Abstract:
Keywords:
Multimedia:
As new media enter our lives, new practices are established and can be traced in language use. For example, the French now say: 't'es ou là ?' ( 'where are you, right now ?') when answering their mobile phones. This conventional opening is appropriate to the collaborative activity 'telephoning' because it gives priority to the need of participants to establish common ground about their respective locations which is one of the necessary conditions for deictic reference to be interpretable in the conversation.
This illustrates how complex and multidimensional the relation between new technology and language use is. It would be naïve to say that mobile phones are 'the cause' of the change in language conventions. Oversimplifications of this kind are amplified through the 'global village' discourse which Hawisher and Selfe (2000, p.1) describe as a 'utopian and ethnocentric narrative' of the Western world. The present study is an attempt at escaping from the limiting influence of popular discourse. It aims to explore empirically the complex relationship between language use and new technology by analyzing the e-mail exchanges of pupils carrying out cross-linguistic activities in a Web-based bulletin-board. The main value of the data lies in its naturalistic character because it reflects the actual use of the bulletin board by the pupils while giving a realistic picture of the kind of activities effectively taking place between schools. Our aim is threefold:
(1) To approach the bulletin-board environment as a new arena of language use and identify the part effectively played by the technology in providing opportunities for collaboration or creating barriers to it. To do this, we look at the outcomes of collaborative activity in terms of language choice patterns in the discourse data (Section 3.1.) then analyze the way in which a number of dimensions interact with the features of the bulletin board to create barriers or opportunities for pupils' collaborative work ( Section 3.2).
(2) To explore the hypothesis, derived from sociocultural theory, that different groups relate to the environment in different ways so that, even though they may be doing the same tasks they may not be engaged in the same activities.
(3) To contribute to CMC research methodology in relation to educational contexts.
(a) Relevance: Much of Europe has become bi- or tri-lingual (Cenoz and Jessner, 2000 : 254) and the importance of the development of plurilingual and pluricultural competence has been recently stressed by the Council of Europe 's Framework (Council Of Europe, 2001, p.168). With improved Internet access, it is possible to enhance the development of language skills and cultural awareness by the use of new media. In the UK, the use of e-mail and of ICT resources is mentioned explicitly and repeatedly in the Programme of Study for Modern Language of the National Curriculum (DfEE & QCA, 1999), in the DfES strategy document 'Languages for all: Languages for Life' (DfES, 2002) and the IT- skills training of Modern Language Teachers has been supported by the government. Documenting how schools actually use technology to develop international partnerships independently of the official rethoric is directly relevant to the present situation.
(b) Need to question assumptions: Although use of the Internet to put pupils in contact with speakers of the languages they are learning seems an easy- to-manage and practical solution, the outcomes of activities involving direct communication are not well-known. The assumption that contact with 'native speakers' will automatically lead to gains in linguistic knowledge and foster positive attitudes needs to be questioned. Recent research in the European HE sector suggests that it may be optimistic (Coleman 96a, Howard, 2001). Crucially for CMC research and its use in Modern Language education, the idea that the new media are a 'neutral ' arena is being undermined. Studies such as Morgan and Cain (2000, p. 77) and Sugimoto and Levin (2000, p. 133) show the strength of the cultural norms which influence users of the technology and need to be further documented.
(c) Secondary sector under-researched: This is particularly noticeable for other languages than English. Studies have concentrated on the use of the Internet to support second language learning and the development of interculturality at University level (Hogan-Brun and Jung, 1999; Warschauer and Kern, 2000; Chanier, 2000) and in Europe, prominence has been given to 'Tandem Learning' which rests on the principle of reciprocity ( Little and Brammerts, 1996; Appell, 1999). Recent US work which documents the development of address form use in telecollaborative language learning (Belz and Kinginger, in press) also concerns University students as well as Negretti's study of synchronous communicative practices in a chatroom (1999). Two recent studies based on a telecollaboration project between German and American high school students focus on the interaction between task design and content (Muller-Hartmann 2000) or concentrate on the way institutional constraints may shape tele-collaborative language teaching (Belz and Muller-Hartmann 2003) but do not focus on the issue of the opportunities and constraints afforded by the technology. We do not claim this review is comprehensive, but there seems to be room for looking at the collaborative use of language between English and French speaking pupils in a Web-based bulletin board.
The data comes from a corpus collected in 2001-2002 in the context of a project called Tic-Talk, after 'Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication' in French for 'ICT' in English. The primary aim of the project was to encourage intercultural understanding between anglophone and francophone secondary school pupils by providing them with opportunities to communicate directly with pupils who were speakers of the language they were learning and who were learning their own language. Key features were that the pupils:
Tic-Talk was not conceived as a research project nor as a teaching programme but as a voluntary activity which the pupils could carry out independently on their own in a secure Web-based environment. It was aimed at the classes which did not have public examinations and were less pressurised. The pupils' ages ranged from 14 to 18 . There was no compulsion, marks or incentives and pupils could participate or opt-out at any time. The 6 teachers and 3 lecturers involved did not intervene once initial instructions had been given. The teachers' role was to select pupils and to send their names to the WebBoard manager in the Faculty, to facilitate pupils' access to WebBoard if needed and to observe what happening.
The project was initiated by staff in the Faculty of Education of the University of Cambridge and a network of modern language teachers to explore the use of new technologies for exchanges between pupils. A pilot had taken place the preceding year. Six schools participated, three of which were in South East England. The French-speaking schools were in Belgium, in France, and in Senegal. The ideal Tic-Talk group was originally intended to have 6 participants: three anglophones and three francophones. There was little pupil response in the UK so that eventually most groups turned out to have only four 'sites', or e-mail addresses, one for each country involved. The number of email addresses and the number of individual pupils did not always.coincide. In Senegal, because of the large number of pupils and the number of computers, pupils were organised in small teams with a group secretary so that the Senegalese 'address' could represent up to four pupils.
The programme lasted 4 months from October 2001. It was interrupted several times by holidays whose dates did not coincide in the different countries so that groups functioned for a maximum of eight to ten weeks. The 24 groups involving 152 pupils functioned independently from each other but locally, even pupils who were not active participants could monitor the groups' exchanges. All participants granted permission to have their messages analysed for research purposes but all names have been changed in the examples to protect their identities, the rest of the examples being otherwise strictly identical to the original messages. The present paper is based on the analysis of 12 groups chosen randomly and representing 75 pupils. They are distributed over 53 addresses as follows: Belgium: 15, Senegal: 12 representing 34 pupils, France: 13 and UK: 13.
In view of the aim of exploring WebBoard as a new arena of language use, we wanted to triangulate the methods of analysis of the discourse data not only to improve the validity of the study but because it seemed the best way to approach the exploration of a complex phenomenon.
(a) We first look at collaborative discourse from the point of view of the effect of collaboration on the patterns of language use in the data. We take the view that the pupils form a kind of bilingual group and that on the assumption that the participants are trying to use their L1 and L2 as suggested, which would predict a 50-50 split between the two languages overall, patterns of language choice in the discourse reflect the degree to which they are working together. This amounts to taking a naïve 'common sense' view of collaboration (literally meaning 'work together'). Basic arithmetic is sufficient here to characterise the overall corpus in terms of the amount of joint work carried out, as measured by the distribution of English and French in the pupils' messages. This crude analysis provides us with a snapshot representation of the overall degree of collaboration between the pupils which we can teeze out in the following qualitative analysis.
(b) The view of collaborative discourse we adopt for the main analysis comes from Herbert Clark who proposes that language use is a form of joint action taken by participants who share information (Clark, 1996, p. 52-56). A conversation is a co-ordination game in which the shared common ground is constantly updated into a 'discourse representation' composed of a textual representation, 'a representation of the language and other signals used during the discourse' and a situational representation, 'a representation of the situation being talked about.' These can be traced in the 'discourse record', or the text of the actual messages in our data. It represents the official or 'on record' states and events in the current activity. Public states and events that are 'off-record' are not official parts of the joint activity. Clark's model has distinct advantages for us as analysts:
The concept of signalling as co-ordination device in discourse offers descriptive tools which are neutral as regards to conventional methods of signalling such as the use of linguistic symbols as in 'English' or 'French' (Clark 1996, p.188). This means that cross-linguistic discourse cohesion whereby an English noun, say 'chair', is referred to as 'elle', a feminine pronoun, in the following French message is not problematic. Also, participants may use non-linguistic methods to convey their intentions such as gestures which can demonstrate for example, how a person holds an umbrella, or such as gaze which can indicate who one is referring to. Although co-ordinating devices have been studied in face to face interaction, the possibility of creating new symbols and icons is open whenever joint activities are taking place. Moreover, in WebBoard, pictures and diagrammes can be posted.
Viewing discourse as a joint activity means that there is a discourse continuum on which joint activities can be positioned depending on how heavily they rely on conventional language. A telephone conversation is 'mostly linguistic' but a tennis match 'least linguistic'. We thus have a measure to place the activity ' WebBoard conferencing' on the continuum.
The model lends itself well to the analysis of asynchronous text-based communication where the interactional order is not problematic, in sharp contrast with chatroom discourse, and in which the sequence of messages makes it possible to make a message by message analysis of the discourse record as interpreted by the participants in the context of use.
Finally, the model does not undermine the role of discourse as social practice and socio-cultural meanings in interaction, such as demonstrated by interactional sociolinguistics and especially Gumperz 's work (1982). In particular, it makes it easy to include signals which have no other intention than to re-assert that participants share a common view point.
The model was used to develop a crude evaluation measure of whether messages contributed to the discourse: each message was coded independently of language choice as Fail (F), Co-operative ( C ) or Collaborative ( C*). F meant the message did not contribute to the discourse i.e. there was no sign of any kind that the message had been acknowledged by anybody in the discourse record.( C ) meant the message contributed to the discourse but that it was 'minimal' in the specific - sense that its absence would have been uncooperative and would have required some sort of an explanation. A typical case would be the answer to a question sent to a specified addressee (C*) meant the contribution initiated a new exchange - thus displaying an intention to increase common ground further- or called for further work, for example, asking for some sort of clarification.
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)
| Group Number | Number messages | EN messages | FR messages | Belgium pupils | Senegal pupils | France pupils | UK pupils | Number pupils | Number addresses | ||
| L1 | L2 | L1 | L2 | ||||||||
| G(1) | 41 | 1 | 29 | 10 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 7 | 4 |
| G(2) | 30 | 0 | 21 | 9 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 3 |
| G(3) | 40 | 0 | 24 | 16 | 0 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 7 | 4 |
| G(4) | 55 | 0 | 23 | 32 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 4 | 3 |
| G(5) | 61 | 10 | 18 | 30 | 3+6* | 2 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 8 | 6 |
| G(6) | 66 | 1 | 27 | 30 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 8 | 5 |
| G(7) | 40 | 0 | 22 | 18 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 3 |
| G(8) | 47 | 4 | 31 | 10 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 6 | 4 |
| G(9) | 51 | 10 | 15 | 22 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 9 | 7 |
| G(10) | 45 | 5 | 19 | 19 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| G(11) | 83 | 5 | 55 | 20 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 8 | 6 |
| G(12) | 39 | 8 | 14 | 10 | 7 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | |
| T: | 598 | 44 | 298 | 226 | 24 | 15 | 34 | 13 | 13 | 75 | 53 |
| -342 | -250 | (*‘other’ = 6) | -12 |
Table 1: Distribution of English and French messages by group and composition of the groups.
(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:
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:
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.
(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, 08:12Hi 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.
(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.
(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
S alut.
Conf: Group 10
From: Sylvie Meunier
Date: Friday, November 16, 2001 08:04
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.
SALUTEx. 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.
(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 … @+
Ex. 08:
= 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)[…] dsl g pas pu venir sur l'ordi avant…
Ex. 09:
= désolée j'ai pas pu venir sur l'ordinateur avant…
(tr: sorry, I could not come and work on the computer before)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.
(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.
We come back to the issue of motivation to address a methodological issuet: we argue that an educational viewpoint brings to attention aspects of the complex reality mediated by WebBoard which might detract our attention from phenomena which may be the most valuable ones for CMC.
From a modern language perspective the issue of motivation lends itself to interpretations which make prominent issues of policy. The data is a micrososm showing the outcome of abandoning language policy to market forces, as is the present case in Europe (Phillipson, 2003). Tic-Talk fulfills its aim of encouraging cross-cultural collaboration between the pupils, but does not serve the purpose of motivating the UK pupils to use French and generally promotes the use of English as used by non native speakers, which is a feature of the use of English worldwide (Graddol, 97). The UK pupils' lack of engagement can be ascribed to the fact that they approach the use of French as a foreign language, i.e. it is firmly associated with 'not being their own', they feel embarrassed and anxious about having to use it, and they fear they might make mistakes particularly in public. This interpretation is supported by Chambers' evidence suggesting that the derminant factor motivating pupils is perceived relevance - instrumentality - and that currently in the UK there is a mismatch between the content of Modern Language lessons and what the pupils feel they need to learn for reasons which lie outside the school (Chambers, 1998). Furthermore, according to Stables and Wikeley (1999), the situation is deteriorating rapidly and this is reflected in the latest trends in examination entries for French at Key Stage 4 (CILT, 2003). UK pupils think Modern Languages are not useful, not enjoyable, and difficult in spite of the efforts deployed by their teachers to make them more attractive (Chambers, 2001). In Tic-Talk, given that participation was not controlled or sanctionned, WebBoard acts as a magnifying glass showing the effect of the lack of motivation in participating in cross-linguistic environments. Not only pupils refrain from participating, but if they do, tend to opt out quickly and generally marginalise themselves, particularly as the francophones' use of language between themselves increases their own difficulties. In sharp contrast, the French-speaking group as a whole seem to have a different orientation. They already belong to the European generation of French-speaking children for whom English is a second language (Jones, 1998). They are keen to use English to communicate internationally but whether they are using English with UK pupils is secondary and they enjoy using English and French between themselves. The data reflects that UK pupils are not motivated for modern language activities and are not ready to put a lot of effort into communicating in a second language even when it is made attractive by the use of technology and the removal of teachers' control, whereas the francophones are orientated towards collaborative activities independently of the language.
In future, if the Tic-Talk network was to support a policy of language diversity and language equality, the 'laissez-faire' pedagogical approach to language choice clearly would need to be revised and strict controls applied to ensure an equal distribution of anglophones and francophones in the groups and measures aimed at encouraging the UK pupils, such as inviting other anglophone schools while making the francophones improve their sensitivity to the difficulties of English learners.
A New Text approach: If we revisit the data once again in terms of activity theory (Nardi,1996), groups appear to diverge considerably in their approach to what the object of the activity is. Their members engage in the tasks from different angles and bring different resources to them. Although they are doing the same tasks and are very similar in their amount of effort they can be engaged in different activities. Some groups dubbed 'the conformists' use the tasks to extend their social world via a new medium. The 'innovators', in sharp contrast, exploit WebBoard to engage in a creative process of cultural innovation.
The conformists. In nine groups, the pupils treat Web-Board as a means of extending their social and cultural world, but do not allow it to challenge the organisation and structuration of that world. Instead, they try to create a WebBoard group which conforms to the norms they are used to.and reproduces it. They behave as if they have to do what was suggested by the Tic-Talk team and do not question the truth of what is said. They are reality-bound, literal and their discourse is almost entirely referential. Topics mainly relate to their immediate physical and social surroundings locally. Big events recorded are significant family events such as a baby's birth or an operation. Social or political issues are rare and messages are often addressed to the local community more than to the Tic-talk group as in Ex. 10 which exploits the broadcasting potential of WebBoard to fulfill personal goals:
Ex. 10:…..Saturday, we did gymnastik, with my friends, for the college because there was a party. Have you got a girlfriend?
Me, I haven't got a boyfriend because it's finish with Ted Sorgue !!….
Adaptation here means disambiguating information according to familiar structuring categories (gender, nationality) to obtain more details about the others and write messages likely to get answers. The information participants seek to obtain, for example the others' parents'jobs, reveals the categories they think are important in the construction of social reality and the basis upon which they conceptualise the notion of group identity. Group self-regulation looms large in cross-cultural cooperation and in G11, involves a lengthy and heated debate about the rules to be followed in poem writing.
The innovators. In groups 4, 6, and 12, the participants explore the opportunities offered by WebBoard and use the Tic-Talk group as an arena - or island - of joint creativity. Verbal and other semiotic games are triggered whereby the ambiguities afforded by WebBoard and the task design are systematically explored as resources to avoid disclosure, hide behind ridiculous nicknames ( 'Soso', 'Doudou'), and generally create a fantasy world. These groups use of language is also characterised by much 'in-group' talk.
A characteristic of the way games work in the data is the presence of recurring themes which keep bouncing back in the discourse and are elaborated upon each time by different members, thus creating a unique and memorable shared ground for the group based on the textual representation. In Ex. 11, three girls pretend they are fighting over the only boy in the group. One of them introduces the topic of modelling in mid-November in the following way:
Ex. 11(a):M is a future
model bcoz she has the body to do it, she has a beautiful face.. anyway we are two pretty blacks.
The theme reappears on December 1st as part of a ritualised verbal fight between 'rivals':
Ex. 11(b):ce n'est pas pour etre pretentieuse mais si on etait si moche que ca on ferait pas partie dune Ò agence de mannequin, toi par contre….
(tr: I would not want to show off but is we were as ugly as this we would not be part of a modelling agency, whereas you…).
Then on reception of a photo on 8th January, the 'rival' sends the ball back:
Ex. 11(c):il est super mimi ce mec!! Il est aussi dansÒ votre agence de mannequin?
(tr: he's a real cuty, this guy!! Is he in your modelling agency as well?)
to which the following reply comes on the 12th:
Ex. 11(d):malheureusement non, cette bombe sexuelle nest pas dansÒ notre agence…mais y en a ki sont pas mal du tout".
(tr: unfortunately no, this sexual bomb is not in our agency but there are a few who are not at all bad)
These groups use a lot of non-conventional language or 'in-group' text messaging conventions which can be interpreted as a new cultural artifact. The Tic-Talk variety is rooted in CMC and productive: it imports signs from several technological domains and word-formation mechanisms associated with the younger generation notably 'verlan' in French as in 'ctru' for 'truc' in Ex.12 (a) in which a French-speaking participant initiates comments on a picture of tags on a wall:
Ex. 12(a):salut tout le monde
c'est un graf ce ctru!!!!! Pour moi kan 1 ga fait 1 tag il dechire plus que sa mai bon chacun fé se qui veu et il a son StYlE.
PAUL= c'est un graphe, ce truc! Pour moi, quand un gars fait un tag, il déchire plus que ça mais bon, chacun fait ce qu'il veut et il a son style.
(tr: is this thing a tag ? for me, when a guy makes a tag, he's got to be more aggressive than that but OK everyone can do what they want and he's got his own style)
There is also a characteristic expansion in the range of devices used: Creativity is not limited to the language form itself. In Ex 12(b) an english boy makes an attempt at visual art:
Ex. 12(b)Hi
I relly
like the picture
and I wish I could
draw like that it is relly
good
bye
ed
Even though groups of conformists and innovators may be comparable in terms of the level of collaborative effort they are making and are doing the same tasks, they conceptualise the technology very differently, either as an extra tool or as an opportunity for exploration and change. Crucially, for CMC research, the increased range of coordination devices and cultural artifacts used by the' innovators' shows that analysing the way the new technological environment is appropriated creatively to produce new texts is valuable per se, independently of the modern language teaching constructs.
We have explored the relationship between the use of new technology and changes in language use in the case of the use of a Bulletin Board by groups of pupils collaborating cross-linguistically in three tasks. By means of theoretical and methodological triangulation, we have analysed the same discourse data in three ways. We showed that patterns of language choice in the discourse reflected considerable differences in levels of activity between the anglophones and the francophones pupils. We documented the fact that many dimensions influenced the way participants achieved co-ordinated action and that the conditions and constraints under which they used language in WebBoard were more important in the mediation of meaning than the features of WebBoard itself. We argued that groups might be involved in different activities even though they might be doing the same tasks and presented evidence that groups were learning to use the resources afforded by the technology creatively. We suggested, even when it is carried out in an educational context, CMC research may be more productive if it is not carried from an educational perspective until the affordances of the new technology for learning are better known.
The study is exploratory and would have gained a lot from independent evidence obtained by means of questionnaires and interviews to confirm or disconfirm interpretations. However, carrying out multiple analysis of the WebBoard collaborative discourse record has given us a better understanding of the complexity of its textual density.
We wish to thank E.F. Harding for advice on the quantitative analysis, to C. Kinginger and C. Lanskey for providing references and to C. Zähner for comments on earlier versions of the paper.
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