3. Collaboration and Language Use in WebBoard

3.1 Patterns of language choice.

Number of pupils: 75 pupils are actively involved. 62 are French speaking and 13 English speaking, or 83% vs. 17% . 'Actively' means that they are identifiable authors of messages by contrast with the unindentified 'passive' participants whose presence is recorded in the number of times a message has been read at the top of each message. It will be recalled ( Section 1.1.) that in Senegal the 12 addresses represent 34 pupils working in groups. Elsewhere, if there are several pupils from a country in a group they would have one address each. The difference between the number of pupils and the number of addresses is given in Table 1 below.

Total number of messages: 598

Distribution of messages by group: Mean : 49.

Distribution of messages by e-mail address or 'site ': Mean: 11

Distribution of messages between English and French: 57% of messages(n=342) were in English, 42% (n=250) in French and 1%(n=6) made up of cryptic codes unattributable to either French or English (noted as 'other' in Table 1).The distribution further depends on whether messages were produced by native speakers or second language learners: 90% of the French messages (n =226) were in L1 and 10% (n = 24) in L2. 13 % of the English messages (n =44) were in L1 and 87% (n = 298) in L2. Overall 88% of the messages were produced by the Francophones (n=524) or a mean of 9.8 per address while 12% were produced by the Anglophones (n=68) or a mean of 5.2. per address.

Distribution of messages by task:

Task 1:
48% of total number of messages (n= 277)
112 in English (28L1 + 84 L2) + 165 in French(164 L1+1L2)

Task 2:
43% of total number of messages (n= 256)
212 in English (14L1 + 198 L2) + 44 in French (21 L1+23 L2)

Task 3:
9% of total number of messages (n= 58)
23 in English ( 1 L1 + 22 L2) + 35 in French (34 L1+1 L2)

Table 1: Distribution of English and French messages by group and composition of the groups.

3.2 Summary

(1) We should expect the difference between the number of participants from each linguistic background to be reflected in the distribution of L1 and L2 messages for each language. On that basis, there is a sizeable difference between the group of anglophones and the group of francophones in terms of language use, and more particularly in their efforts to send messages in their second language. English speaking and French-speaking pupils are not dissimilar in terms of the amount of effort they put in participating in the activities when using L1 (average: 4.2 in French L1 vs. 3.3. in English L1) but when it comes to using L2, English- speaking pupils put three times less effort than their French- speaking counterparts ( average: 1.8 in French L2 vs. 5. 6 in English L2).

(2) The pattern whereby the francophones put more effort in participating than the anglophones both in L1 and L2 is reflected across the three tasks:

• In Activity 1, we expect exchanges in L1 to predominate. It is true of the French-speaking pupils' messages and of the English-speaking pupils' messages but there is only 1 message in French L2 whereas there are 84 messages in English L2.
• In Activity 2, we expect exchanges in L2 to predominate. It is true of the French-speaking pupils' messages and of the English-speaking pupils' and there is less difference between the two groups.
• In Activity 3, the joint poem, had very little take up overall ( two groups did not even try) although the groups which did try ( G4 and G11) put a lot of effort into it. Even then, the same pattern appears.

Discussion: Can the analysis shed light on the difference in collaborative activity shown by the anglophones and the francophones?

The data from G9 and G11 which are balanced in terms of number of anglophone and francophone pupils suggest that the reason may not necessarily be the imbalance in the number of pupils. In G9, although the proportion of messages in English and French is almost equal, thus approaching the ideal case, ( 49% vs. 51%), the francophones are more active than the UK pupils in L1 and in L2. In Group 11, which appears to be the most active group ( 83 messages) 60 (72%) of the messages are in English and 55 of these are produced by the francophones. This suggests that balanced groups of pupils do not necessarily co-operate better than less balanced ones and that there is very little engagement on the part of the anglophones or that even if there is, it may be short-lived so that the near balance between English and French would mostly reflect between-francophone co-operation in both languages.

A difference in motivation might be a more likely candidate to explain the difference between the two groups than imbalance in numbers. The evidence is that it is not just a question of lack of enthusiasm for using French on the part of the UK pupils but that the francophones are motivated to make use of English even when it is not necessary for communication purpose. Indeed, Groups 2, 3, 4 and 7, where no English-speaking pupils appear, maintain their activity in both languages and demonstrate that French-speaking pupils from three different countries use both French and English independently of the presence of the UK pupils.

The language choice analysis of the use of WebBoard in Tic-Talk makes appear:

• that French-speaking pupils are generally more active, try more and more often than English-speaking pupils both in L1 and in L2, and use English between themselves.
• that English-speaking pupils do better in Task 2 but are generally less active than their counterparts, both in L1 and in L2 and do not even show up in four groups.
• that differences in motivation might be a more likely explanation for the difference in collaborative activity between the francophones and the anglophones than the imbalance in numbers.

3.2. Qualitative analysis: Barriers to and opportunities for collaboration in WebBoard.

Before returning to the issue of motivation, we need to develop a more sophisticated analysis of collaboration in a Bulletin Board and capture the collaborative process behind the production of the discourse. In this section, we explore the complexity of collaborative language use in WebBoard and try to gain an understanding of the pupils' interaction with the environment. The analysis provides evidence that the design features of WebBoard do not affect language use directly but interact with a number of dimensions in creating barriers or opening up new opportunities for establishing common ground between participants. These include: (1) the psycholinguistic, (2) the pedagogical, (3) the cultural (4) the social and (5) the institutional dimensions.

3.2.1 WebBoard features and second language users: constraints and affordances

(a) Headers have two features which can mislead the receivers of messages in developing the situational representation: they are in English, which prevents differentiation between the English and French-speaking participants, and they do not log the sender's location. The location of French-speaking participants is an issue since they may be in any of three countries. Further ambiguities arise when pupils use nicknames or because of local school arrangements. For example, when students write messages together, authorship is blurred as in Ex. 1 (b) where 'we' means 'us four' and not 'we in Senegal'. Others use their teachers' e-mail address so that the message and signature appear to disconfirm the name in the header. As a result, there are many examples of assumed common ground leading to inappropriate communicative action. In Ex. 01, Leila 's message shows that she assumes that Philippe is in France. The inclusion of the headers in the analysis ( although they are not always reproduced for reasons of space) is a reminder that they are part of the text of the message read by the recipients.

Ex. 01(a):

Topic : Pictures ( read 35 times)
Conf : Group 09
From : Leila Jones
Date : Friday, November 16, 2001, 08:12

Hi Philippe… i live in Cambridge near London(…) we don't have tests - yet…THANK GOD!!!! Tell me more about france and where you live and about your school.bye Leila

to which Philippe replies:

Ex. 01(b):

Topic : Pictures ( read 35 t

HI LEILA
We do not know what is happening in france because we don't live there.we live in dakar capital of senegal. bay bay

(b) On the other hand, WebBoard provides participants' names in writing which helps communication as foreign names are difficult to memorise. However, the value of written names as co-ordinating signalling devices depends on their correct orthography. The responsibility for being accurate with names in writing is given prominence because of its significance: the French-speaking spokesman of a group of four works hard to convey the message that 'Nicholas' should be spelt 'Nicolas' in the header. His request is fulfilled and he gets a formal apology from the Tic-Talk team, who have realised the collaborative nature of his insistence: participants would assume 'Nicholas' and four others are English speaking. Even when spelt correctly, access to first names does not always lead to unambiguous joint reference in cross-linguistic discourse. They can be re-interpreted via the L1 phonology ( 'Gilles' for 'Gill' ) or misunderstood as when 'Vincianne', a girl's name, is addressed as 'Vincent'. The 'triggering' effect of headers in production, the bilingual discourse phenomenon whereby the appearance of one element from the second language causes a switch into that language (Clyne, 1967) should not be underestimated because the participants actually see the message to which they are responding while encoding their response.

(c) Constraints and affordances of the 'one to many only' feature for L2 learners. The 'one to many only 'feature increases the communicative efficiency of individuals since any message represents potentially as many communicative acts as there are people in the group. This is one reason why there are few messages overall. However, it might also increase the phenomenon of convergence and compliance (Burt, 1002) in small groups whereby participants may not feel they need to contribute to a discussion if another member of the group has expressed views with which they agree. It also puts considerable constraints on the ability of L2 learners to write their messages. Few pupils achieve the necessary lexical and grammatical control in production, even in their native language, to design messages which ensure that each member can not only identify the sender but also feel compelled to contribute to the group's discourse. Ex. 02 below is a model of co-operative design and gets three replies. It includes (a) self-identification, (b) direct references to the immediately preceding common ground (c) addressee selection by name to ask a question which is relevant only to Myriem who is in the Euro zone but the fact that the question is asked shows that Antoine assumes the topic is of interest to all and projects a European identity onto the others.

Ex. 02:

Hi it's Antoine
I'm fine thanks. I talk French, Spanish, English*
I think that Antrax come by Bin Laden**
do you know Wallen? If yes, What do you think about her? ***
Myriem, are you ready for the "Euro" BYE****
Antoine

Notes:
* This is a reply to Myriem's immediately preceding message which goes 'I'm very well thank you.And you?. How many languages do you speak?')
** Contribution to debate launched by Philippe the preceding week which goes 'What do you think about ben laden.' to which Myriem has responded 'I don't think Antrax is from ben laden.And You?'
*** Careful offer of new topic. It does not assume the others know Wallen.
**** In the original message, Antoine has typed a big 'Euro' sign instead of the 'E'

Thus, WebBoard provides an environment which alleviates some of the difficulties which get in the way of L2 users' collaborative action but can also increase the number of potential ambiguities and put heavy demands on their ability to design messages for a multi-party audience. The above features together turn WebBoard into a more demanding environment for the English speaking pupils compared with the francophones: the task of identifying their francophone partners is more difficult for them and it increases their chances of making humiliating public mistakes. The anglophones also have to cope with the extra task of typing French accents on English keyboards, whereas all the letters needed to type English exist on the French keyboard.

3.2.2 The pedagogical dimension: The design and the use of non-linguistic means interact with the technology in creating barriers to collaborative action while supporting it in other ways.

(a) Task design effect on discourse and participants' proficiency. The design involved a progression: participants were invited to use their L1 in Activity 1 so that they could gain confidence and truly say what they thought. In Activity 2, they could exercise their ability to use L2. However, many participants were unable to identify which messages were in L1 or L2 in the bilingual discourse. Indeed, as shown in Ex.3. language choice proved to be an unreliable guide to identifying participants' countries:

Ex. 03:

Hi Robert!! (…..)
Thursday and Friday, we have a 'Brevet Blanc', it's an exam with History, French, Maths and Education Civiq ;
it's a bit like your 'A -Levels'. Say me 'GOOD LUCK'!!! BYBYE and BIG KISS !!!! JEANNE

The French girl assumes the Belgian boy to be English and gives him a 'collaborative' explanation about 'your A-levels' on that basis (we are not commenting on the validity of the comparison here). It is a case of assumed common ground leading to the inappropriate realisation of a communication strategy aimed at facilitating the understanding of the addressee. It has the counterproductive effect of increasing the addressee's difficulty in resolving the issue of joint reference. Jeanne's message does not get a reply and it fails to achieve the status of 'contribution' to the joint task.

(b) Pictures and photos in Activity 1 help participants achieve joint reference but it presupposes transmission is reliable. In Ex. 4, the senders assume wrongly that the 'en' of their message is unambiguous, but the picture referred to has not reached some of the members of the group:

Ex. 04(a):

salut c'est nous, on aimerait bien savoir ce que vous en pensez
(tr: hi it's us we'd like to know what you think about it)

but Vincent replies:

Ex. 04(b):

on parle de quelle photo non excuser moi mé je comprends plus rien. je suispas c.
(tr: which photo are we talking about sorry but I don't understand anymore. I'm not stupid)
vincent kisssssssssssssss

The pedagogical task design and the use of pictures can be identified as the source of difficulties in establishing common ground but these 'accidents' are not caused by the design features of WebBoard. In Tic-Talk, the pupils followed the rules proposed and the use of pictures as joint focus for discussion supported the establishment of common ground in Activity 1. The imbalance in numbers between English and French messages facilitated switching into English through triggering in Activity 2, but it did not seem to have worked against collaborative activity per se.

The cultural dimension interacts with the collaborative use of WebBoard in relation to participants' shared background knowledge.

(a) Ex.05. where John fails to make Jeannette understand the reference to his 'paperound' shows how assumed shared cultural background knowledge leads to failure to achieve joint reference cross-linguistically. For a learner, his message is particularly difficult to understand and is further evidence that the phenomenon whereby messages are perceived as being written in L2, identified in section 2 (a) above, is less surprising than one might think. Here the message has obviously been typed in a hurry and John is referring to the TV series 'Friends' in the first line then to his own friends in the second without marking the difference in the orthography so that 'them' is ambiguous. But John also clearly assumes that 'doing a paperound' does not constitute a referential problem for Jeanette whereas it is a typically anglo-saxon practice.The example shows that participants can be co-operative and willing while completely by-passing each other's intentions without realising it.

Ex. 05(a):

I like watching friends but only when i am not doing my homework or it distracts me, i like ging (sic) out with my friends but it gets too dark because
the clocks went back but I have a paperound so i somethimes get to see them on my paperound' [our higlights]

Jeanette's reply shows that she has noticed the salience of 'paperound', tried to guess what it could be and come to the conclusion that John must have wall paper in his room with prints of the actors of 'Friends', presumably on the assumption that one is literally surrounded by wall paper. John does not pick up the neologism. It probably did not even cross his mind that there could be a link between 'papier peint' and 'paperound'.

Ex. 05(b):

hello!!
c'est Jeanette. Tu as de la chance d'avoir un papier peint comme ca. Mais bon je ne regarde pas la serie je n'y pense jamais.
(tr: it's Jeanette. You are lucky to have that kind of wallpaper. But I do not watch the series I never think about it.)

(b) For participants however, WebBoard offers opportunities to share their youth culture. Wherever they live, pupils share the same music, films, TV series etc, so that mention of certain icons is sufficient to trigger a response establishing or reinforcing the group's identity as in 6 (b). The insertion of the word 'friends' in the French messages does not create any problem of co-ordination between French participants, indicating that the picture of the actors of the series posted on WebBoard has been sufficient to ensure joint reference through the use of the TV series title. Ex.6 ( a) and (b) are messages written by native speakers of French ( our italics) .Yet again they show how easy it is to make a mistake of identification of a participant's first language in a group. It also suggests that English pupils might process them in English.

Ex. 06(a):

Topic: Picture 2, Read 58 times
Conf: Group 10
From: Sylvie Meunier
Date: Friday, November 16, 2001 08:04

S alut.

Moi c'est Sylvie, j'ai 14 ans. Super la photo de Òfriends. Tout le monde est au rendez-vous: Chandler, Rachel, Ross, Monica, Joe et Phoebe en train de boire. La musique du générique est super. En France, Friends est à la mode.
SALUT

Ex. 06(b): Topic: Picture 2, Read 56 times
Conf: Group 10
From: Sophie Dillak
Date: Friday, November 16, 2001 08:07

Salut
ben nous, c Sophie, Rachel, Justine et Anne Marie. Nous avons 15 ans et nous habitons Dakar. Comme toi, nous adorons Òfriends. Voila, a bientot…
Les Miss.

WebBoard mediates both the failures and successes of participants in sharing their culture. The exchange of pictures increases the influence of commercially imposed pop culture,as well as the amount of English in the French messages. It multiplies opportunities for ambiguities on the identity of the senders and for 'triggering' into English. The analyst may also trace 'missed opportunities' for understanding each other's assumptions but when these are not identified as 'trouble source' by the participants, their potential for the development of interculturality is irrelevant.

3.2.2 Socially, the environment puts heavy constraints on collaborative language use but also opens up opportunities for teenagers to mark both their difference and their solidarity.

(a) As illustrated in Ex. 1 and 3, its 'one-to many only' constraint makes of WebBoard a socially 'face threatening' arena. Mistakes are public and officially recorded so that it may expose participants to social embarrassment both within their WebBoard group and their local community. Although the errors in Ex. 3 and Ex. 5 (b) are not picked up as a 'trouble source' (Schegloff et al. 1977) and do not affect the collaboration, they still have much social significance and meaning in WebBoard because anybody can trace the failures back to assumptions made by participants about the others in their group in the discourse record. They amount to publicly failed bids.

(b) WebBoard is also an arena for establishing new language norms. Both 'Netspeak' (Crystal, 2001, p.24) and text-messaging conventions are used as community membership devices. In ten groups out of 12 and in varying degrees, the participants use text-messaging conventions (Ex. 07 and 08 and graphological devices and smileys or emoticons(Sanderson, 1993) to mark emphasis or to convey emotion (Ex.09). One may not argue that the use of text messaging conventions which serve the need to reduce the amount of information transmitted is imposed by WebBoard since the length of messages is unlimited. Similarly, for emoticons, many of the meanings expressed in Ex.09 can easily be expressed lexically. One has to conclude that some groups need to mark symbolically their belonging together in the WebBoard context in their use of language in this way. However, in the context of Tic-Talk it is also a test of within- group cooperation because text-messaging conventions are highly language specific, in contrast with emoticons which are broadly international. The use of text-messaging conventions increases the boundary between the Tic-talk group and the world of parents and teachers and sets them apart but here, it makes it much more difficult for the members of the group to understand each other cross-linguistically because they need to reconstruct the language of the messages from representations of the L2 phonetics to which they are unaccustomed:

Ex. 07:

[…] bon j'vs laisse pcq g d'autre message … @+
= bon je vous laisse parce que j'ai d'autres messages… à plus tard
(tr: ok got to go because I have other messages see you later)

Ex. 08:

[…] dsl g pas pu venir sur l'ordi avant…
= désolée j'ai pas pu venir sur l'ordinateur avant…
(tr: sorry, I could not come and work on the computer before)

Ex. 09:

j'adoooore…
= j'adore + emphasis (French)

kisssssssssss
= kiss + emphasis (English)

je vais l faire TOUT SEUL!
= I am going to write it on my own, i.e. 'without you lot mark my words') (French)

tell him that I'm very beautiful ! ;)
= wink (English)

Our interpretation of the use of these devices as group membership devices would explain why none of the participants question the use of conventions or check what words mean cross-linguistically in spite of the considerable variation. In one group, we find 'A+',' a+', '@+', 'A plus', 'a plus'and ' Seeyou@+' for 'à plus tard'. Moreover, there is much evidence that some participants try to get bye pretending they understand the 'in-group norms' rather than risk disclosure that they do not know what certain expressions mean. Finally, it would also explain that text-messaging is especially prominent in groups without English participants, although there are at least two French pupils who use text-messaging in the two languages.

The social dimension highlights how de-motivating the use of WebBoard might be if the Tic-Talk situation is experienced like the extension of a language classroom. Potential public humiliation, for a pupil who is shy and is not quite sure about writing in L2, is bound to override the potential excitement of exchanging with invisible buddies around the world. It also shows how much use of the Web opens up opportunities for developing new literacy practices. The borrowing of conventions from language use in other new technologies have no functionality in WebBoard other than their symbolic social meaning.

3.2.4 The institutional dimension directly affects collaborative activity in two specific ways.

(a) International collaboration between the schools and the teachers in the activity is only made possible because of the availability of the technology. It also highlights the dependence of the Tic-Talk community on the infrastructure. It is not available 'anywhere'.

(b) Institutional gate-keeping. By virtue of the fact that they are controlling pupils' access to computers, the schools also undermine the Web's other selling point which consists in being accessible 'anytime'. There is only one hour in time difference between the four countries concerned so that there is no issue there but in most schools, access to the computer room is limited by the time-table of classes. Even though some of the schools had computers in open-access, the whole Tic-Talk community quickly ended up living to the rhythm of weekly slots during which the majority of the activity took place, and this explains the pattern of weekly bursts of activity in exchanging messages and the pupils' interactional expectations. While a-synchronicity is a feature of the discourse produced in WebBoard, it is the way WebBoard is used in the various schools which eventually determines the pacing and the timing of the exchanges by diminishing or increasing the number of opportunities individual pupils can participate to their Tic-Talk group.

The institutional dimension highlights (1) how selective and potentiallly divisive collaboration to the Web environment is (2) how much assumed common ground between schools is misleading: The local conditions regarding access to the technology directly affects the interaction between the pupils and WebBoard.

To summarise section 3.2. we have presented discourse evidence that a number of dimensions cut across the collaborative use of Web-Board as double-edged weapons. For each of these dimensions, WebBoard, as used in Tic-Talk, is an arena which creates barriers to collaboration between participants whenever they assume common ground too quickly on the basis of co-ordination devices or signals which fail. However, there is also evidence that it is an arena which opens up opportunities for collaboration when new devices ( i.e. emoticons, pictures, new words etc.) acquire a signalling value and lead to new practices and conventions between group members. The specific design features of WebBoard on collaborative language use are significant only in so far as they become tools for the participants' joint work in establishing common ground. The above analysis reinforces the view that the difference in participation between the English pupils and the francophone pupils can be explained in terms of their experience of WebBoard. For each of the dimensions examined, the constraints and opportunities offered by WebBoard affect differentially the UK pupils and the francophone pupils and reinforce the difference in motivation between the two groups. The issue is briefly taken up in Section 3 along with the implications for.CMC research.