A Case Study Of Social Interaction Of A Learning Community Based On An Online English Course Forum

The growing influence of Vygotsky's theory of social constructivism leads to a movement from the"Age of the Individual to the Era of Community". Learning communities are just the manifestation of this movement.Internet is changing our social lives including education increasingly and engenders great influence on education in schools all over the world. Various kinds of online communication modes are provided as a complement to the traditional face-to-face teaching model. The integration of internet technology and classroom language teaching has become a burgeoning trend.The present study investigates the factors contributing to the establishment of an online learning community, based on a case study of the postings of the online forum of linguistic course offered at Northwest Normal University. Based on the definition of the learning community, the present study investigates this online learning community by examining its characteristics through three dimensions: the participative characteristics of groups'interaction, the academic supportive characteristics of forum discussions and the quality of knowledge construction. The three dimensions were analyzed by social network analysis method, content analysis method and document analysis method.Firstly, the author used social network analysis (SNA) method to investigate the participative characteristics of groups'interaction through three aspects: cohesion analysis, role analysis and centrality analysis. Results of cohesion analysis showed that a few participants belonged to more than six cliques, and they were"bridgers"to connect different cliques. According to role analysis, we can see there were four groups formed in this forum: core participants, active participants, inactive participants and lurkers. And then the results of centrality analysis showed that the more relations an individual or an organization possessed, the more central position the participants would be located. Hence, the more influence would be brought. The leaders were at the center and they worked as the"trigger"and"responder". Someone less influential would stay on the margin of power. Secondly, the author analyzed the academic supportive characteristics of forum discussions by content analysis through five parameters: intersubjectivity, ontology, problematicity, dialogicity and motivation. The results showed that participants'discussions focused on the theme of linguistic course; the participants had academic dialogue relationship; they could integrate outside reference with new and enriching discussion topics to some extent; they attempted to use the forum both to define and address problem, and they were motivated beyond the extrinsic motivation of course requirements to participate in the forum. Thirdly, the author used Gunawardena's Knowledge Construction Process Model to analyze the quality of knowledge construction. Results show that participants'level of knowledge construction wasn't high, and the majority of the postings were primarily concerned with sharing information and viewpoints and many postings emerged at the negotiating stage. The latter is a significant difference between the present study and other studies.To conclude, the online learning forum under investigation is partially successful in promoting and building an academic learning community, but the level of the knowledge construction was low, and further improvements were needed to promote knowledge construction. In the end, the author pointed out the limitation of this research and suggestions for further research.