Reflection on improving L2 learners’ speaking performance in distance learning

Abstract

This reflection presents my teaching practice at university to improve L2 learners’ speaking performance through distance learning. In order to facilitate learners’ interaction in the speaking tasks provided via synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC), I offered asynchronous computer-mediated communication (ACMC) pre-tasks in advance since ACMC provides learners with preparative and reflective time for the intended learning. However, ACMC might cause L2 learners to experience a sense of isolation, misunderstandings, a lack of collaboration, and a lack of social and emotional reality. To deal with these potential challenges, the instruction on ACMC interaction was provided based on the notion of social presence within the Community of Inquiry (Garrison, 2017). This reflection offered two personal insights: (1) attending to social presence of ACMC tasks could facilitate L2 learners’ text-based interaction; and (2) facilitated interactions in ACMC pre-tasks could lead to students’ improved speaking performance in the subsequent SCMC tasks.

Full text

Reflection on Improving L2 Learners’ Speaking Performance in
Distance Learning
Koji Osawa
Kyoto University of Advanced Science
This reflection presents my teaching
practice at university to improve L2
learners’ speaking performance through
distance learning. In order to facilitate
learners’ interaction in the speaking tasks
provided via synchronous
computer-mediated communication
(SCMC), I offered asynchronous
computer-mediated communication
(ACMC) pre-tasks in advance since ACMC
provides learners with preparative and
reflective time for the intended learning.
However, ACMC might cause L2 learners
to experience a sense of isolation,
misunderstandings, a lack of
collaboration, and a lack of social and
emotional reality. To deal with these
potential challenges, the instruction on
ACMC interaction was provided based on
the notion of social presence within the
Community of Inquiry (Garrison, 2017).
This reflection offered two personal
insights: (1) attending to social presence
of ACMC tasks could facilitate L2
learners’ text-based interaction; and (2)
facilitated interactions in ACMC pre-tasks
could lead to students’ improved
speaking performance in the subsequent
SCMC tasks.
The spread of COVID-19 has kept
some undergraduate students who have
pre-existing medical conditions or who live
with elderly people with a high risk of severe
disease away from face-to-face educational
environments and has led to an increase in
distance learning. To promote educational
equity, the Ministry of Education, Culture,
Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) has
encouraged universities to ensure that
distance learning has interactivity and quality
equivalent to face-to-face learning (MEXT,
2022). Under such conditions, I was in charge
of an “English Conversation” distance
learning class for 10 third-year business
majors for 15 weeks in 2021. The students
were approximately at the beginner level of
English-speaking proficiency (i.e., from the
A1 to A2 level of CEFR). The learning
outcome of this class was to improve four
skills in business English, mainly focusing on
listening and speaking.
To improve the level of the students’
learning outcomes, I designed the weekly
lessons, adding asynchronous
computer-mediated communication (ACMC)
pre-tasks (i.e., text chat and discussion
forums) to the subsequent synchronous
computer-mediated communication (SCMC)
tasks (i.e., 90-minute video conferencing),
using Microsoft Teams. The theoretical
background to this design was twofold:
reducing cognitive load through pre-task
planning, and facilitating cross-modality
transfer of language skill. Firstly, a substantial
body of L2 studies suggests that providing
L2 speakers with pre-task planning reduces
the cognitive load they face, and thus
improves the accuracy and fluency of oral
production (Burns, 2012; Ortega, 1999). In
terms of computer-mediated communication,
adding text-based ACMC pre-task planning
in advance of SCMC tasks reduces the
cognitive burden on L2 learners’ oral
performance, and thus contributes to a
higher level of production than when
assigning only SCMC tasks; and this is
particularly true for beginner learners (Payne,
2004). The SCMC mode usually has time
limitations for planning and preparation for
what learners have to say, which increases
their cognitive load and results in increased
Explorations in Teacher Development 28(3)
42

errors in speaking in terms of grammar and
pronunciation. On the other hand, ACMC
mode provides learners with ample time for
reflection and language manipulation to
express opinions, respond to peers and
negotiate meaning, which is much more
cognitively friendly to L2 learners than
SCMC. Therefore, I selected ACMC pre-task
planning prior to SCMC speaking tasks.
Secondly, sequencing from ACMC to SCMC
speaking tasks induces the cross-modality
transfer of language skills from writing to
speaking (Abrams, 2003; Blake, 2009; Payne
& Whitney, 2002; Satar & Özdener, 2008).
That is, engaging L2 learners in regular text
chat stimulates learners to subvocalize the
written texts they produced in their mind,
which later, positively impacts on their oral
performance (Blake, 2009).
However, it was also important to
consider how the use of ACMC might cause
L2 learners, including my students, to face
the following typical types of difficulties: (1) a
sense of isolation, (2) misunderstandings, (3)
a lack of collaboration, and (4) a lack of social
and emotional reality (Delahunty, et al.,
2014). In addition, since most of my students
did not have any experiences of ACMC in
English, it appeared vital that I be proactive
and supportive regarding dealing with the
possible challenges when integrating ACMC
into my class. To mitigate the above
difficulties, I provided at the beginning
explicit models of how students should
interact with peers for successful ACMC. A
theory that deals with such social aspects is
the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework
(Garrison, 2017). The CoI framework is a
generic and coherent system that indicates
deep and meaningful learning experiences in
which learners are collaboratively engaged in
critical inquiry and thereby improve their
personal reflection and shared
understanding. Such learning is realized by
developing three interdependent elements,
i.e., social presence, cognitive presence, and
teaching presence. Social presence is
defined as the ability of learners “to identify
with a group, communicate openly in a
trusting environment, and develop personal
and affective relationships progressively by
way of projecting their individual
personalities” (Garrison, 2017, p. 25). Since
the notion of social presence does not only
attend to social and emotional aspects in
ACMC environments but also strongly
focuses on achieving learning outcomes, I
reasoned that this could be helpful for my
students to successfully carry out the tasks
and avoid the potential challenges.
Objectives
Teachers can use this reflection:
●to avoid the difficulties L2 learners
may experience in ACMC in terms of
emotion and socialization, and
●to facilitate L2 learners’ ACMC for
successful speaking performance in
SCMC.
Practical implications
By reflecting on my students’
interaction in ACMC tasks, I gained some
insights into how to deal with salient social
and emotional aspects as follows:
1. Showing a model of how to express
learners’ emotions may improve a
sense of belonging, and improve
interpersonal relationships. ACMC is
typically face-less and body-less,
which thus encourages learners to use
virtual facial expressions, body
language, and interjections that may
have functions analogous to the
affective expressions used in SCMC
and lead to the formation of closer
bonds between learners. My students
frequently used the following affective
expressions (see Figure 1):
a. emoticons (e.g., thumbs up,
smile, laugh)
b. interjections (e.g.,
haha, oh,
wow
)
Explorations in Teacher Development 28(3)
43

c. exclamation marks (!)
Figure 1
Screenshot of Students’ Asynchronous
Online Communication
2. Showing a model of open
communication may make learners
feel more comfortable in ACMC. Many
students asked questions of each
other and expressed appreciation for
peers’ posts, and interestingly, some
of the students voluntarily extended
their threads, going beyond the
minimum requirements for the number
of posts. My students’ open
communication was realized as
follows:
a. continuing a thread without
creating a new thread
b. asking questions and
responding to questions (e.g.,
Why do you want ...?
)
c. expressing appreciation (e.g.,
Thank you for asking
) and
complimenting (e.g.,
That
sounds great
)
3. Showing a model of how to become
cohesive as a group might help
students to develop a sense of
collaboration. The students frequently
used vocatives and phatic expressions
to encourage peers to reply as follows:
a. vocatives (e.g.,
Jack, Rebecca1
)
(1: For this article, they were
assigned a pseudonym for
anonymity)
b. salutations, phatic expressions
(e.g.,
hi, hello
)
Although my students interacted with
such expressions, it did not seem that
they collaboratively formed a cohesive
group of 10 students, because the
task focuses were mainly on individual
interaction (e.g.,
What are the best
things about your personality?
) rather
than group discussions (e.g.,
What are
the advantages and disadvantages of
business meetings and training
increasingly taking place online?
).
4. Overall, the students’ ACMC
appeared to be facilitated by explicitly
showing a model interaction based on
the notion of social presence within
the CoI framework. My students
seemed to enjoy chatting with each
other, minimizing the risk of difficulties
that might occur in ACMC in terms of
emotion and socialization.
5. Most importantly, successful ACMC
pre-tasks were able to help L2 learners
improve their speaking performance
(see Payne, 2020). In the course, each
lesson had a minimum goal that the
university set (e.g., to negotiate a new
deal, to describe an electronic device,
to solve a business problem).
However, given my students’
beginner-level English proficiency, it
would have been difficult to achieve
these goals if they only had
opportunities to speak impromptu in
SCMC. Thus, engaging in ACMC
pre-task planning helped them
sufficiently plan and prepare for the
subsequent SCMC tasks; and in fact,
many of the students appeared to
accurately express their ideas with
only occasional stumbling and
Explorations in Teacher Development 28(3)
44

communication breakdowns during
SCMC tasks.
6. Moreover, establishing time
parameters (e.g., posting a comment
at least three days before the SCMC
tasks) ensured that learners were
well-prepared for the SCMC tasks. For
the first few weeks, one or two
students posted their comments right
before the pre-scheduled weekly
SCMC lessons. This made it
impossible for peers to respond to
them, and thus they lost meaningful
opportunities to communicate with
peers.
7. Finally, providing a small incentive (5%
of the overall course grade) for
participating in ACMC seemed useful
for increasing learners’ engagement
and motivation for interacting with
peers.
Reflective Conclusion
My reflection concludes with two
personal insights: (1) attending to social
presence of ACMC tasks seemed to improve
facilitation of interaction between
beginner-level L2 learners by helping them
mitigate the difficulties they might otherwise
experience from the emotional and social
perspectives, and (2) facilitated interactions
in ACMC pre-tasks seemed to lead to their
improved speaking performance in the
subsequent SCMC tasks, providing
preparative and reflective time for the
intended learning and reducing the cognitive
load of spontaneous conversation. For me,
the next phase of this journey will be to view
ACMC pre-tasks from the perspectives of
teaching presence and cognitive presence in
order to improve the quality of ACMC
interaction. The perspective of cognitive
presence could help to measure the extent
to which students achieve higher-order
learning outcomes (e.g., recognizing and
posing questions, expressing divergent
opinions, collaboratively producing solutions
or explanations, or critically assessing
co-constructed knowledge). The teaching
presence perspective might also help to
measure how successful our teaching
practice actually is in the virtual environment
(e.g., establishing netiquette, setting the
learning atmosphere, or responding to
technical concerns). Many of us know that it
is challenging for us to promote meaningful
distance learning of a second/foreign
language; however, I hope this reflection will
contribute to advances in this field of our
endeavors.
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About the Author
Koji Osawa teaches English courses at Kyoto University of Advanced Science, Kyoto. His research
interests include L2 literacy development, L2 asynchronous online communication, systemic
functional linguistics, and textbook analysis.
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