Yining Zhang

Concerns over the quality of teaching in massive open online courses devoted to language learning (LMOOCs) have prompted extensive research on learning behavior in such courses. The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of autonomous learning check-ins – that is, individuals sharing their own learning records and/or other information about their learning-related experience – a novel behavior that has not been studied in previous LMOOC research. Using learning analytics, we found that just 6.2% (n = 699) of a sample of 11,293 learners autonomously engaged in check-in behavior, and that the content of these learners’ check-ins varied considerably according to their contexts and the language skills they were seeking to acquire. We further found (1) a positive association between check-in behavior and LMOOC completion; (2) that students who chose to check in earned relatively low grades on unit quizzes, especially in their early stage of learning, but outperformed the non-check-in group significantly in final exam scores; and (3) that those who checked in engaged with a significantly wider array of in-LMOOC learning components than those who did not, and thus accessed a wider system of language-learning experiences. Taken together, these results confirm that check-in behavior can aid the process of learning in an LMOOC and further highlight this behavior’s wider potential to aid self-directed autonomous online learning.

While English major education is of significant importance in China, there is a lack of comprehensive research that provides a broader perspective, encompassing a thorough exploration and comparison of the diverse program modes employed across different undergraduate English programs in China. The focus of this study is to (1) discern the overarching characteristics of undergraduate English programs in China; (2) identify undergraduate English program modes in China; and (3) delve into the relationship between the identified modes and university discipline evaluation rankings. The dataset includes undergraduate English program handbooks from 50 universities in China and information on 2942 courses extracted from these handbooks. The findings suggest that English programs in universities and colleges in China exhibit a predominantly application-oriented approach. In addition, three modes were identified: Literature and Linguistics, Balanced, and High English Skills. The High English Skill mode was found to be linked with a lower ranking compared to the High Literature and Linguistics mode. The study concludes by offering implications for the design of a future English program based on the insights gained from the analysis.

Situated in a social-constructivist perspective, this chapter discusses the importance of researching knowledge construction in the context of online learning. Therefore, scaffolding and/or explicit guidance is strongly needed to promote high-quality knowledge construction in online L2 learning. Through reviewing the three most-adopted frameworks for understanding knowledge-construction behaviors, along with subsequent work built on them, this chapter has highlighted the importance of updating coding schemes for shared epistemic agency if we are to understand students' knowledge-construction behaviors in online learning. In addition, this chapter reviews several approaches for studying online knowledge construction and critiques their use for studying online knowledge-construction behaviors. It argues that the use of two learning analytics approaches, i.e., epistemic network analysis (ENA) and lag sequential analysis (LSA), could fill important gaps in traditional analysis of knowledge-construction behaviors and provide more comprehensive and vivid illustration of socio-cognitive learning activities in online learning contexts.

This chapter introduces background information of this book from three aspects. First, synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) has been found as an effective means of delivering second language (L2) education in recent years, especially during the pandemic. However, it also faced main challenges regarding a lack of opportunities for students to practice English with instructors. Second, since not all interactions necessarily lead to knowledge increasing, it is vital that course designers consider how to make interaction meaningful through high-quality knowledge construction, especially under a social-constructivist perspective. Third, as academic publishing has entered a stage of both globalization and monolingualization, there is a critical need to provide support to English as an Additional Language (EAL) scholars through teaching English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP). This chapter then states the purpose of the book which is to shed new light on how the teacher and learners interact and construct their understanding of ERPP-related knowledge in an online synchronous classroom. This chapter ends with an introduction to the organization of the book.

As one of the most fundamental components in L2 teaching and learning, interaction in synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) should involve contextualized, meaningful, and collaborative communication between teachers and students, students and students, students and content, and students and learning platforms. Previous studies have revealed that students are often given insufficient opportunities to interact in SCMC and encounter other challenges such as lack of feedback, inactive peers, lack of paralinguistic cues, and loneliness, among others. To solve such problems, it is important to open the black box of interaction, which in turn requires us to adopt a process-oriented rather than an effect-oriented perspective: i.e., to study the characteristics of each participant as well as the relationships among all participants in a given SCMC interaction network. This chapter's review of social network analysis (SNA) suggests that such analysis allows a thorough, yet nuanced understanding of the structure of interaction among individuals, groups, and communities. Four major uses of SNA have been identified and may have considerable potential to open the black box of L2 SCMC interaction using a process-oriented approach.

When it comes to knowledge construction in ERPP instruction, this chapter shows how the teacher and students interact in academic activities, as well as the different functions that such interaction serves, to a large degree determines how much critical discussion and knowledge construction occur. However, the way that ERPP teachers and learners articulate their understanding of ERPP-related knowledge in their classrooms, especially online synchronous ones, is largely absent from the current literature, and various important questions therefore remain unanswered. In particular, these questions include knowledge construction in ERPP learning as well as the sequence of knowledge construction in ERPP learning. This chapter then proposed an integrated framework for analyzing ERPP knowledge construction in SCMC. After that, specific questions regarding the pattern and sequence of knowledge construction in ERPP classrooms are provided.

This chapter concludes the major findings from three aspects: interaction, knowledge construction, and the sequence of knowledge construction in ERPP teaching and learning. This book has moved beyond the usual descriptive understanding of the online-learning process to an in-depth exploratory and inferential analysis of the entities, structures, relations, and processes of learning that occurred in a synchronous ERPP classroom. It has interpreted the dynamic and variable interplay in ERPP learning along three interrelated levels (i.e., the micro level, the meso level, and the macro level) of learning. The findings will enrich current understandings of the complexity of ERPP teaching and learning in SCMC contexts and facilitate various actions and interventions. It is hoped that the findings will open a new era of using learning analytics to understand what students are doing and how well they are doing. Perhaps more importantly, these findings will drive us to rethink and reshape the way ERPP instruction is delivered post-pandemic. More insightful thoughts and effective actions upon what to teach, how to teach, who to teach, and when and where to teach should be on the way.

The use of English as the lingua franca of global academia, high-stakes publication requirement, and the prevailing discursive challenges confronted by EAL scholars have combined to make ERPP instruction crucially important. Among various difficulties, discursive challenges were quite common. To solve the problem, genre pedagogy has been used to teach how research articles' various sections are structured and how language is used differently in each of those sections. This approach has been validated to be effective in various aspects related to ERPP scholars' proficiency development. Regarding teaching materials, textbooks and research articles that were either provided by teachers or students were identified as some major types of ERPP teaching resources. Regarding instructional sequence, three main types were identified: they all originated from the traditional IMRaD structure of empirical research papers but with different sequences. In addition, this chapter argues that the development of online and digital technologies is opening up new opportunities for ERPP teaching and learning. Nevertheless, hardly any research on the use of technologies in ERPP has focused on how learning takes place in formal online classrooms.

In this chapter, four aspects of interaction are explored. (1) At the group level, it has been found that teacher-student interaction and student-teacher interaction were the two most frequently observed types of interaction, and there were limited teacher-class and student-student interactions. In addition, the teacher was at the center of class interaction regardless of teaching topics but not all students had chance to interact in class. The teacher used audio as almost the sole channel to interact with students, whereas the students responded to the teacher and others using both audio and text-based interaction. (2) At the individual level, the teacher received more responses from the students and she was quite fair in terms of choosing students to answer questions. The students varied in making their own contributions to class and they could be classified into three clusters: active participants, low receivers, and low contributors. (3) The group of low contributions tended to show significantly low final grades, confirming a potential relationship between social-participatory roles and cognitive levels. (4) The two-mode SNA revealed that the degree centrality showed the most in the global knowledge of ERPP and research-related knowledge and less in the local aspect of ERPP knowledge. The proportion of different aspects of ERPP knowledge varied by teaching topics.