The potential of social media to give insight into the dynamic evolution of public conversations, and into their reactive and constitutive role in political activities, has to date been underdeveloped. While topic modeling can give static insight into the structure of a conversation, and keyword volume tracking can show how engagement with a…

The purpose of this paper is to identify the types of students' interaction, as well as their discussion patterns in an online course. The study took place in a large Midwestern University and 17 graduate students participated in the study. The primary data was obtained from students' discussion forum postings. The researchers used both…

As an overt expression of internal mental processes, discourses have become one main data source for the research of interactive learning. To deeply explore behavioral regularities among interactions, this article firstly adopts the content analysis method to summarize students' engagement patterns within a course forum in a small private online…

The unstructured conversations of students who chatted with Freudbot in his Second Life virtual office over a 32-month period were examined in order to better understand the nature of the virtual relationship between students and conversational agents (CA) as historical figures. This research builds on past work that examined these conversations…

The main objective of this study is to explore how students who participate in virtual intercultural exchanges use evaluative language to build rapport and encourage collaboration. Data were gathered from 211 email messages sent by 40 Spanish and American university students and were tagged following Martin and White's Appraisal model.…

The present study explores a linguistic mechanism in which the identity of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) learners can be influenced online. Analyzing the discourse of ESOL chat room participants and how they uptake positioning statements through online conversations, we present two vignettes that illustrate the kind of discourse…

In light of evidence that the Internet, participatory media, and online communities are increasingly central to civic and political life, this article investigates online political discourse as a context of youth civic development. Drawing on a national survey of 2,519 youth, ages 15 to 24, we find that exposure to conflict in online discourse is…

With a shift toward understanding the goals of foreign language learning as development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC; Thorne, 2010), telecollaborative interaction with geographically distant partners has been seen both as a pedagogical tool that can play a significant role in promoting intercultural negotiation abilities and…

This article provides results of analysis of data collected from online Spanish-medium subject courses taught in Spanish by the same teacher to students whose first language is English. The students are at a high-intermediate to advanced level (B2-C1), and are enrolled at an American university in Madrid in courses centring on topics of Spanish…

This article provides results of analysis of data collected from online Spanish-medium subject courses taught in Spanish by the same teacher to students whose first language is English. The students are at a high-intermediate to advanced level (B2-C1), and are enrolled at an American university in Madrid in courses centring on topics of Spanish…

The focus of this study was to answer the following overarching question: How does a Twitter discussion format compare to a Facebook discussion format in terms of promoting collaborative argumentative discourse? Data analysis focused on the difference in amount of arguments, counter-arguments, reasons, and elaborations generated by participants…

Research in computer-supported collaborative learning has indicated that conversational agents can be pedagogically beneficial when used to scaffold students' online discussions. In this study, we investigate the impact of an agile conversational agent that triggers student dialogue by making interventions based on the academically productive talk…

Identifying which online behaviours and interactions are associated with student perceptions of being supported will enable a deeper understanding of how those activities contribute to learning experiences. Student language is one aspect of their interaction in need of greater exploration within discourse-based online learning environments. As a…

In spite of its potential for learning, and in particular knowledge revision, argumentation on science concepts is neither easily elicited nor easily sustained. Students may feel uneasy critiquing and being critiqued, especially on complex science topics. We report on a controlled study that tested the role of 2 potential factors that may either…

In designing online and hybrid courses, instructors should consider structure, student motivation, and interaction (per Moore's 1993 Theory of Transactional Distance). To motivate students to interact and to build course community, instructors may assign student introductions. However, after examining students' introductions in a hybrid…