Teaching and Learning with Telecommunications: Instructional Discourse in a Hybrid Russian Class

Abstract

Where learner discourse has been the focus of much recent research on asynchonous online instruction, the specific forms of instructional discourse used by online educators has yet to be examined. Indeed, the majority of work in the area of foreign language and telecommunications has concentrated on student-student, student-peer interaction, and the kinds of language these contexts encourage. No research to date has tackled the real and potential scripts for educators in online conversations that are potentially instructional in nature. Our study examines the online teaching strategies employed by the teacher of a second-year Russian class that integrated computer mediated communication (CMC) for extended language practice and additional “embedded” instruction through the teacher's careful interventions. Techniques such as saturating the discourse with target forms, recasting, and corralling learning were successfully incorporated as instructional discourse and responded to as such by learners. Such instructional interventions mimic those of the ideal communicative classroom where instructors attempt to direct a focus on form while engaging learners in the active negotiation of meaning in the target language. The advantages of CMC in this regard include the opportunity for both teacher and students to stop the clock, examine the language being used in the online conversation, determine teachable and learnable moments, and respond accordingly.