This article focusses on graduate level students' interactions during asynchronous CMC activities of an online course about the teaching profession in Turkey. The instructor of the course designed and facilitated a semester-long asynchronous CMC on forum discussions, and investigated the interaction of learners in multiple perspectives: learners'…

This article reports a case study that examined dynamic patterns of interaction that two small groups (Group A and Group B) of ESL students exemplified when they performed two writing tasks: a research proposal (Task 1) and an annotated bibliography (Task 2) in a wiki site. Group A demonstrated a collective pattern in Task 1, but switched to an…

This paper reports on a small-scale study of the social interactions between six children labelled with special educational needs and their peers in their respective early years settings. Data from play observations, photographs and staff interviews is used to examine the dynamics of the connections that they make with other children. The position…

For many years, face-to-face peer mentoring has been a feature of learning support provided to first-year undergraduate students at one university in the UK. Building on the success of these initiatives, a scheme has been developed at this institution in which first-year undergraduates are mentored by second- and third-year students through a…

This dissertation explores the perceptions and experiences of international students from China and Hong Kong with diversity courses. Using theoretical frameworks that examine the diversity classroom, informal interactional diversity, a diversity typology used to categorize diversity courses, intergroup peer relationships and student…

Investigates the effects of various source characteristics on the persuasiveness of communications in the area of public health and presents evidence suggesting that a peer appeal can be more effective than a persuasive attempt by a source from a different age group. (MH)

This paper describes data gathering and analytic procedures, and then presents examples regarding how each fits into the naturalistic research model. From the interactionist perspective, called symbolic interactionism, meaning is of central importance. Naturalistic inquiry is a way of doing social science research which provides the methodological…

Investigates Chinese students' interaction styles and reactions to peer response groups in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) composition classes. Interviews with Chinese-speaking and Spanish-speaking students were audiotaped and examined by researchers. Analysis of these tapes indicated that the Chinese students' main objective of group harmony…

To provide a description of children's strategies for acquiring and protecting status in peer interactions, participant observation fieldwork was conducted in a classroom of 24 kindergarteners in a low socioeconomic status urban public school. During the period from January through May of 1983, 26 observational visits were made and 80 hours of…