Resumen de La implicació dels aprenents d'idiomes en els fòrums asíncrons: un estudi exploratori
This thesis explores engagement of language learners in asynchronous discussion forums which are used as part of a fully online English language learning course for adults at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Learner engagement is not a new area of research in education but it is only quite recently that online language learner engagement has been the focus of study. There is a solid theoretical background in the area of learner engagement (Fredricks, Blumenfeld and Paris, 2004; Kahu, 2013; Schindler, Burkholder, Morad and Marsh, 2017) and it is generally agreed to consist of three dimensions: behavioural, cognitive and emotional engagement. Behavioural engagement refers to learners’ participation and involvement as they carry out the pedagogical task at hand, cognitive engagement involves what and how learners learn, and emotional engagement considers learners’ emotional connection to their learning. Research has mainly focused on the behavioural dimension and where the emotional dimension is addressed, methods have varied considerably and the primary source of data has tended to be student questionnaires (Dixson, 2010; Nakazawa, 2009; Young and Bruce, 2011), which means that findings are focused on those learners who are highly engaged and do not take into consideration the rest. Where cognitive engagement is included in research, approaches have focused on self-regulation and the use of learning strategies (Fredricks et al., 2004), with the objective of understanding learners’ motivation to learn, persistence to achieve learning objectives and deep processing of information (Schindler et al., 2017). In such contexts learning gains are measured in terms of grades (Dixson, 2010). In this study, we observe these three dimensions of engagement in two groups of learners as they carry out three writing tasks in asynchronous discussion forums. Our objective is to provide some insight into how learners engage with the tasks and with one another. To achieve this, we carry out three case studies; the first analyses two separate groups of learners working with the same teacher while they carry out a course warm-up task; the second case study analyses the engagement of one of the two groups of learners from the first case study across three tasks; and the final case study narrows the focus further by analysing the engagement of three learners from the group in the second case study across the three tasks. We adopt a specific method for each dimension of learner engagement. For behavioural engagement, we analyse participation and interaction quantitatively by measuring post rates, word counts, post reading activity, forum threading characteristics and the number of interactions. For cognitive engagement, we track how individual learners’ marks change from the start to the end of the course and in the final case study, we analyse and compare three learners’ posts in terms of their complexity, accuracy and fluency. For emotional engagement, we carry out quantitative content analysis of posts in terms of social presence. The main findings of the study indicate that the three dimensions of learner engagement are inter-related and therefore should not be studied separately as has traditionally been done. We conclude that higher rates of participation and interaction tend to correspond to learners whose marks improve or at least stay the same over the course. The contributions of the learners in these two groups also show higher levels of indicators of social presence, particularly in the early stages of the course.
