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.