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N97C0022 Christine

Facilitating or Limiting? The Role of Politeness in How Students Participate in an Online Classroom Discussion. N97C0022 Christine. Ming-Lung Yang, Yu-Jung Chen, Minseong Kim, Yi-Fan Chang, An-Chih Cheng, Yangjoo Park, Treavor Bogard, and Michelle Jordan. ＊ Introduction.

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N97C0022 Christine

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  1. Facilitating or Limiting? The Role of Politeness in How Students Participate in an Online Classroom Discussion N97C0022 Christine Ming-Lung Yang, Yu-Jung Chen, Minseong Kim, Yi-Fan Chang, An-Chih Cheng, Yangjoo Park, Treavor Bogard, and Michelle Jordan

  2. ＊Introduction • Newlands, Anderson, & Mullin ( 2003): CMD (Computer-mediated classroom discussion) is an online forum in which participants co-construct meaning, representing an example of a social situation in which literacy (reading and writing abilities) is required to negotiate meaning. • Knobel & Lankshear, Leu (2005): New literacies: thedispositions and practices needed to engage with computer-mediated and technologically-enhanced information and communication tasks.

  3. ＊Introduction • Brown & Levinson (1987), Morand & Ocker (2003): Politeness as a discourse framework is rooted in the work of Goffman (1955). • cited in Morand & Ocker (2003): In Goffman’s view, politeness issues arise when individuals, while Interacting with one another, want to “create certain impressions in others to appear smooth and competent in their role of performances, to be perceived as appropriately heedful and supportive of others’ performances.”

  4. ＊Introduction • Brown and Levinson (1987): Three main politeness strategies (1)positive politeness, showing an appreciation of something that the speaker believes the listener would like to hear (2)negative politeness, attempting to reduce any imposition on the hearers (3)off-record (indirect) , making a statement that the listener can interpret either as an imposition or not

  5. ＊Introduction • Chun (1994) and Darhower (2002) found that students spent a great deal of time in greeting and leave-taking when interacting in CMD. • Indirect communication was largely used to save face by the students in order to avoid being embarrassed by others’ rejection and disagreement. • Four types of cues to an author’s emotions: sound rendering (hehe), physical actions (*kiss*), emphasis (no, I *won’t* go), and emotions such as  to indicate a smiling face.

  6. ＊Introduction • Schallert and colleagues (2004): learning could evidenced from the actual words students used in the CMD and from their self-assessments of learning. They provided several categories of learning, clarification, collaborative expansion, integration,application, and alternative interpretation.

  7. ＊ Definition • Learning is both social and personal, originating in interaction with cultural and social practices but internalized in an active, goal-directed manner. Conflict and disturbance can act as an impetus for the learning process (e.g.Almasi, 1995; Chan, Burtis, & Bereitet, 1997) and learning is more likely to occur when learners hold an engaged, open stance to the new ideas being entertained (e.g. Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000). • Learning was evidenced when students clarified their existing understanding or offered personal examples of new insights they had freshly constructed from reading others’ comments

  8. ＊ Definition • Politeness theory terms : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politeness_theory • The concepts derive from Brown and Levison (1987) and begin with the concept of face, or the self-image of human beings in their social interactions. Face wants or needs are said to drive interactions with others, and face-saving as well as face-threatening and losing face are important concerns of all humans.

  9. ＊ Definition • Politeness theory terms : • The concern for face-saving leads individuals to worry about the negative and positive face needs of others as they interact with them. • The positive face of either the speaker (or writer in an online environment) or hearer (reader) will be threatened if someone must disagree with someone else. • Anytime a face-threatening act (FTA) is being planned, the speaker (writer) must carefully word what is said in order to soften the threat or lessen the risk of losing face.

  10. ＊ Definition • Politeness theory terms : • Positive politeness strategies are all about redressing the threatened face needs of the hearer (reader) by implying what the speaker (writer) is saying does indeed fulfill the needs and wants of the hearer (reader). • Negative politeness strategies are used to reduce the threat to the hearer (reader) by minimizing the seeming imposition of what the speaker (writer) is stating. • Positive politeness revolves around an awareness of the self-image needs of the hearer (reader) and negative politeness reflects an awareness of the autonomy needs of the hearer (reader).

  11. ＊ Research Questions • RQ1: What politeness strategies students and their teacher would use in an asynchronous online discussion? • RQ2: What evidence of learning we could find particularly related to the use of politeness strategies? • RQ3: In what ways would the use of politeness strategies limit students’ learning?

  12. ＊ Method ◆ Participants • the instructor • graduate students — 32 (12M, 20F), including 11 interactional students (Korea=4, China=3, Taiwan=2, Middle East=1, and Philippines=1)

  13. ＊ Method ◆ procedure 1.Three required online discussion used a web-based software (Blackboard) to organize and deliver postings. Students were divided into four groups of seven or eight with group reading assignments, such as motivation, learning and social-cultural views which were posted by the teacher. 2.Students were asked to post at least three comments within 36 hours. 3.The teacher entered into the conversation of all groups and attempted to respond to every student at least once.

  14. ＊ Method ◆ Data Sources and Classroom Activities (From the second discussion) Three data sources: • (1)The printout of the written discussion of all four groups(44 messages for G1, 50 for G2, 56 for G3, and 46 for G4) • (2)The transcript of a follow-up, in-class activity designed by the teacher • (3)The assigned self-analysis essays the students turned in at the end of the semester

  15. ＊ Method ◆Data Analysis • (1)Transcripts of the written conversation—developing a codebook for the 25 politeness strategies—15 positive and 10 negative adapted from Brown and Levinson(1987) for the written online medium. • (2)Transcripts of oral in-class activity—looking for instances of students indicating the politeness constraints or issues of face saving and how they were describing the kind of learning happened during discussion and in-class activity. • (3)Self-analysis essays—students were asked to describe their own experience of the discussion and to response to open-ended questions.

  16. ＊ Results ◆ Part 1: Politeness strategies (1)Politeness is a special concern in a CMD environment. (2)The different politeness strategies were not all used to an equal degree. (3)Positive politeness strategies were used almost two times more often than positive strategies in the particular online written discussion. Positive politeness strategies are invoked what the writer choose wording to indicate he or she is addressing the self-image needs or wants of the reader.

  17. ＊ Results ◆Part 2: Politeness strategies Facilitating Learning • Encouraging deeper thinking and reorganization. • Increasing students’ willingness to participate by creating a safe environment. • Motivating students’ participation by fulfilling students’ desire to receive feedback for their ideas and questions.

  18. ＊ Results ◆ Part 3: Politeness Strategies Impeding Learning From “self-analysis essay data”: Students frequently reported their concerns about saving face led them not to state their students’ thoughts and feelings ,decreased some students’ participation in the discussion and even affected the length of messages. From “in-class activity for G3”: Students want to save their own and the reader’s face, they negotiate meaning and even challenge ideas. The negotiation process may become thwarted or stopped altogether, and learning may be hindered.

  19. ＊ Discussion • Conclusion: • 1. Politeness framework was useful in understanding the processes learners experience as they construct ongoing discourse. • 2. The use of politeness strategies can motivate students’ participation in the learning process. A safe environment is also important • 3. Politeness strategies were intricately interwoven in the discourse used by students, sometimes facilitating and sometimes interfering with the needs students had to negotiate their incipient understandings of difficult course constructs.

  20. ＊ Discussion • Implication: • 1.Politeness strategies are commonly used in daily life, we have to note even in the “private” data source, the students’ retrospective think-loud and their self-analysis essays, it’s possible that students also applied politeness strategies and may not have said all that they wanted to say. • 2. In future research, it would be interesting to determine whether politeness is differently influential in different language/culture groups.

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