Developing intercultural sensitivity in the current multicultural world is an essential, but challenging requirement. This necessity is significant in EFL classes where learners are expected to gain intercultural skills to communicate more efficiently in culturally diverse contexts. Grounded in Bennett's (Bennett, International Journal of…

This study uses WhatsApp to facilitate online discussions in developing content idea for ESL writing. A quasi-experimental study was conducted with 33 pre-university students participating in online discussions on WhatsApp for five weeks to support face-to-face instructions. Pre-test, post-test, and five weekly writing tests were administered,…

For three months, Japanese university learners (N=40) utilized the YoTeach! application by Pedagogic and Active Learning Mobile Solutions (PALMS) Project, PolyU as a part of their English discussion class. Researchers re-purposed the application, which originally was designed to be an online classroom backchannel, as an asynchronous, pre-task…

This study examined how a group of Korean international students enrolled in a writing class in a United States business programme navigated their literacy practices through the use of KakaoTalk, a social networking application for smartphones. On the basis of 29 student interviews and a detailed narrative of one focal student's activities in…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of conducting asynchronous online discussion forums on low-achieving EFL students in Taiwan. 124 non-English program students from a technological university participated. Based on a textbook, one to three questions were assigned every other week. An asynchronous learning mode was implemented…

The present study investigated The Mixxer language exchange site (https://www.language-exchanges.org/) as a typical informal online community of self-directed language learners with a focus on how learners interact with each other. Learners' perception was also studied regarding how their language learning was impacted by their participation in…

This paper reports on a project that draws upon the framework of the community of inquiry to support game-based language learning outside classroom. Case study design was employed to collect and analyze both qualitative and quantitative data, with a view to investigating the participants' language development, participation, and perception. This…

This study examined asynchronous online discussions in the online course "English Language Development" to identify themes related to participants' learning about the language and literacy development of English Language Learners when they facilitated online discussions to determine whether the participants developed sufficient…

Identity became apparent as an important theme while investigating the role of interaction in the asynchronous discussion forums of an online post-graduate TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) education subject. Identity emerged through dialogic choices as students projected an impression of themselves, negotiated their…

Online discussion forums represent "online collaborative learning spaces in which communities become engaged in the discourse on a topic about which they share common interests or goals" (Montero, Watts & Garcia-Carbonell, 2007, p. 568). This digital communication modality has been claimed to enhance second/foreign language (L2)…

There has been an unquestionable upsurge in distance education in recent years. Given this, it is extremely important to understand the experience of online courses from students' perspectives. The purpose of the current qualitative study is to understand student attitudes about distance education in a specific context, namely that of a…

Contemporary discussions of education in blended-learning environments increasingly emphasize the social nature of learning which emphasizes interactions among students, or among students and instructors. These interactions can occur asynchronously using a text based discussion forum. A text-based discussion forum, however, may not work well for…

An online learning community enables learners to access up-to-date information via the Internet anytime--anywhere because of the ubiquity of the World Wide Web (WWW). Students can also interact with one another during the learning process. Hence, researchers want to determine whether such interaction produces learning synergy in an online learning…

This study investigated the application of an online videocase discussion community into fostering preservice and inservice EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers' professional development in Taiwan. This investigation further revealed the nature and development of discussion discourse and the participating teachers' perceptions of this…

In this paper, an application of one aspect of the Internet technology, namely Internet groups, into the teaching of American and British literatures is evaluated by means of a content analysis of the Internet group which was used as the course component. The aim of this paper was to see how students used the Internet group in the learning of…