Research Paper on "Communicative Competence of ESL Students Using Electronic"

Research Paper 4 pages (1095 words) Sources: 3

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Communicative Competence of ESL Students Using Electronic Discussion Boards" by Shenghua Zha, Paul Kelly, MeeAeng Ko Park, and Gail Fitzgerald

Many young people enter the school system today with an entirely new set of skills and expectations concerning the use of technology in the classroom. Not surprisingly, these trends have also affected the manner in which English as a second language (ESL) instruction is being delivered to even very young learners. The study by Zha, Kelly, Park and Fitzgerald (2006) took advantage of these new skills to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate communicate competency levels among elementary-aged ESL pupils using electronic discussion boards to communicate with each other and their teachers as described further below.

Subjects or participants. Twenty-eight ESL pupils in grades 2 to 5 participated in this study. The participants were drawn from seven ESL classes in six different elementary schools. About two-thirds (64.2% or 18) of the participants were boys and eight (35.8%) were girls. A quarter (7) of the participants spoke Spanish, five spoke Chinese and other participants spoke French, Russian, Korean, Arabic, Pohnpeian, Urdu, or Samoan as their native languages. In order to ensure that the electronic discussion board was the sole forum available for participants from the same schools, pupils were assigned into different discussion groups. Consequently, every group with three or four pupils which had its own electronic discussion board for message exchanges.

Methodology. Although many young people enter the classroom today with the skill set needed to "hit the ground running" when it comes to electronic discussion boards, because the participants came to the classroom from various backgrounds with varying levels of computer knowledge, the researchers conducted training for the first week to ensure that everyone knew how to compose, edit and post messages as well as how to navigate the other features of the system such as accessing the board, logging out and using the spell check function. The first week was also used as an opportunity for the participants to practice using the electronic discussion board hosted on the school's server by exchanging messages and becoming acquainted with each other. All students and teachers, as well as the researchers, had individual accounts for the electronic discussion board; in addition, all of the participants were furnished with wireless-Internet equipped Hewlett-Packard laptops.

Following the completion of the training week, the researchers assigned a series of three activities that were deemed relevant and interesting to the participants: (a) activity 1 was "Creating Clubs"; (b) activity 2 was "Recommending a Holiday Menu," and (c) activity 3 was "Planning a Party." Because each of the activities involved different social settings, the participants were required to use English that was appropriate to their audience, purpose and setting. Although ESL teachers were available to assist the participants one-on-one with respect to using the electronic discussion board, they were instructed to not interfere with the postings by the participants.

Data collection procedures. The qualitative data for this study was collected by capturing the participants' 956 messages on the electronic discussion board and the data entered into NVivo 2.0 (a qualitative analysis software program offered by QSR International). Following the completion of each week's activity, the researchers captured the posted messages in a single document and sorted them chronologically. The messages were coded following the… READ MORE

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