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.