in learning and in life, and quite a few were about
encouraging themselves to keep on the good work. Not many students responded to each
other’s postings (altogether there were 11 response postings throughout the semester), and
unfortunately the log ﬁles in Blackboard does not provide information on how often
students checked into each other’s blo g. Thus, it seems that the self-reﬂection blog did
serve the function of self-encouragement, emotional management, and possibly, as
students reported, a chance to relate to others. But the blog failed to serve the purpose of
building a climate in which students actively adjust their learning strategies and helping
each other with learning problems and strategies.

As for the other discussion board postings (Chengo Chinese and culture questions,
sharing learning resources and helping each other), a handful of the students expressed

favorable opinions about them. Among the positive things said about those postings were:

54

chance to ask questions and seek help from others, get to know others’ problems,
opportunity to communicate with each other. In addition to the above-mentioned
functions, discussion board also served as a bridge or starter for more interaction between
the students. In this online Chinese course, at the right beginning, someone suggested on
the postings that they might want to interact with each other on Instant Messenger. This
suggestion initiated an AIM group of around six students who were actively interacting
with each other on a daily basis. Despite the positive comments, students also expressed
frustration over the uncertainty of getting responses, “sometimes, it seems to take forever
for someone to answer a question that I had.”

A check into the discussion board postings showed that students responded quite
diligently in the forum on questions concerning help and questions about assignment, but
almost no responses were given to the e-textbook and culture questions and no student
postings in the learning resource forum either. The fact that asking questions about e-
textbook and culture was a weekly assignment had led quite a few “no new questions”
postings.

Table 6 summarizes the changes that were made out of the negotiation between
the ideal design and the K-12 contexts (technological capacity, privacy issue, scheduling
issue, etc.), the particularities of online teaching (cheating issue, lack of group cohesion
and course commitment due to the anonymity, difﬁculty of keeping every student on the
same page, etc.), and the Speciﬁc student population (the low proﬁciency level, the
geographic dispersion, etc.). Thus the design of the online foreign language learning
environment needs to take into account the potential impact of various contextual factors

and student backgrounds so as to seek a great ﬁt between the design and the context.

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57

CHAPTER 5

CRUCIAL FACTORS TO ONLINE FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING

This chapter presents the regression analyses on factors that affect students’
perception with their online foreign language learning experience and the summary of
student-perceived importance of factors in online foreign language education. The
analyses were based on the student survey response data and student interview data.

Regression and Correlation Analyses

In this virtual high school, the distance foreign language courseware (French,
German and Spanish) were purchased from an accredited foreign language education
company (http://wwwpower-glidecomh and all the instructors were provided through
this company. The virtual high school customized the courseware through dividing the
contents into modules and sections and put them on its courseware management system,
Blackboard. Thus all those distance foreign language courses were organized in exactly
the same way. All the learning activities in these courses were exactly those laid out in
the courseware, and the instructors did not add any additional class activities throughout
the semester. As a result, there was not much variation in course structure among the
distance courses on these three languages. The lack of variation in the course structure
among those online foreign language courses limited the scope of course design issues
that this study could test rigorously and only the course communication component of
online foreign language learning design framework was able to be subjected to regression
analyses. However, to some extent, regression analysis on this component of the design
framework is most meaningful and insightful since it is this component that differentiates
distance courses and face-to-face courses the most since interaction is the component that

is most inﬂuenced by media in that communication in distance courses has to be mainly

58

or solely mediated by online media. Furthermore, this component is also where distance
course within-variation is most salient. Regression analyses were conducted on the course
communication variable together with some student and contextual variables to identify
which factors might predict learners’ satisfaction with their online foreign language
learning experience.
Students ’ Positive Perception of the Course

In general, student perception of their online foreign language courses was quite
positive (Mean = 5.35; SD = 0.15). Course communication alone could account for 62.9%
of the variation in students’ positive perception of the course, among which interaction
with the instructor alone could account for 43.8% of the variation. When adding student
and contextual variables”, four variables were retained in the regression model. The
model was statistically signiﬁcant (p < .001) and it explained 73.3% of the total

5

variationl .

Table 7

Crucial Factors to Positive Perception of the Course

 

 

 

 

Effect Regression Coefﬁcient t p
R2 = 73.3% B SE (B) B Effect size
(Constant) -.73 .45 -l .60 .l 1
Course communication .75 .08 .66 2.2116 9.51 .000
attitude .16 .06 .16 0.63 2.72 .008
conﬁdence .24 .08 .21 0.67 2.90 .005
motivation for taking the course .50 .17 .18 0.69 2.96 .004

 

 

'4 Instructor variable was checked and was not found to have signiﬁcant inﬂuence on the model.

'5 A possible outlier was identiﬁed and checked, but was not to ﬁnd to be abnormal case. There was no
legitimate reason to exclude this case and thus it was kept in the model.

'6 The effect size was calculated through t/sqrt (Zn). The large effect size also suggested that it would be
hard to invalidate the inferences drew from the sample, small though it was compared to the overall
population, based on the indices of robustness for sample representation (Pan & Frank, 2004).

59

Students’ perception of course communication in terms of interaction
opportunities with other classmates and the instructor as well as their perception of the
effectiveness of the course communication mechanism that helps to reduce confusion and
ﬁ'ustration (clarity of instructions and expectations, timely and informative feedback, and
technical and mentor support) was found to be a signiﬁcant predictor of student’s positive
perception of the online language course. Table 7 shows that the more positively the
students perceived of course communication, the more positively they would rate their
learning experience (ES = 2.21, P < .001). This ﬁnding conﬁrmed the theoretical
argument and the ﬁndings in the meta-analyses on the positive effect of amount of
interaction on general satisfaction with distance education (Zhao et al., 2005; Bernard, et
aL,2004)

In addition, some student variables were also found to affect students’ view of
their online foreign language learning experience. It was found that the more conﬁdent
the students were about their skills in taking distance courses, the more positively they
would perceive their learning experience (ES = 0.67, P < .01). Furthermore, students’
positive attitudes towards distance foreign language learning that they brought to their
online learning experience also positively inﬂuenced their ultimate satisfaction with the

course (ES = 0.63, P < .01)”. This result was in line with Bernard et al’s (2004) ﬁnding

 

'7 There might be a concern that because most of the students did not ﬁll out the survey on conﬁdence and
attitude until 4-6 weeks into their course, students’ attitude and conﬁdence might have changed during this
time lapse. Thus, the positive effect of conﬁdence and attitude on general positive perception of the course
might be boosted due to this time issue. However, when comparing the students who ﬁlled out this survey
two weeks earlier (11 = 40) with those who ﬁlled out later (11 = 40), for conﬁdence there was no signiﬁcant
difference (t=-.819, p=.415); and for attitude the students ﬁlled out the survey earlier held signiﬁcantly
more positive attitudes than those who ﬁlled out later (t = 2.186, p=.032). Thus although it cannot be argued
that the survey time did not have effect on student’s conﬁdence and attitude, at least it could be claimed that
the ﬁndings on the positive effect of conﬁdence and attitude was not boosted due to the time lag.

60

that the beliefs about the effectiveness of distance course that students bring to their
online courses positively predict their achievement in their online courses.

The result also revealed that students’ motivation for taking the online foreign
language course has positive impact on their ﬁnal perception of the course (ES = 0.69, P
< .01). Those students who took the course simply to meet graduation requirement tended
to be less satisﬁed with their online foreign language course than those who took the
course more for utility reasons or for integrative reasons (i.e., to understand more of the
language and culture).

Reduced Feeling of Isolation

In general, the students were not very satisﬁed with their amount of interaction
with their classmates made available in the course and felt quite isolated during the course
(Mean = 3.89; SD = 0.21). A subset of the course communication variable (opportunity to
interact with classmates and the instructor) was found to be a better predictor of students’
reduced feeling of isolation. Opportunity to interact with classmates and the instructor
alone was able to explain 41.1% of the variation in the student reduced feelings of
isolation (P < .001), among which interaction with classmates alone could account for

38.3% ofthe variation (P < .001).

Table 8
Crucial Factors to Student Reduced Feelings of Isolation

 

 

 

Effect Regression Coefﬁcient t p
R2 = 41.1% B SE (B) [3 Effect size
(Constant) 1 .00 .42 2.37 .02
Interaction_student&instructor .70 .10 .65 1.71 7.44 .000

 

Note. Interaction_student&instructor refers to the amount of interaction with fellow
classmates and the instructor.

61

Table 8 shows that student perception of the opportunities to interact with other
classmates and with the instructor in the course might be a critical factor that impacts
whether they will suffer from the feelings of isolation (ES = 1.71, P < .001). The more
opportunities they perceive there to be, the less feeling of isolation they would entertain.
This result agrees with the literature on student attrition rate that interaction would reduce
the feelings of isolation that distance education students have so often reported (Moore &
Thompson, 1990), and lends support to Moore’s (1989) claim that more dialogue tends to
decrease distance. However, the small amount of variation in feeling of isolation that
interaction with the instructor and other learners could explain suggested that feeling of
isolation was a quite complex phenomenon, and could involve more factors than
opportunity of interaction alone. It might be possible that the nature of the interaction has
a say over feeling of isolation as well, as Rovai (2002) has suggested: “interactions that
are critical or show tension or antagonism” might actually increase the feeling of isolation.
Course Grade

It was unreasonable to compare the course grades of different language courses
since those languages varied drastically on the ease of learning”. Furthermore, instructor
bias in grading was hard to eliminate since those courses were taught by different
instructors who might vary a lot in their rigidity of grading and the skills they focused on
during grading. Thus, it was not meaningful to compare the grades of those students
across different online foreign language courses. As a result, the analyses on course grade

focused on the online Chinese course.

 

'8 According to the Defense Language Institute, it took a student with average language aptitude 480 hours
of instruction to reach level-2 speaking proﬁciency in Spanish, but to reach the same level it would take the
same student 1320 instruction hours (Baxter, 2006).

62

First, the course grades of the 15 students who participated in the surveys were
correlated with their perception of the course, and it was found that the correlation was
positive and statistically signiﬁcant (r = 0.93, p < .01). This high positive correlation
suggests that what we found to be signiﬁcant predictors of students’ positive perception
of the course might as well have indirect impact on students’ course performance via their
positive perception of the course.

Then, the course grades of all the students in this Chinese course (n = 22) were
correlated with their participation in the group writing projects and other discussion board
forums. It was found that the correlation was also positive and statistically signiﬁcant (r =
0.57, p < .01). This positive correlation suggests that students’ participation in the
asynchronous interaction with classmates was related to their ﬁnal course grades.
Summary

The regression analyses suggest that effectiveness of course communication,
especially the opportunities for interaction with the instructor and the students in the
online course, might be a very important factor that affected students’ ultimate perception
of their online language learning experience. The correlation analyses on the students’
ﬁnal grades in the online Chinese course suggest that those factors might have indirect
impact on students’ ﬁnal grades through their positive perception of their online learning
experience.

Student Perception of Crucial Factors to Online Foreign Language Learning

In addition to the regression analyses, analyses on student survey responses and
student responses to the open-ended questions in the follow-up emails were also analyzed

to gain deeper understanding of the perceived crucial factors to online foreign language

63

learning and the perceived functions those factors play in their online foreign language
learning experience.

At the end of semester, when asked what factors are important to their online
foreign language learning, students viewed responsive and supportive instructor as the
most important factor, followed by clear class expectations, opportunity to interact with
the instructor, accessibility to immediate feedback, and engaging and fun course materials

and learning activities (Table 9). This view was also shared by the instructors.

Table 8

Students Perception on the Important Factors to Online Foreign Language Courses

 

 

 

All Students Instructor

Mean SD Mean SD
Authentic course materials and activities 5.84 1.38 6.50 1.00
Engaging and fun course materials and activities 6.04 1.27 6.75 0.43
Responsive and supportive instructor 6.58 0.90 - —
Opportunities to interact with other classmates 4.70 1.68 5.37 1.22
Opportunities to interact with the instructor 6.38 0.89 - -
Authentic and engaging learning activities 6.03 1.08 - -
Opportunities to collaborate on projects 4.84 1.91 4.86 1.57
Sense of community in which learners support and 5.24 1.59 5.00 1.83
help each other
Accessibility to immediate feedback 6.21 1.06 6.57 0.53
Express clear class expectations 6.41 0.82 6.71 0.49

Opportunities to talk about and learn the skills
necessary for online learning

l()alggfilrtunage 1121:3133 Share strategles for online foreign 5.45 1.28 5.29 1.3 8
Opportunities of continuous self-reﬂection on what

gets learned and what learning strategies to use in the 5.60 1.29 5.57 1.39
future?

Note. 7 indicates most important.

5.81 1.20 6.43 0.79

Students and instructors viewed the opportunities to interact with other classmates,
opportunities to collaborate on projects, sense of community in which learners support

and help each other as less important. However, this negative perception might be biased

64

since the majority of the students (students in other online foreign language courses) were
not given many opportunities to try those things out, and those factors might actually be
more important than students and instructors might have expected”.

Furthermore, student survey responses on areas they wanted their online courses
to improve and their responses in follow-up email “interview” also revealed several issues
they valued in online foreign language learning that were consistent with their rating of
important conditions for online foreign language learning.

Opportunities for Interaction

The emphasis on opportunities to interact with the instructor and other classmates
was reﬂected in their responses in the follow-up email “interview”. During the interview,
most of the 14 students regarded “direct correction” and help from the instructor, and
“having someone (‘ﬁiends’, ‘fellow online classmates’) to talk to about certain aspects of
the course” and “help each other” as crucial to their online learning experience. For
instance, one student commented: “It just helps to have someone else to talk to once in a
while or go over assignments with.”

Furthermore, when asked about what areas they wanted their online foreign
language courses to improve, there was quite a long list on the wish for enhanced
interaction either with the instructor or with the fellow classmates (around 33% of the
survey respondents). And a few more were about lack of support in pronunciation and

clarity in the instructions and assignments (10%), which could actually be remediated

 

'9 When comparing the rating of crucial factors to online foreign language learning from the students in the
online Chinese course (who were given a lot of opportunities for interaction and collaboration)with that
from the students in the other foreign language courses (who were not given chances for such activities), it
was found that the students from the online Chinese course rated opportunities to interact with other
classmates and to collaborate on projects and the sense of community in which learners support and help
each other as more importantly than students from the other courses (5.60 vs. 4.47; 5.73 vs. 4.60 and 6.27
vs. 5.03).

65

through more interaction with instructors or classmates. A lot of the students interviewed
stressed the importance of speaking in online language classes, as elaborated in this
student’s comment:

“The main difficulty is in practicing speech. It takes more eﬁ’ort to practice

speaking in French when you don 't have a typical classroom atmosphere

that forces you to speak on a daily basis. Normally, one spends a lot of

time talking in a language class, if only to go over homework problems.

Online doesn 't offer this same opportunity... It ’5 easy to complete the

assignments, but to practice speaking is a vital but often ignored part of

learning a language online. "

Then why was interaction regarded so important in their online foreign language
learning experience and what role could interaction possibly play in students’ online
foreign language learning experience?

Interaction with other classmates. Among the interview with the students, all of
the online Chinese students ‘interviewed’ through follow-up emails (n = 7) who had
relatively more opportunities to interact with classmates unanimously agreed that
interaction was a very important component of their online language learning experience.
However, the students interviewed from other classes (n = 7) split in their opinion on the
importance of interaction with the classmates. Two of them had interacted with the
classmates who were taking the same online course at the same hour and thought
favorably about interaction. The rest ﬁve had little interaction with their classmates either
online or face-to-face, and four of them regarded interaction as not very important. In all,
it seems that, among the students interviewed, the students who had had the chance to
interact with other classmates, either online or face-to-face, all regarded interaction as an
important part of their online language learning experience.

The wish for more interaction with classmates was also reﬂected in the students’

responses to the survey question “what about the course they did not like and wanted it to

66

be changed.” Around 20% of the students in the other classes explicitly expressed wishes
for more interaction with other students. Students commented: “I don’t like how we are
kind of isolated from other students.” “I feel really isolated, and that doesn't help me learn
as well. I need to be able to interact with others...even if I don't know them.” “i dont like
it because it hard to me and i cant get no help from nobody.” “The only thing I think this
course could improve on, is the social aspect. Maybe we could talk to other students on
MVHS who are taking the same course. This way we could talk to other kids our age, and
help each other.”

Then what perceived functions did interaction with classmates serve in students’
online foreign language learning experience? First, a major function of interacting with
classmates might be to build rapport among the classmates. The students reported that
interaction with other classmates enabled them to relate to each other and seek moral
support and encouragement from each other: “I LOVE being able to talk with the other
students all throughout Michigan who are learning the same language that I am leaming;”
“it allows us to relate with the others who are also completing the course”; “You start to
understand the difﬁculties other students go through”; “that way I know how other kids
feel about the class”; “I feel that I am not the only one who might be excited about a new
assignment, or stressing about the upcoming quiz. It provides people who can empathize
with what I am learning”.

Second, interacting with classmate might also serve the function as cognitive
device for learning, helping them to seek learning techniques from each other and better
monitoring learning. As some students pointed out, “it was very helpful to discuss the
information with them, and learn their study techniques;” “it's easy to tell when you fall

behind;” “I can learn from others’ mistakes and correct mine and vice versa.”

67

Third, another function interacting with classmates might serve was to enable
learners to help each other through the learning process: “they can help me ﬁgure things
out”; “We can ask one another questions and give each other advice”

Last but not the least, interacting with classmates gave learners the chance to
practice language with each other: “Being the only one from my school to be taking
Chinese was difﬁcult because I had nobody to talk to on a day to day basis about the
material in the course — it would be nice to have somebody to practice with who is also
learning and at the same stage as I’m at”; “It’s important because a chance to practice
language, more proﬁciency, use language effectively;” “discussing assignments, asking
questions, and practicing sentence structure.”

Interaction with the instructor. All the students “interviewed” regarded interacting
with the instructor as extremely important. And in their survey responses on areas in
which their online course needed improvement, more than 15% expressed explicitly that
they wished for more interaction and easier interaction with the instructors.

Media of interaction. The “interview” and survey responses also indicated that the
media via which interaction was conducted was very important. When explaining why he
did not think of interaction as important, a student said: “I don’t think it’s really important
in an online language course because of the trouble with communicating through email.”
Similar complaints about the inconvenience of media of interaction echoed among the
students: “It’s difﬁcult and time consuming to use email to communicate when I have
questions It’s annoying to have to type everything into an email, so I usually just
don’t ask questions anymore,” “I wish that we had a better way to get a hold of our
teacher like immediate responses instead of having to wait a day or longer for an email

response.”

68

Need for Edutainment

Moreover, students also valued the “fun” and “engaging” component of learning,
but at the same time the learning materials also needed to be “challenging”. Variability of
input and language practice opportunities was also considered important, but at the same
time they stressed the importance of support for and enhancement of the input. Around
8% of the survey respondents complained about the lack of comprehension aid (like word
lists) in the course materials, as reﬂected in comments like “It goes through words too fast,
I cant understand it. I started out too hard instead of keeping a steady pace. I couldn’t
keep up so I gave up.”
Need for F ocus-on—F arms

The tension between focus-on—form20 and focus-on-forms21 was also salient
through students’ survey and “interview” responses. Around 7% of the survey
respondents explicitly requested more systematic and explicit grammar instructions, as
explicated in students’ responses: “I wish we were taught grammar and conjugation rules.
I understand that the class wants to be ‘interesting’ so we simply listen to stories with the
goal of ‘picking up’ the rules as we go, however, this does not work. I wish were taught
rules of language.” During the email “interview”, a French student commented:

“I don ’t know how much this is a failure of the course or just my

comfort in learning a language, but I ’m used to a much greater focus

on learning the rules of grammar and then practicing them directly.

This course is much more scattered which is often particularly effective

for small children learning a language but it is difﬁcult to know

whether my grammar is correct or not when I ’m completing my
assignments because we don 't always learn the rules before being

 

2° Focus-on-form refers to directing learners’ attention brieﬂy shifted to linguistic code features, in context,
when students experience problems as they work on communicative tasks. Thus the linguistic features were
worked on in context in a sequence determined by their own internal syllabuses, current processing capacity
(Long, 1997)

2' Focus-on-forms refer to discrete-point grammar teaching, where learners spent a block of time working
on isolated structures in a sequence predetermined externally (Long, 1997)

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expected to use them When assignments are returned, they are

corrected, but grammar rules are not explained. I learn grammar

largely by guessing and comparing it to the rules I 'm familiar with in

Spanish/English. Largely, I like the format that this course follows but

I think a more focused look at grammar would help greatly. ”
This comment is pertinent to this big push for task-based instruction and focus-on—form in
online foreign language learning (Doughty & Long, 2003). For foreign language learning,
perhaps the integration of both focus—on-form and focus-on—forms might be the way to go.
As Klapper & Rees (2003) pointed out through their four-year longitudinal study on a
German program that explicit and synthetic language instruction is still substantially
needed “in the speciﬁc context of foreign language teaching in a majority Ll setting”, and
that “foreign languages are taught more efﬁciently and effectively when meaning-based
classroom interaction in L2 is linked to FonFs, rather than (just) FonF instruction” (p.
309). This might be particularly true for online foreign language learning since moments
for FonF per se are quite constrained in this learning environment due to the severely
limited opportunities for interaction among the learners and with the instructor in most
online language courses. And for the online learning of foreign languages that lack social
resources, like Chinese, this matter might be even worse since even less meaning-based
interaction is expected to happen in the learners’ immediate social surroundings and their
language learning might solely rely on the short period of exposure to the online
courseware and limited interaction with the instructor. Thus, the courseware and the
instructors might serve the language learners better by striking a balance between focus-
on-form and focus-on—forms, and it might be advisable for the instructors to provide some
emergent but synthetic linguistic explanations (focus-on-forms) either during virtual

meetings or via detailed feedback on assignments, and at the same time increase the

opportunities for focus-on-form through engaging learners in meaning-based interactions

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with fellow learners. If neither of them provides some emergent but systematic
explanations on the grammar and word usage, the feeling of uncertain and unsure about
their grasp of the language as the student expressed above might be unavoidable.
Summary

Students’ perception on crucial factors to online foreign language learning
corroborated with the results from previous quantitative analyses: students valued the
contribution of effective course communication to their online language learning. They
valued the opportunities to interact with the instructor and the classmates not only for

enhanced social presence but also for language learning purposes.

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CHAPTER 6
THE ONLINE CHINESE COURSE

The online Chinese course was designed to put heavy emphasis on engaging
students in interaction with the instructor through weekly virtual meetings and in
collaboration with other students during the weekly virtual meetings and postings in the
discussion board forums. This chapter presents students’ overall reaction to this course,
focuses on the problems emerged and the lessons learned on the implementation of the
proposed framework in a beginner-level online foreign language course, and thus
identiﬁes issues of note for future online foreign language course design and
implementation. The data analyzed in this section mainly came from student self-
reﬂection blog, student discussion board postings, email “interviews” with students and
student responses in the anonymous end-of-semester class survey.

Student Background

The online Chinese course had 29 students22 to start with. There were four
students who dropped out after the ﬁrst week and one student dropped out after the
second week. Thus 24 students studied in this course. Out of the 24 students, one student
stopped studying at the 6th week and one student stopped studying at the 12th week. As a
result, 22 out of 29 students stayed in the course from the beginning to the end.

The students taken this course ranged from grade 9 to grade 12, with an average of
10.88. Most of them had taken other foreign languages before or were currently taking
another foreign language course. The majority of them had never taken online courses

before. Their motivation for taking this course varied quite a lot, representing a wide

 

2‘ For one student, the mentor registered for him and he never knew he was in the class until the instructor
emailed him about that. Thus he did not participate in any of the course and was not considered as a student
of the course.

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range of motivation ranging from strengthening resumes to interest in the Asian language
and culture.
Students’ Overall Perception of the Course

The student retention rate was 76%23 . Among the ﬁve students who dropped out
of the course within the ﬁrst two weeks, one dropped out because of missing virtual
meetings and coursework due to her trip to China, another dropped out because of the
technical problems. For the two who did not persist to the end, they were both from the
12th grade.
Overall Satisfaction with the Course

All of the 16 students, who submitted entries of summary reﬂections on the
semester’s learning experience, expressed their enjoyment of the course. Comments like
“Overall, this was one of my favorite classes this semester;” “I have had awesome fun in
this course and I hope it will be here in the Fall of next year;” and “I absolutely loved it
and have every intention of keeping it up over the summer” abounded. Among the 19
students who ﬁlled out the end-of-semester class survey, 84% of the students liked the
learning activities in the course, 94% of the students agreed that the course was well
organized and easy to follow, and 84% of the students thought the assignment instructions
were very clear.

The course also helped to inspire and maintain students’ interest in Chinese. For
instance, one student noted: “Most importantly, I think that being exposed to this course

has really made me want to learn more and perhaps visit China as well.” Another said: “I

 

23 Note this retention rate was calculated through taking the ratio of students who persisted to the end over
all the students who were originally in the student roster. Since ﬁve drop-outs happened during the ﬁrst two
weeks, if we count only those who dropped out in the middle of the semester as ‘real’ drop-outs, then the
retention rate would be 92%.

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feel like I've learned a lot in this course and though I won't be taking any more XX
Virtual courses because I'll be in college, I do want to continue learning Chinese through
online study.” Furthermore, students expressed the wish to continue the learning
experience: 10 out of the 1624 students who submitted the summary reﬂection blog
planned to continue the course next semester.

Perceived Learning through the Course

Students perceived positively about what they had learned about Chinese through
the class. Among the 19 students who ﬁlled out the end-of-semester survey, 69% agreed
that they learned about the same as or better than a traditional high school class, and 85%
regarded this online course as about the same challenging as or more academically
challenging compared to other course. In their self-reﬂection summary, students
commented: “Wow, I've learned so much from this course, mainly about the Chinese
language, and even a little about the culture;” “I learned much more than I learn in a
semester of my Spanish class;” and “I learned a lot of different things that I didn’t know.
The culture was really interesting, and there were many things that I didn’t know.”

In addition, students also reported acquiring some online learning skills. One
student reﬂected on group management skills: “If we do any kind of group project next
year, I know that I need to make sure that my group is much more organized from the
start.” Another student reﬂected on what the class taught her about herself: “Also I think
this class helped me learn a lot about myself... my work habits, people skills, time
management, and so much more.” Several students commented that the class helped them
to realize the importance of time management issue: “. .. and this class has made me

realize how important time management is. . .. More than anything else, I have learned

 

2" 4 other students could not continue the course due to entering college or moving out of the country.

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that, when taking an online course, you must take the initiative in order to learn
efﬁciently;” “I did, however, start to slack toward the end quite a lot. So that’s
deﬁnitely one thing I’ll need to improve on. Starting college this coming fall, I’ll really
need to practice my time management skills.” In all, the majority of the students’ overall
perception of the course was quite positive.
Issues of Implementing the Proposed Design Framework

Discussion about the problems encountered in this class will proceed in the
sequence of the issues arisen in the implementation of the various components of
this course.
E - Textbook

Generally speaking, most students liked this program, thought of it as “nifty” and
felt much to learn in this program. However, quite a number of students encountered a
series of technical problems with this program. This e-textbook used some cutting-edge
learning tools, like speech-recognition. Though cutting-edge they may be, those tools
were also not mature enough to secure the stability of their performance. Hence students
reported great frustration with them. Those technical problems might have had
devastating effects on students’ perception of the program. One student had constantly
complained about the technical problems in her self-reﬂection blogs, and in the summary
blog she commented:

“I have to admit, there were frustrating times during the class, as well.

Especially ﬁrst, the problems with the Chengo Chinese program really got

on my nerves. After a while, I learned how to work beyond the glitches.

Probably my least favorite part of the class was actually completing the

Chinese episodes. I can ’t even explain why there were so trying; I just
dreaded doing the episode. ”

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Thus, it is important to ensure the stability of the e-textbook through selecting the more
mature technologies and make sure that technical support is easily accessible since in
online foreign language courses, the majority, if not all, of a student’s study time revolves
around the e-textbook.

Furthermore, students’ comments also suggested the importance of making close
connection between the e-textbook and the other course activities and, more importantly,
making this connection explicit to the students so that they could see e-textbook and other
class activities as coherent and perceive each of them as meaningful. One student
remarked at the end of the semester:

“Also, I think that with the course itself the Chengo Chinese portion could

have been improved upon. Besides the vocabulary, none of the material

learned in the program was really implemented. Due to this, I think that I

was often rather bored with the Chengo Chinese program itself "

Although in this online course, the instructor spent quite a portion of time practicing the
vocabulary encountered in the e-textbook during virtual meetings, the culture discussion
during virtual meetings also revolved around the theme of each episode in Chengo
Chinese, and the problem-solving project and the group writing project aimed at
encouraging students to use what they learned about the vocabularies, phrases and culture
in Chengo Chinese in contexts, the student still felt it lack of being reinforced. This seems
to caution us that the coherency in course design does not necessary lead to perceived
coherency on the students’ side, and it is the perceived coherency that determines whether
the students would perceive each course component as meaningful and connected and

actively pursue each of them. Thus online instructors might fare well to make sure the

students see the coherency and link between different components of the course since

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without seeing the purposes of each activity and the link among the activities, the students
may simply lose interest in the activity itself.
Virtual Meeting Sessions

Despite the overall positive reactions to virtual meeting sessions in the Chinese
course, several issues arose in the implementation of the virtual meeting sessions.

Scheduling was a major issue in the implementation of virtual meetings. With the
busy schedule of the high school students, it was quite a task to ﬁnd common meeting
times even for a small group of kids. Some schools assigned a certain time slot for
students to work on this online course during the school day, which would be the most
convenient time slots for most students. However, the time slots for the students were
different ﬁ'om each other, which made it hard to form groups during the time slots that
were most convenient to the students. The instructor expressed constant frustration in the
ﬁrst two weeks on the scheduling issue, and even with quite an effort in coordinating the
meeting times, several students still ended up not being able to ﬁtting their schedule very
well with their classmates and the instructor. It turned out that most of the virtual
meetings were conducted after school between 4 pm to 7 pm. Some students commented:
“The only ways in which these group sessions are not positive are the times in which they
are offered does not always compliment my schedule;” and “I was able to attend them all
until softball season started in April. Since then, I have not been able to attend a Monday
since.”

A related issue is the time demand on the instructor. For this online course, the
instructor spent an average of 10 hours each week. Comparing the time she spent with the
time another instructor spent on an equivalent course (French 1A) with 30 students, the

difference was 2 hours. So with weekly virtual meetings incorporated into an online

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language course, it may demand more time from the instructor. Although the virtual
meetings required extra time of the instructor, at the same it reduced the work load of the
instructor to some extent in the sense that the virtual meetings helped address a lot of
questions and concerns from the students which may help to reduce the frequency of
email Q&A. However, the case of online Chinese course is peculiar in the sense that the
students were deliberately selected from different locations of the state, which made the
student population quite dispersed and might have caused more scheduling problems than
would be expected from other online foreign language courses, where we might ﬁnd more
students coming from the same school and sharing similar schedules. In another word, for
the other online foreign language courses, the instructors might be able to provide fewer
virtual meetings with a larger group of students, which may offset the extra time demands
virtual meetings imposed on instructors.

The ﬁrewall issue revolving the downloading of conferencing software on local
school computer caused a lot of problems, ﬁ'ustrations and confusions at the beginning
weeks of the course. Thus some sort of orientation needs to be arranged to troubleshoot
the technical problems before even starting incorporating the virtual meetings in the
course so that the course schedule would not be delayed. However, this would require a
lot of communication between the local schools and the virtual high school help desk, and
the support from the school districts, which would be extremely hard since it would be
hard to solicit help and priority from the schools and the districts with some many things
going on at the beginning of the semester. It might be more advisable and effective to
choose a simple-to-use conferencing tool, preferably one without requirement of
downloading, if possible. Furthermore, the big ﬁle size of the class recordings made it not

very student-friendly and hence greatly inhibited the realization of its potential role in the

78

course. Thus, to ensure the contribution of this course component, considerations should
be given to the ﬁle size when providing recorded virtual meetings to the students.
Group Problem Solving Project

One issue that arose in group problem solving project was the feasibility of
eliciting negotiation of meaning among absolute beginners in online course, since as
elaborated previously absolutely no negotiation of meaning occurred during the group
problem-solving project throughout the semester. Is it possible that the expectation of
using this type of project to elicit negotiation of meaning is too idealistic, as one student
pointed out in his/her response: “The wizard of Oz project just was too big a task for
people who are just learning the language”? Although there did exist second language
learning literature on negotiation of meaning at the basic level, this basic level is in no
way equivalent to the level of the students in this class since most of this literature
investigated ESL situation and the basic-level participants in those studies actually had at
least several years of experience learning the language already. Thus, it might be true that
for the ‘true’ beginners of a foreign language, negotiation of meaning might not be
realistic to pursue, at least not in the ﬁrst several months of learning the language. As
Rosell-Aguilar (2005) pointed out, “beginners can only produce very limited utterances,
especially at the beginning of their studies, so they require a large number of stimuli and
more structured activities to extract the little language they can produce.” The limited
linguistic capacities and the structured activities make it hard to elicit negotiation of
meaning among the learners themselves during the course. Furthermore, audio
conferencing might have made the task even more daunting. Researchers have argued that
negotiation of meaning through audio conferencing might not ﬁt absolute beginners, like

the students in this online Chinese course, and may be best suited to “learners of at least

79

intermediate competence in the target language” (Kotter, 2001, p. 347) since
“synchronous CMC places a higher cognitive load on the learner, and as such is better
suited to higher proﬁciency learners” (Stockwell, 2004).

That being said, it needs to be born in mind that due to technical and logistic
issues, the problem solving project was only able to proceed through two episodes, which
renders the ﬁndings from this study too weak to address the issue of the feasibility of
using tasks to elicit negotiation of meaning among the absolute beginners.

Group Writing Project

The group writing project imposed heavy management requirements on the
students. Students found it hard to coordinate their work and collaborate in asynchronous
manner. Also, this project was not tightly structured. The students were told that this was
a semester-long project and they needed to work with people in their groups to come up
with a ﬁnal writing about China with around 60% of the words in Chinese. As a result,
students remained indolent for quite a few weeks and only started to communicate with
each other on this project after the instructor urged them to do so. In most groups, one or
two students took the initiatives to organize the postings and posted more often than the
rest of the group members. However, the leadership style of this person was important to
the overall result of the online collaboration. In one group, the girl who took the
leadership role had a different opinion on the storyline from another girl in the group, and
she went to extreme and virtually banished the girl from the group, resulting in the girl
opting out of the group and doing the project alone. Whereas in another group, two group
members were quite active in contributing to the conversation and the ﬂow of the group

communication was quite smooth and demographic. The group members were on good

80

terms with each other and the group ended their group project with good feelings about
each other and with a sense of accomplishment.

The loose structure of this project might have led to the procrastination among the
students and caused extra layer of difﬁculty to the management of the project. It might be
advisable to introduce more structure into the project, as one student suggested “I also
feel as though the group writing project needed a little more structure. Such as, a due date
for the rough draft, an approximate date to start translating, etc.” The pure asynchronous
fashion of the project and the short duration during which they were asked to work on the
project made it hard for students to collaborate in the real sense. This was reﬂected in one
student’s response to her tearnmate’s suggestion for meeting to discuss about the project:
“. . .. Anyway, for meeting times. Tuesday’s are always out for me. Sorry ‘bout that. Any
other day would be ﬁne. How are we going to get together? Hmmm. .. like you said, XX,
we can’t exactly meet for coffee because Corey lives all the way up in the UP!!! (Never
been there, though!) Can we use that Team Speak thing? I don’t know if we can.” Thus, it
might be viable to give students one week to construct and post project ideas
asynchronously on the discussion board, contribute a portion of next week’s virtual
meeting for students to deciding on the plot and storyline, and then give students half of
the semester to work asynchronously on coming up with the English versions as the
students preferred. But for the next half of the semester, they should be required to work
together on the virtual meeting sessions to convert their pieces into Chinese together
under the guidance of the instructor. In this combined synchronously- and
asynchronously-mediated fashion, group writing project would not lose its original
intention of stimulating collaborative learning of the language and would possibly avoid

most of the problems listed above.

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Discussion Board Postings

The discussion board postings were obsessed with the problem of few initiative
postings from students and few responses to each other’s postings. Weekly self-reﬂection
postings were designed for two purposes: to encourage learners to actively reﬂect on their
learning experience as a way and to create the opportunities for learners to share learning
strategies and to relate to each other. However, it turned out that students seldom
responded to each other’s postings even in the case where questions were raised. It might
have been caused by the fact that the instructor started to reply to some of the questions in
the postings at the end of each week in case that the students might feel their blogs lacked
audience and their problems were not helped, and that this monologue fashion might wear
out their interest in this activity. But the fact of the instructor taking the initiative to
answer the questions might have made the students think that they were not responsible
for answering the questions raised. Thus, it is always tricky as to how much instructor
moderation is desirable: on the one hand, we want to encourage students to share feelings
with each other and elicit help from each other; but on the other hand, we do not want to
let students down with the lack of response to their questions and teacher presence is also
need to move social presence towards cognitive presence to ensure high quality of
interaction as suggested by Garrison & Cleveland-Innes (2005).

The intention for the other discussion forums in the discussion board was mainly
for students to raise and answer each other’s question on Chinese language and culture.
However, quite a few ‘no question this week” postings appeared and few postings with
questions were responded to, which seems to suggest that making discussion board
postings a weekly assignment might have led the students away from its intended

purposes in supporting each other’s learning. Discussion board postings might serve

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better as an optional thing in which students are encouraged to share their problems and
help each other, rather than as an obligatory assignment. Learning community might fare
well as fostered but not enforced.

In all, discussion board postings ﬁilﬁlled, to some extent, the social part of the
learning community, i.e., to relate to each other, help each other with concerns and
encourage each other, but they failed to realize the intellectual part of the learning
community, i.e., to help each other with language and culture problems and to share
learning resources with each other.

Summary
Table 10 summarizes the functions of each course component perceived by the

students as extracted from students’ comments in end-of-semester class survey.

Table 10

Student Perception of Chinese Course Components

 

Course Component

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Virtual Other
Functions meetings Problem Group Self discussion
solvrng writing reﬂection
(e-textbook ro‘ t . t bl board
part) p jec pr0jec og postings
Language Pronunciation 6
learning Sentence 1 l 4
structure
Vocabulary 3
Variety of input 2
Interaction with instructor 6
Interaction Work together 3
with Empathy 6 5
classmates Help each other 1 3 7
Shargproblems 3
Immediate feedback 2
Fun, creative, challenging,
5 7
novelty
Monitoring learning 6 l
Venting stress and concerns 6

 

Note. Numbers in the table shows the number of students who had the opinion

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From this table, we can see that different components of the course were perceived to
serve different functions. Virtual meetings, problem-solving project and group writing
project were viewed as more of a help in learning different components of the language,
enhanced interaction with the instructor and connection with the other classmates. Due to
the way the problem-solving project was carried out in this course, students did not
perceive it as an enhancement of connection and opportunity for working with other
classmates. Problem-solving and group writing projects were perceived as the fim and
creative parts of the course. Self-reﬂection blog was acknowledged mainly for its
function to help students regulate and monitor both the emotional and cognitive aspects of
learning. The other discussion board postings served more of the ﬁinction of connecting
and helping with each other.

Furthermore, it could be seen that the term interacting with other classmates
actually embodied a variety of functions, and different interaction means and different
components of the course actually served different functions of interacting with other
classmates. This corroborated with Zhao et al.’s (2005) meta-analysis ﬁnding that a
combination of synchronous and asynchronous interaction format conduces more to
greater distance learning outcome. Thus, it makes sense to incorporate different
interaction media and activities to cover this multi-faceted component of online learning.
This need for interaction diversity was best illustrated in a student’s interview response:

”In my class we get the opportunity to talk online during class (the
one hour session per week) to discuss assignments. And we talk
between classes on either the discussion board or AIM. We do
interact a lot and have become friends, just like a regular
classroom The virtual meetings every week are great to get
“human ” help on issues that you are not able to troubleshoot by
yourself and with the software The discussion board posting are

very helpful in learning more about my classmates. By reading the
discussion board I can see how my classmates are doing on the

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assignment, and any issues they seem to have AIM is an all hours
help station, whenever I have a question on something I can bring it
up and usually someone is available to help, or we can at least
trouble shoot together. Usually the conversation starts off with a
question about the current assignment or what the class is doing then
after it is answered we just-chat. ”

The analyses of the online Chinese course revealed that enhanced interaction with
the instructor and classmates through virtual meetings was a highly valued component in
this course, and its successful implementation relies a lot on technical support, especially
in terms of school ﬁrewall issues. Online group collaboration was doable but may need
the support of both the asynchronous and synchronous communication means to relieve
the difﬁculty of coordination and misunderstanding within a team, and make online group
collaboration more convenient and efﬁcient. Learning community through discussion
board postings was not easy to foster: simply providing discussion forums might not

ensure the formation of learning community, especially the realization of its learning

functions.

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CHAPTER 7
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS
Summary and Discussion of the Findings

This study attempted to test the applicability and utility of the proposed online
foreign language learning framework through both qualitative and quantitative analyses,
identifying some factors that were perceived to be important for online foreign language
learning and revealing some problems that might emerge when implementing this
framework. This section provides a summary of the research ﬁndings and discussions in
reference to the design framework.

Course Communication

Amount of interaction. The regression analyses of the online foreign language
courses found that the amount of interaction, with the instructor and with fellow
classmates, was positively associated with students’ overall satisfaction with the course
and reduced feelings of isolation. This ﬁnding corroborates with Zhao et al.’s (2005) and
Bernard et al.’s (2004) meta-analyses results. And the correlation analyses on the online
Chinese course showed that amount of interaction was also positively associated with
students’ ﬁnal grades.

Furthermore, the in-depth analyses of the online Chinese course and the follow-up
email “interview” and survey responses from students in those online foreign language
courses showed that the students valued the presence of a ‘live’ instructor in online
foreign language courses. In effect, Zhao et al.’s (2005) meta-analysis has found the
positive impact of the presence of ‘live’ instructors on the effectiveness of distance
courses. ‘Live’ instructors might be particularly crucial to and much needed in online

foreign language courses because, in addition to all the claimed essential roles they play

86

in distance education in general, their ‘live’ presence might as well be needed also for
some speciﬁc language leaming purposes: 1) to meet online language learners’ need to
practice and reﬁne their speaking skills and pronunciations, which is important to
language learning but kind of downplayed in online foreign language learning; 2) to
provide immediate feedback; 3) to facilitate negotiation of meaning and provide emergent
linguistic instructions; 4) to act as a major or even sole, in the case of language like
Chinese, social resource for foreign language learners. From the online Chinese course,
we could see that the addition of one-hour virtual meeting with the instructor could
change students’ learning experience, as elaborated in one student’s interview response:
“Unlike my French courses, this Chinese course has been so much easier because I am
able to get direct answers and ﬁnally speak something correctly.”

However, does this boosting effect increase in proportion to the increase of ‘live’
teacher presence? On the one hand, we want to support students’ learning with ‘live’
teacher presence; and on the other hand, we do not want to sacriﬁce the “big window of
time” to “think things out,” and the opportunities to “learn at my own space” offered by
distance education. At the same time, the nature of distance education also requires us to
strike a balance between the economic and time considerations and the pedagogical
considerations. Thus, it is much valuable and needed to look into the issue of optimal
level of ‘live’ teacher presence in online foreign language learning, both time-wise,
economy-wise and pedagogy-wise. Furthermore, this optimal level might as well vary for
different foreign language proﬁciency levels since students of different levels might need
different levels of instructor facilitation of negotiation of meaning and emergent linguistic
instruction, and different levels of pronunciation support, which is another important

issue that deserves some attention.

87

The “interview” and survey responses suggested that social resources available to
and used by the students during their learning experience (interaction with students in the
school who were taking the same online course and with friends and family members who
speak the language) might be a possible factor to remediate the need for interaction with
fellow classmates, although this was not conﬁrmed in the regression analysis. Students
who have more social resources available to support their language learning might have
less demand on the course to provide opportunities to interact with fellow classmates, as
reﬂected in a French 1A student response: “I don’t utilize these opportunities purely
because it’s not really necessary. I ﬁnd it easy to learn without communicating with the
other students in the course as I can just go home and talk to my mom in French.” A
check into the correlation of student satisfaction with the course and reduced feeling of
isolation with social resource yielded that social resource possible was signiﬁcantly
correlated with these two measures (r = 0.33, p < 0.001; and r = 0.27, p < 0.01). It might
be interesting to look at how availability and access to social resources (fellow students in
the same school, friends and family members who can speak the language) affect online
foreign language students’ needs for interacting with fellow classmates, an answer to this
would have great implication to the course interaction design for foreign language courses
that vary in the amount of students who have easy access to social resources, e.g., the
students who come from the same school and have opportunities to interact with each
other face-to-face.

Quality of interaction (negotiation of meaning and culture understanding). The
online Chinese course failed to elicit negotiation of meaning for those absolute beginners
with those tasks. This ﬁnding seems to be in alignment with some arguments for the

unﬁtness between negotiation of meaning and basic-level students, especially in the audio

88

conferencing context (Kotter, 2001; Stockwell, 2004). However, it might not necessarily
be the case that basic-level language learners are unﬁt to engage in negotiation of
meaning, but rather be the case that the elicitation tasks designed were not effective to
elicit negotiation of meaning. It might be true that careful design of communication tasks
that incorporate “a larger number of stimuli and more structured activities” would help, as
suggested by Rosell-Aguilar (2005), or maybe referring students to the place in the e-
textbook where the target linguistic forms are used and give them some time to think over
and plan would help (Kotter, 2001; Hampel & Hauck, 2004). There is not much literature
and empirical evidence on whether negotiation of meaning is a desirable goal to shoot for
at the absolute beginning level and on how to best facilitate negotiation of meaning in
terms of task design and instructor moderation at the absolute beginner level in audio
conferencing context. However, some insight into this question is crucial especially when
negotiation of meaning and task-based instruction is in vogue in second language
education and when more and more online foreign language courses are being constructed
for learners of different proﬁciency levels.

Quality of interaction (timely quality feedback and eﬂective communication of
assignment instructions and expectations). The regression analyses showed that clarity of
assignment instructions and course expectations, timeliness and richness of feedback,
availability of technical and mentor support were associated with students’ positive
perception of their online foreign language courses. Students’ rating of crucial factors to
online foreign language learning also yielded similar ﬁnding. The online Chinese course
students’ perception of their course suggested that these components could potentially be
enhanced or compensated for through more interaction with the instructors and

classmates both synchronously and asynchronously.

89

Media of interaction. This study found that interaction with the instructor and
interaction with fellow classmates were not treated as generic terms by the learners, each
of them serving different sets of functions leaming-wise, motivation-wise and course
communication-wise. It was further found that different communication media and
different communication activities served different functions of these two types of
interactions. Thus technology diversity might be required to serve this interaction
diversity, both synchronous and asynchronous communication means might be needed to
better serve the interaction needs in online foreign language courses. However, what
communication means and activities would better serve what interaction need is a crucial
question to answer since an online language learning ecology should be diverse but at the
same time should be efﬁcient, especially considering the time constraints both on the
students’ and on the instructor’s side and the importance of keeping things simple in an
online learning environment.

Course Structure

T ask-based instruction. This study found that task-based instruction had its appeal
to the online foreign language learners and could work in online foreign language
learning. The variability and comprehensiveness of the course material and learning
activities were regarded valuable. Students valued that materials be presented in various
contexts and forms and cover a wide range of language learning skills including listening,
reading, speaking, translating and creative writing. Furthermore, they preferred the
materials and activities be presented in a fun, engaging and enjoyable manner. At the
same time they also wanted the materials and activities to be challenging enough to

engage them in thinking and give them a sense of victory.

90

This study also found that the coherency and interrelatedness of the tasks were
crucial since it determines whether students would ﬁnd each task meaningful and be
willing to invest their time in it, as explicated in the case of the student who lost interest
in studying the Chengo Chinese episodes and in the frequent occurrence of “no new
questions” in the Chengo Chinese discussion board postings. Furthermore, the study also
found that coherency and interrelatedness of the tasks in designer’s and instructor’s eyes
did not naturally carry across to the coherency and interrelatedness of the tasks in the
students’ eyes. Thus efforts need to be taken to make sure that the students see the
connectedness and meaning of each task at the right beginning.

Focus on form. In this study, some students complained about online language
learning via focus on form alone, and they felt uncertain and unsure about their
understanding of the language. This ﬁnding cast some doubt on the feasibility of focus on
form alone in the context of online foreign language learning, where students had little
chance to engage in massive meaningful communication in the target language outside
their foreign language classes (Klapper & Rees, 2003). The situation might be
exacerbated in the case where there was little synchronous interaction between the
instructor and the students but rather learning depended totally on the focus-on-forrn
embedded in the e-textbook and learning activities, as well as the email feedback from the
instructor. Online foreign language courses might not afford the working conditions for
focus-on-form: the nature of being foreign language learning and the limited volume of
the e-textbook episodes inhibits the possibility of facilitating massive planned focus-on-
form; and the lack of constant and immediate availability of instructor and fellow
classmates does not lend themselves well to massive incidental focus—on-form. Thus in

online foreign language learning, planned and incidental focus on form plus emergent but

91

systematic linguistic explanations might be the viable way to go in order to avoid the
feeling of confusion and uncertainty among the learners. However, emergent but
systematic focus on forms might not work well through email correspondences between
the instructor and the students since it is unreasonable and uneconomical to expect the
instructors to provide detailed explanations to every student based on their assignments.
Some sort of synchronous meetings between the instructor and the students might fulﬁll
this task more efﬁciently and effectively.

Activities to strengthen learning management skills. The study showed that online
students and instructors did regard such activities as crucial to online foreign language
learning, which suggests that certain measures to foster such skills might be needed as
suggested by researchers (Bernard et al., 2004; Curtis et al., 1999; Hurds et al., 2001).
The online Chinese course adopted self-reﬂection blo g as one way to facilitate learning
management skill building. Students did take this opportunity to monitor their online
language learning cognitively and emotionally through venting ﬁ'ustrations and concerns
about the content and the technical problems, which was considered as important for
students in a distance environment (Hara & Kling, 2000), and encouraging themselves to
continue working.

However, there was little sign of students using this opportunity to actively reﬂect
on and adjust their learning strategies. It might be because the instruction for this activity
was too abstract: students were simply asked to reﬂect on their learning process during
the previous week and expressed problems and concerns. Too abstract and unstructured
self-reﬂection blog might have made students tend to provide simple and superﬁcial
entries and hard to ﬁnd a point to focus on, as some students complained: “(e)very entry

started to sound the same.” Thus, it might be possible that students might not have the

92

ability to improve learning skills through random reﬂection on past week, but rather need
to be guided and gradually led to increased learning skills and strategies through some
well-designed speciﬁc issues for them to reﬂect on. For instance, if the particular week
focuses on introducing Chinese pinyin, then the instructor may ask the students to reﬂect
on the problems they encountered in learning pinyin and any strategies they can think of
to solve those problems; or the instructor may ask the students to reﬂect on their
strategies in learning the vocabulary and evaluate those strategies, and so on.
Furthermore, this study failed to observe much evidence in which students helped
each other to better manage their online language learning. Similar phenomenon was also
observed by Dickey (2004), who found that small-group blo g might work better than
individual blog towards building a community climate. Although his study focused on
using group blog to reduce feeling of isolation, it is possible that probably small-group
reﬂection blog, in which a group of students are asked to reﬂect on their individual
learning experience and problems and at the same time help each other with their
questions or problems, might work better than individual reﬂection blog in strengthening
students’ learning management skills as well. Small-group format makes sense because it
makes reading and commenting on each other individual reﬂection entries a more doable
task than whole-class format employed in the online Chinese course. Notwithstanding,
this study did suggest some value of blog in terms of helping students to monitor their
learning process, but at the same time also revealed its limitations in fulﬁlling the task of
strengthening students’ online learning skills. Thus, it is important to investigate effective
and efﬁcient ways of conducting reﬂection blogs to strengthen students’ online learning

skills.

93

Co-constructing learning experience. The importance of learning communities
was not reﬂected in students’ perception of important factors in online foreign language
learning. The online Chinese course attempted to build learning communities through
discussion board postings, and it turned out that social function of learning communities,
in terms of helping students to relate to each other and empathize with each other, could
be achieved through those postings, whereas the intellectual function of the learning
communities, in terms of sharing learning resources and helping each other with language
learning, failed to materialize. It might be because those students were absolute beginners
of Chinese and there was not much difference in the students’ proﬁciency levels to enable
them to engage in peer tutoring. The relationship between peer feedback and tutoring and
students’ proﬁciency level was another issue that may deserve some attention.

The online Chinese course also showed that collaboration online over some
projects was a doable task in online foreign language classes, but it might need to be more
structured and supported with various interaction means. The problems encountered in the
collaborative writing project reminded us that a lot of factors might need to be considered
and carefully investigated to safeguard the quality of online collaborative activities, which
include the instructor moderation level and type, what type of language learning activities
would work best as collaborative activities online, and different ways of organizing and
facilitating the group activities to make them ﬂow smoothly and realize its collaborative
nature in the online environment.

Student Characteristics and Contextual Factors

This study failed to ﬁnd any student characteristics, like self-regulatory skills and

technology skills, that were claimed to be predictive of the success of distance learning in

general (Roblyer & Marshall, 2003; Ferdig et al., 2005) as signiﬁcant predictors of

94

student positive perception of their online learning experience. The discrepancy might be
because of the different measures of learning outcome: the two studies both looked at the
relationship between student characteristics and the likelihood of whether the students
could pass the distance course, whereas the outcome measured in this study was positive
perception of the course and feeling of isolation.

However, the study did ﬁnd that students’ attitudes and conﬁdence about online
foreign language learning were predictive of their satisfaction with the course, and
students’ motivation for taking the online foreign language course was also predictive of
their satisfaction with the course. Anecdotal evidence from this study suggested that
social resources of the language and culture that are available in one’s immediate social
environment might be pertinent to one’s perception of their online foreign language
learning experience.

Limitations

The study had a low response rate, which might make the sample not very
representative and may potentially threaten the reliability of the survey responses.
Furthermore, most ﬁndings in this study were based on student self-report data and
anecdotal evidence. Thus the ﬁndings from this study are far from being conclusive and
cautions need to be taken when interpreting the ﬁndings. Due to its exploratory nature,
many issues pointed out through this study only indicated some possible trends and
needed to be subjected to rigorous testing.

This study investigated factors that might affect student perception of their
learning experience in various courses and the retention rate of the courses. However, it

could not explore an important outcome measure, student learning outcome, due to the

95

incomparability of the learning outcome (course ﬁnal grades) across different languages.
Thus only correlation analyses were conducted on the online Chinese course alone.

Moreover, although measures were taken to make sure that the manner and the
timeline in which the surveys was collected would not threaten the validity of the research
ﬁndings, the relatively long period the survey responses spanned across due to their
online nature might still have some undetected effects that might potentially inﬂuence the
overall ﬁnding.

Due to the homogeneity of the course design and implementation of all but one of
the online foreign language courses investigated in this study, only part of the course
design framework could be tested through regression analysis.

Furthermore, the online Chinese course was a pilot course, and thus some of its
course components (like interaction media) went through several changes as the course
laid out and some of its course components (like problem-solving projects) were not
given due respect to their length and portion in the course. Therefore, students’ perception
on those course components should be interpreted with some caution.

Implications

Findings from this study have some implications for online foreign language
course design and implementation and also unravel some research issues for future
research.

Implications for Online Foreign Language Course Design and Implementation

In the design of the online foreign language courseware, learning support might
need to be an important consideration. Courseware should not only be fun, engaging and
incorporating a lot of interactive activities, it should make sure to provide a lot of

comprehension and learning aids, like glossary, speed adjustor, textual enhancement,

96

keeping track of where students ﬁnished last time, and so on. This may sound trivial, but
is crucial to online foreign language learners. In the online learning situation, without
convenient and immediate way of contacting the instructor and other classmates, students
may ﬁnd it hard to retain their interest in learning and the lack of those seemingly trivial
aids may make them feel learning too daunting to persist in and thus simply “gave up” as
one student put it. Second, when designing courseware, decisions as to what technologies
to choose should be made carefully. Advanced technologies, like speech recognition,
might make the courseware look very attractive. But if its performance is not very stable,
it may cause unnecessary frustration and dislike among the students, just like the example
of voice recognition with Chengo Chinese, in which the student became “dreaded doing
the episodes.”

A successful online foreign language course might not solely reply on the
courseware, since “a program can only do so much.” There needs to be a bridge between
the courseware and the students. Thus the online instructors play a vital role in online
foreign language courses, especially in those that apply a focus-on-form approach to
language learning in their courseware. It would be advisable for the instructors to provide
emergent but systematic linguistic explanations to support this language learning
approach so as to reduce the feeling of uncertainty and confusion among the students.
Therefore, the quality of the instructors’ feedback is extremely important.

Since students’ attitudes towards and conﬁdence of distance foreign language
learning were found to be predictive of the students’ overall satisfaction with the course,
instructors might pay attention to building students’ positive attitudes from the right
beginning. They may make available to their students what previous students have said

about the course and their successful learning strategies to prepare those students better

97

for this online learning experience. The courseware may also need to start out a little bit
easy to build students’ conﬁdence in their ability to take the course and then gradually
increase the challenges in the course. But at the same time it is crucial for the instructors
to be especially careful in making sure that the instructions are clear and students fully
understand the purpose and expectations of the assignments when introducing new and
challenger contents into the course, since clarity of the instructions was found to be
critical to distance foreign language learning.

The instructors might need to pay more attention to creating opportunities for
students to interact with each other both for social purposes and for learning purposes.
Student-student social interaction might be more important than most instructors had
expected. If not via other means, the instructors can at least make some discussion board
forums available to the students, or encourage the students to and make it possible for
students to ﬁnd means to interact with each other (like the AIM example in the online
Chinese course). Forum discussion may work better if not enforced but rather fostered
and encouraged. When organizing collaborative work among the students, synchronous
and asynchronous means might need to be combined to facilitate the process and
safeguard its quality. Online study group might be another option to make good use of
student interaction to facilitate learning.

Synchronous interaction between the instructors and the students might be quite
important to online foreign language learning when talking about students’ satisfaction
with the course, reduced feeling of isolation and course retention rate. If weekly meeting
is not an option, some sort of online synchronous ofﬁce hour might be a good alternative
since it could provide opportunities for online students to get immediate feedback,

clariﬁcation on assignments, help on pronunciation and so on.

98

Implications for Future Research

Online foreign language learning is a broad ﬁeld that encompasses a multitude of
issues. Although this study suggested a possible framework to follow when designing
such an online environment and identiﬁed some factors that might affect learners’
perception of their online learning experience, it leaves more questions than answers for
the reﬁning and implementation of the framework. One major issue for future research is
to relate the factors investigated here to student language learning outcome.

Course communication. Interaction is a topic of enormous interest in the distance
learning literature. This study raised a few issues about class interaction that deserve
further investigation: 1) This study showed that different types of interaction might be
needed for different functions in online foreign language learning and learning activities
mediated by different media might serve different ﬁinctions of different types of
interaction. Then a natural question follows: How to take best use media diversity to
support interaction diversity and at the same time how to balance the diversity need and
the economy/efﬁciency need in the online language learning ecology? In speciﬁc, a
promising line of investigation is to look at how to combine different interaction media
and activities to reach high quality of interaction; what media and activities best suit for
creating social presence, teaching presence and/or cognitive presence and for facilitating
the transition from social presence to cognitive presence; how to gradually shift the
teaching presence from the instructor to the teaching presence from the students and so on.
2) This study explored one form of synchronous interaction between instructors and
online language students. Further research is needed to explore different ways of
implementing the synchronous interaction between instructors and the students, and how

to strike a balance between the cost of adding extra time load on the instructor and the

99

beneﬁts of bringing better learning outcome. 3) This study suggested some possible
interaction between contextual factors and need for interaction, such as the possible
relation between different course levels. More research endeavors are needed to subject
those possible interactions to rigorous testing and explore further into other possible
interaction between demand for interaction and other contextual and learner variables. 4)
Negotiation of meaning is a crucial issue in second/foreign language learning, and this
study questioned the applicability of negotiation of meaning in the online foreign
language learning of absolute beginners through a case study. More research are needed
to investigate the possibility of negotiation of meaning in absolute beginning-level online
foreign language learning. If it is possible, then what types of tasks might work better to
elicit and support negotiation of meaning in this context. Furthermore, we also need to
investigate more into the ﬁtness between different types of tasks and online learners at
different proﬁciency levels, and work towards constructing taxonomy of tasks for online
foreign language learning situation. 5) Previous distance education literature emphasized
a lot on the timeliness of feedback and not much had been done to look into the richness
of feedback provided and its effect on students’ online learning experience. In the
distance foreign language learning context, this is particularly important since with
current emphasis on task-based instruction and focus-on-form in the second language
learning ﬁeld, quality of instructor feedback is crucial to alleviate learners’ feeling of
uncertainty and confusion in this sort of online language learning environment, especially
true for the online learning module where email is the only way of interaction between
the instructor and the students. It would be interesting to investigate different ways of
providing feedback (e.g., pure error corrections, elaborated explanations, pointing out

areas for improvement and so on) not only on students’ language learning but also on

100

their feelings of uncertainty and their satisfaction with the amount of interaction with the
instructor. Furthermore, the demands for timeliness and richness of email feedback may
vary depending on the speciﬁc online learning environments. It might be possible in an
online learning environment with a lot of other means of interacting with the instructor,
the demand for timeliness and richness of the email feedback might be less than an online
learning environment where the only means of interaction is through email.

Course structure. This study suggested the feasibility of implementing task-based
instruction in online foreign language learning, but at the same time raised a lot of issues
on how to make the most out of it in this particular leaming context.

First, the issue of focus-on-form and focus-on-forms: this study suggested that a
combination of both might be a viable way to go, but the ﬁnding was mainly based on
anecdotal evidence. This ﬁnding itself needs further investigation. Furthermore, it might
be true that a combination of both would be more pertinent to the beginning levels and as
they progress into more advanced levels focus-on-form alone would fare just as well
since the beginning level students might be more anxious to build their interlanguage
system and would be more likely to be irritated by and feel uncertain and confusion from
the lack of explicit and systematic grammar rules. While it could also be the other way
around since focus-on-forms might make more sense after learners have gathered enough
‘samples’ from a long time of focus-on-form. This is deﬁnitely an issue that deserves
some attention.

Second, the issue of collaborative learning: this study suggested that collaborative
learning and group work is doable in online foreign language learning and might be more
important than online students and instructors might have expected. However, there are a

whole set of issues that need to be resolved for it to realize its full potential in online

101

foreign language learning, including how to best promote and support collaborative work
online in terms of what media to use, what levels and types of instructor intervention are
appropriate, and what activities ﬁt best for collaborative work.

Third, the issue of learning community: this study explored using discussion board
as an attempt to encourage the co-construction of learning community and succeeded in
the social part but failed in the intellectual part. Then an answer is needed on how to build
a learning community that not only promote social presence, but also facilitate cognitive
presence. For instance, what kind of discussion topics are more effective, what kind and
level of instructor presence is needed to facilitate the transition, and so on.

Fourth, the issues of strengthening learners’ learning management skills: this
study explored using self-reﬂection blog as a way to strengthening student’s learning
management skills and was greeted with mixed results. Further research is needed to
explore ways of making reﬂection blog more effective in fulﬁlling this purpose (e. g,
group + individual reﬂection blog; speciﬁc reﬂection topics), and to explore other
possible ways of promoting leamers’ learning management skills (e.g., direct and
constant instructor intervention, sharing of previous students’ strategies to manage their
learning experience in the course).

Conclusion

This study constructed a design framework for online foreign language learning
based on literature, tested the feasibility of this framework through designing an online
Chinese course, and investigated the utility of this framework in the context of several
online foreign language courses together with the online Chinese course. It identiﬁed
some factors that might affect learners’ perception of their online language learning

experience, and at the same time unraveled some issues and problems related to the

102

materialization of the principles of the design framework. Due to the exploratory nature
of the study, although they are suggestive, its ﬁndings deserve ﬁirther investigation.
Nonetheless, this study suggests the importance of interaction in online foreign language
learning in terms of fostering positive student perception of their online foreign language
learning experience, and points out some possible directions for further research to better

understand and construct effective online foreign language learning environments.

103

 

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Appendix B: Percentage of Students in Different Language Groups

 

 

potential student pool participant
French 30% 37%
German 20% 10%
Spanish 41% 34%
Chinese 9% 19%

 

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Appendix D: Representativeness of the Participants and the Group Who Filled Out the

First Survey

 

 

 

 

Participants FUSt survey
(11 = 79) respondents
(n = 147)
Mean SD Mean SD
Student Achievement motivation 5.73 0.90 5.61 1.09
vanable iriglimzatlon and self-regulatlon 5.37 0.91 5.34 1.02
Positive attitudes to distance learning 3,52 1,38 3,34 1,36
Conﬁdence 1n ab111ty to take distance 5.89 1.23 5.77 1.24
course
Contextual Social resources possible 4,11 1,75 4,14 1,79
variables Background_online 0.34 0.48 0.41 0.49
Background_language 0.71 0.46 0.64 0.48
Grade 10.85 1.01 10.81 1.05
Age 16.29 1.16 16.30 1.23
Gender 0.72 0.45 0.69 0.47

 

109

Appendix E: Outcome and Predicator Variable Scales
Outcome Scales
Positive perception of the course:

I enjoyed this distance course very much.

I would be very happy to take another online foreign language course if opportunities
arise.

I am very satisﬁed with this course.

I am satisﬁed with the amount of interaction with the instructor in this course.

I am satisﬁed with the learning materials in this course.

I am satisﬁed with the way the course is designed and organized.

I really enjoy this course and have great motivation to continue to take this online course
next semester.

I enjoy learning this language and will continue to learn it even aﬁer I ﬁnish the course
from virtual high school.

This course increases my conﬁdence in my ability to learn this foreign language well.
This course increases my conﬁdence in doing well in future online foreign language
courses.

This course increases my abilities to use online technologies to be successful in future
online courses.

After taking this course, I feel more positive about online courses.

After taking this course, I feel more positive about online foreign language learning.

I have improved the skills necessary for taking future online courses.

I have learned a lot about this foreign language in this course.

I have learned a lot about the foreign culture in this course.

I have acquired/improved some skills for online learning from taking this course.

I acquired some strategies on how to learn this foreign language well.

I acquired some strategies on how to do well in online foreign language courses.

This course improves my ability to collaborate with others.

Through this course, I have acquired some skills and strategies on learning foreign
language.

I have acquired some skills and strategies in how to do well in online foreign language
courses.

After taking this course, I feel myself better at taking initiatives and managing my own
learning.

This course is quite effective in teaching the language.

This course is quite effective in teaching the culture.

Reduced Feeling of Isolation .°
I am satisﬁed with the amount of interaction with other classmates in this course.

I felt quite isolated and lacking connection with other classmates throughout this learning
experience. (Neg)

110

Course Variable Scales
Course Communication:

This course provides a lot of opportunities to interact with other classmates.

I interacted a lot with other classmates in this course.

I interacted a lot with the instructor in this course.

The feedback from the instructor was always timely.

The feedback from the instructor was always very detailed and full of information.
The assignment instructions were always very clear and easy to follow.

I know what I was expected to grasp and to achieve in this class.

I always know what I was supposed to do for class activities and assignment.

I was always given sufﬁcient and timely technical support that I needed to do well in this
course.

My mentor is very encouraging and helpful, constantly reminding me to keep on track.

Student Variable Scales
Organization and Self-Regulation:

Having control over my learning environment is important to me (i.e., choosing when to
perform an activity).

I believe myself to be a very organized individual.

I tend to schedule my daily activities to allow enough time to accomplish them.

When I have a difﬁcult exam coming up, I tend to start studying a week or two ahead of
time.

I will often set short-term goals to help me reach a long-tenn goal.

Achievement Motivation:

I study hard for all of my classes because I enjoy acquiring new knowledge.

I do the work assigned in classes because I want to increase my understanding of the
material.

I'm highly motivated to learn this language and the culture and the people who speak the
language.

Attitude:
I cannot (or I predict I would not) learn online as well as I can (would) in the classroom
with ohter learners and the instructor.

111

I would not enjoy (or I predict I would not enjoy) the online learning experiences as much
as being in the classroom with other learners and the instructor.
I believe distance foreign language learning would be less effective than foreign language
learning in classrooms with other learners and the instructor.
Distance foreign language learning requires much more time and efforts than foreign
language learning in classrooms with other learners and the instructor.

Conﬁdence:
I am conﬁdent that I have the ability to learn the language taught in this course well.
I am conﬁdent that I have the ability to use the technology required to be successful in
this course.
I am conﬁdent that I will do well in this distance course.

Hour of Study Per Week:

How many hours did you study per week?

Emailing Instructor: (1—never; 4 — once a week or more)
How often do you email your instructor?

After-school activities: (composite scores of the two measures. 1 — 0-5 hours; 4 —
more than 15 hours)

If you have a part-time job, how many hours a week do you work?
How many hours a week do you spend in activities other than a job outside school?

Contextual VariaLble Scales
Social Resources Available:
I have access to quite a few people who speak the language taught in this course.
It is easy for me to get learning resources about the language taught in this course.
Social Resources Used: (I—never; 4—frequently)

How often do you study together with other students in your school who are taking the
same online language class?

112

How often do you practice this foreign language with your ﬁ'iends or family who speak or
know this language?

Online Learning Background:

How many distance courses have you completed before?

Foreign Language Learning Background:

How many foreign language have your learned before?

Level: (O—IA; I—higher levels)
Gender: (O—male; I—female)

Grade: (I — 9:}. grade; 2 — 10:}: grade; 3 — 11:}: grade; 4 — 12:}: grade)

113

Appendix F: Consent Form and F ollow-Up Email Protocol
Consent Letter for Parents and Students
Dear Parent/Guardian,

I am a doctoral student in educational technology at Michigan State University, and I will
begin a study about online foreign language learning this spring. The goal of this study is
to identify factors that are important to the success of online foreign language courses and
to help improve the design of online foreign language courses. Your child is being invited
to take part in this study because he/she is taking an online foreign language course.
Please read this form and ask any questions you may have before you agree to your child
being in the study.

If you decide to let your child take part in this study, he/she will be asked to ﬁll out one
survey at the beginning of the semester on their prior foreign language experience, their
prior online learning experience and their learning preferences. And at the end of the
semester, he/she will be asked to ﬁll out another survey on their perception of and
evaluation of the online language course. Each survey will take about 5-10 minutes. I may
also contact your child during the middle of the semester through email or phone on their
concerns and problems with their online learning and their perceptions of their learning
environments, and the phone interview will be audio taped.

There might be a slight risk to the students of experiencing some anxiety or
embarrassment about revealing their views and opinions. These risks should be small
since students will be given the option of not answering any questions they don’t want to
answer. Use of pseudonyms and the disguising of personal identiﬁers in research reports
and presentations should offset any risk to students’ reputation. This study is expected to
improve our understanding of distance education and help develop better designed
distance courses. Although no speciﬁc beneﬁts can be guaranteed to any of the
participants, it is possible that students and the teacher will beneﬁt from the reﬂection
about one’s learning and/or teaching that the research procedures (particularly the surveys
and interviews) might generate.

Your decision to allow your child to take part in the study is voluntary. Your child is free
to choose not to take part in the study or to stop taking part at any time without any
penalty. Your child is also free to refuse answer any questions they do not wish to answer.
I will only collect information (surveys, interviews, test scores) from students who, along
with their parents, have agreed to participate in the study. All the information collected
during this research project will be kept strictly conﬁdential and your child’s privacy will
be protected to the maximum extent by the law; for example your child’s name will not
be used in any reports about this project. I will protect your child’s conﬁdentiality by
coding his/her information with a number so no one can trace the answers to his/her name.
Only my colleagues at Michigan State University and I will see any student materials

114

collected for this study. On the form below, you can restrict the uses I make of the
materials I collect ﬁ'om your child. A copy of the research results after this project is
completed will be given to you at your request. If you have any questions about this
research project, please contact Ms. Chun Lai by telephone at (517) 775-2784 or by e-
mail at laichun1@msu.edu, or Dr. Yong Zhao by telephone at (517) 353-4325 or by e-
mail at zhaovo@msu.edu.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding your rights as a study participant, or are
dissatisﬁed at any time with any aspect of this study, you may contact — anonymously, if
you wish — Peter Vasilenko, Ph.D., Chair of the University Committee on Research
Involving Human Subjects (UCRIHS) by phone: (517) 355-2180, fax: (517) 432-4503,
email address: ucrihs@msu.edu, or regular mail: 202 Olds Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824.

Thank you very much for considering allowing me to collect information about your
child’s learning experiences and for returning the enclosed forms.

Sincerely,

Chun Lai

Consent for Child’s Participation

You are being asked to give permission to collect information from your child through the
following activities:

1. Surveys about my child’s previous distance and language learning experience and
experience with this distance world language course.

2. Interviews with my child about his or her experiences in this course.

3. Access to samples of my child’s work completed for class and access to my child’s test
scores.

Your signature below indicates your voluntary agreement for your child to participate in this
study. Be assured that you can deny permission for me to collect information from your child at
any time.

Child’s Name

Parent/Guardian’s Name

 

Student’s Voluntary Consent Form

You are being asked to give permission to collect information from you through the following
activities:

1. Surveys about my previous distance and language learning experience and experience
with this distance world language course.

2. Interviews with me about his or her experiences in this course.

3. Access to samples of my work completed for class and access to my test scores.

115

Your signature below indicates your voluntary agreement to participate in this study. Be assured
that you can deny permission for me to collect information from you at any time.

Name

 

Consent Letter for Teachers
Dear Teacher,

I am a doctoral student in educational technology at Michigan State University, and I will
begin a study about distance foreign language learning this spring. The goal of this study
is to identify factors that are important to the success of distance foreign language courses
and to help improve the design of distance foreign language courses. To reach this goal,
your input on your perception of distance foreign language courses is crucial.

If you decide to take part in this study, you will be asked to ﬁll out one survey at the
beginning of the semester on your prior foreign language teaching and distance teaching
experience, and your pedagogical beliefs. During the semester, you will be interviewed
on your feelings of the course and problems you encountered during teaching through
email or phone, and the phone interview will be audio taped. And at the end of the
semester, you will be interviewed on your perception on distance foreign language
teaching and learning and asked to reﬂect on your teaching experience during this course.
The survey will take about 10 minutes.

There might be a slight risk to you of experiencing some anxiety or embarrassment about
revealing your views and opinions. These risks should be small since you will be given
the option of not answering any questions you don’t want to answer. Use of pseudonyms
and the disguising of personal identiﬁers in research reports and presentations should
offset any risk to your reputation. This study is expected to improve our understanding of
distance education and help develop better designed distance courses. Although no
speciﬁc beneﬁts can be guaranteed to any of the participants, it is possible that you will
beneﬁt from the reﬂection about your teaching that the research procedures (particularly
the surveys and interviews) might generate.

Your decision to take part in the study is voluntary. You are free to choose not to take
part in the study or to stop taking part at any time without any penalty. You are also free
to refuse answer any questions they do not wish to answer. All the information collected
during this research proj ect will be kept strictly conﬁdential and your privacy will be
protected to the maximum extent by the law; for example your name will not be used in
any reports about this project. Reports of the research ﬁndings will not associate subjects
with speciﬁc responses or ﬁndings. Only my colleagues at Michigan State University and
I will see any materials collected for this study. On the form below, you can restrict the
uses I make of the materials I collect from you. A copy of the research results after this
project is completed will be given to you at your request. If you have any questions about
this research project, please contact Chun Lai by telephone at (517) 775-27 84 or by e-

116

mail at laichun1@msu.edu, or Dr. Yong Zhao by telephone at (517) 353-4325 or by e-
mail at anvo@msu.edu.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding your rights as a study participant, or are
dissatisﬁed at any time with any aspect of this study, you may contact — anonymously, if
you wish — Peter Vasilenko, Ph.D., Chair of the University Committee on Research
Involving Human Subjects (U CRIHS) by phone: (517) 355-2180, fax: (517) 432-4503,
email address: ucrihs@msu.edu, or regular mail: 202 Olds Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824.

Thank you very much for considering allowing me to collect information about your
teaching experiences and for returning the enclosed forms.

Sincerely,
Chun Lai

Consent for Participation

You are being asked to give permission to collect information from you through the following
activities:

1. Surveys about my previous distance and language teaching experience and pedagogical
belief.
2. Interviews with me about my experiences teaching this course.
Your signature below indicates your voluntary agreement to participate in this study. Be assured

that you can deny permission for me to collect information from you at any time.

Name

 

F ollow-Up Email Protocol
Dear XX,

Thank you very much for ﬁlling out the survey. I have a few further questions concerning
your online learning experience in this foreign language course. I would very much
appreciate it if you can help me answer those questions. The interview would take around
5-10 minutes. The time and format is ﬂexible and based on your preference. I can
interview you through phone, email or IM, depending on your preference. If you prefer
phone interview, please give me a time and phone number that I can reach you. If you
prefer email, I’ll send the questions to you. If you prefer IM, please give me your IM
screen name.

117

Please let me know whether you will be able to help me with those questions and what
format you would prefer. Thank you very much for helping me gain more understanding
into your learning experience in this course. Hope to hear from you soon.

F ollow-Up Email Questions

1. How are you doing with this online course so far? Are you satisﬁed with your
learning so far? Why or why not?

2. Have you taken any other online courses before? How does this course differ from
the other courses?

3. What do you think is the strength of this course?
4. What do you think the course fail to do a good job in?

5. What do you think about the opportunities to interact with other classmates in the
course? Do you think it’s important for online language learning? Why or why not?

Does this online course provide any opportunity to interact with other classmates?
Did you interact a lot with your other classmates? Why or why not?

6. What do you think about the discussion board in your course BlackBoard? Have
you used them often? Why or why not?

7. Is there any frustration you have encountered during this course?
8. What do you think are important to online foreign language learning?

9. How do you think you can be best supported in your online foreign language
learning experience?

10. Please describe a good online foreign language course in your mind.

118

Appendix G: Final Grades of Students in Different Language Classes

The ﬁnal grades of students in different language levels were summarized as
follows:

 

 

 

Language 1A 1B 2B

Mean SD Mean SD Mean SD
Chinese 72 33
French 66 22 86 9 86 16
German 73 27 62 23 78 23
Spanish 57 33 84 18 88 10

 

The distributions of the majority of the courses were uni-modal, with the
exception of Spanish 1A, and were either approaching normal or negatively skewed. The
table above listed the average scores and standard deviations for those courses. Following
histograms represent the distribution of the score in different language classes:

Chinese:

 

1A

 

Frequency
‘7

2-1

 

 

 

 

l—Tlll

I l I I
0.00 0.20 0.40 0.60 0.80 1.00

Chinese1A

 

 

 

 

 

119

Spanish:

 

Frequency

 

125'-

10.0 —'

7.5-

5.0 -

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Frequency

 

20—

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
0.00

r
020

l
0,40 0 60
a . ..1 B

 

ZB

 

 

Frequency

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
0 so
Sp-nlshZB

 

120

 

German:

 

1A

 

125-

10.0-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

l
0.00 0.20 0 40 0.60 0.80 1.00
Gorrnan‘lA

 

Frequency

 

4...

2—

 

 

 

l I l
000 020 040

 

Germ-n13

 

2B

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I l l I
0.00 o 20 o «o o oo
Germanza

 

121

 

 

French:

 

1A

Frequency

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

0.40 0.60 0.30 1 oo
Fronch1A

 

anuoncy

 

 

 

 

 

l
0.80

 

I
0.50
French‘l B

 

2B

 

 

Frequency

 

 

 

 

 

l_——l-*

 

 

l
060

I
0.00 1 oo
FronchZB

 

122

 

 

 

 

 

 

mo; _N.m mm; :.m no; no.0 mwd 9mm :80>O
. . . . . . . . 080%
mm 2 8 m mm 2 mm m mm 2 R m mm 2 cm m 00808 000 3080000.
0: 86 mm; omd mm; Nod no; 09m 000000088 3820
. . . . . . . . #030000
2 2 mm m m0 _ 00 m mm 2 3 m 3 2 co m 033800.08 000 308:.
mm: oo.m mm; 5.0 m0; 000 2 A 3.6 0000868H0000800£
00.2 ww.m mod 55 mm.“ _m.~ co; 0N6 000080.020 00008005
. . . . . . . . 808683
00 _ mm 0 S N co 0 00 2 N0 N w_ 2 co m 003803—0100008005 00000808800
. 08000
Gm 8N02 Gm 0002 Om 0002 Om 0002
3 H 5 ANN H 5 8.0. H 5 A2 H 5 30000080986 058.03 08000
008000 :ﬂgnm 00000..“ 000030

 

000000 0w00w001~ 8000.005 8 080000800 00000808800 08000 .00 wﬁﬁm 8008m ”I 00000096ﬂ

123

Appendix 1: Detailed Comparison of Positive Course Perception in Different Language

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Groups
Chinese French Spanish German
(Ir-15) (n=29) (n=27) (F8)
Mean SD Mean SD Mean SD Mean SD
Posmve 3‘“de 5.72 1.46 5.49 1.34 5.13 1.73 5.98 0.57
change
“Provemfmc’f 5.96 1.11 5.38 1.25 5.21 1.57 5.81 0.66
general skrlls
Leammg “the 5.73 1.46 5.22 1.20 4.96 1.69 5.69 0.75
language and culture
Sa‘ISfacmnw‘ththe 5.68 0.96 4.86 1.09 5.04 1.58 5.07 1.19
COllI'SC
Likelihood of future
°nlm.eleammgand 5.67 1.41 5.46 1.57 4.62 2.04 5.83 0.91
learrrrng the
language

 

124

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