KOIIA/Communication and Identities in Institutional Arenas - Part I/Final paper gme

Course KOIIA I – Final paper: an introduction
The purpose of the empirical study is to offer some possibilities of reflection on the relationship between Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) and language learning in online virtual institutional environments, with an analysis of the interaction in the virtual classroom as a learning place with no physical presence that will contribute towards an understanding of the complexity of students’ languaging activity in online synchronous environments. Examples of virtual institutional settings are videoconferencing programs that create a virtual classroom, an online environment where students can meet synchronously using multimodal resources (whiteboard, text chat, audio and video), and communicate with each other, with the teacher and the educational institution which is providing the course. We are facing a new kind of communication with new didactical challenges. The following types of empirical data will be used in the present study:


 * 1) Recorded online seminars (as screen recordings) in a videoconferencing environment. The seminars are conducted by the students, without teacher presence or intervention.
 * 2) Textual artifacts provided in advance by the teacher, with exercises and questions that are to be attended to during the student-led seminar

Taking sociocultural points of departure and using Conversation Analysis as an analytical tool to study students’ interaction, the main purpose of the study is to describe and understand what is going on when students engage in CMC in institutional settings, their agency in sense making, i.e. what is going on when they interact with each other engaging in different kinds of communicative activities and using the tools that are at hand in the multimodal environment. Linell discusses about the relation between agency and structure, or between language use and langue system, and argues that we do not talk because we know the system, but rather rules and conventions in speech communities get standardized through the fact that: “[…] we are always immersed in languaging, in and through which we develop habits of using and reusing elements of language and routines of enacting communicative projects through linguistic and other semiotic means” (2009: 56). The focus of the study is in the relationship between students’ peers interaction in the attempt to attend to the issues offered in the teacher’s material as a default route for the online session:


 * How are students relating to the textual artifacts provided by the language course, such as language exercises, questions and other forms of scaffolding, within the virtual environment?
 * How is the material content perceived by the students in the context of the online seminar and in relation to the main purpose of their meeting, which is to enhance students’ communication using the target language?
 * How is the material provided by the teacher affecting students’ interaction and their doing of identity?

To attempt to define identity is a rather complicated enterprise. Identity means to be the same as something else, but this way of considering it implies the notion of a static and unchangeable nature of identity. Even when acknowledging the fact that an individual’s identity is not just about one easily defined label, to consider identity as an addition of several labels or identities is not an adequate solution to the issue either. The notion of intersectionality shows a possible direction on how identity(-ies) can be analyzed as something negotiable, created in the interaction with an audience. In this sense it is more fruitful to relate to identity as a verb, rather than a noun, and where social practices constitute the loci where the doing of identity takes place and is performed in the participation in communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). For further considerations on this subject, see also my other reflections on Intersectionality and Identities and their enactments in human life in Wikiversity. It is from these theoretical points of departure that issues of identities and negotiation of meaning will be addressed in the present study.