Research Progress 3

In the past few days, I have been working on finding papers that discuss about the concept of social presence.

So far I have found one definition of social presence which was developed by Short, Williams and Christie in 1976. According to Short et al., social presence means "degree of salience of the other person in the interaction and the consequent salience of the interpersonal relationships".

I've read other papers have literature review on social presence. It seemed that there are other researchers' perspective on what social presence is and what effect it has on learners when they are learning in CMC settings.

I think one thing that I try to deal with is that there is always something that worth reading in other papers. I always find that what I have read so far for a particular area might not be enough for my literature review. In other words, I don't know when I should stop digging information on one area and move on to another one. That's the hardest thing I have encountered so far. That's also why for so many weeks and I'm still stuck in finding more lit. review on social presence.

Research Progress 2

This week I read two papers. I found one of them to be interesting and the finding result is a little bit different from what I thought would be.

The paper is "A Case Study of Language Learner's Social Presence in Synchronous CMC". In this study, the researchers did the research in different learning modes which are face to face, CMC with webcam and headset, and CMC with headset. She had French language learners paired up with a partner whom they didn't know well in the beginning of the course and asked them to do conversation practice with their partner in different modes.

Interestingly, her result showed that students had higher score of social presence when they did the task in CMC with webcam and headset. This is totally different from what I thought before I read this study. I thought students should feel more social presence in the mode of face-to-face setting. But this is not the case in this study. According to the researcher, some factors affected students' social presence. One is the familiarity of their partner. Since they didn't know each other before doing the task, they felt uncomfortable in carrying out the task in a face-to-face setting where would made them feel more nervous and anxious. But in the mode of CMC with webcam and headset, they weren't as nervous as they were in the face-to-face setting; moreover, they could see more clearly about their peer's facial expression via webcam and the screen which made them feel that the interaction was much real to them. That's why the social presence score in the mode of CMC with webcam and headset had the highest score.

This different result gives me different perspective about how physical space might or might not affect students' language learning if some factors such as familiarity of their peers aren't carefully taken into consideration in the lesson planning.

Research Progress 1

Since my midterm research paper critique focused on blended learning, I would like to expand it a little bit further for my final project. So currently, my final project is about distance learning and my research question is as follows:
1. How does physical space closeness affect EFL (English as a Foreign Language) young learners' learning in a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) which hosts a synchronous course?

2. What are the factors that make the effects?

Due to several reasons (e.g. data collection, time constraint, minor participant issues, etc.), I decided to do a literature review for finding possible answers for these questions.

So this week, I focused on finding papers that talk about "synchromodal learning environment". I found one paper that did a research which is quite close to the learning condition I am looking. In that research, students in a face-to-face setting have to log into VLE to learn with their online peers; meanwhile, their online peers also occupied a physical space in the face-to-face setting via technological devices (e.g. iPad). In this research, the researchers tried to find out the degree of social presence of the learners. But I was also hoping that I could know more about whether their feeling of social presence of their peers would have an impact on their learning or interaction. However, in that study, perhaps that was not their focus, so it did not mention anything about it.

So the problem I encountered this week is that I attempted to look for the impact of learning in synchromodal learning environment. Nonetheless, either I did not use the correct keywords or there is few studies on this topic (I think it is the latter reason that causes this problem). And when I searched for the keywords "synchromodal learning environment", there are just a few papers which were all done by the same researchers and published in the same year but published in different journals or symposiums. Hmm... I think I probably need to move on and start to look for papers in other areas.