Ellipsis Marks in Interaction on Discussion Forums: The Case of Czech Pre-intermediate EFL Learners

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Authors

TŮMA František

Year of publication 2014
Type Article in Proceedings
Conference Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on e-Learning ECEL-2014
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Education

Citation
Field Pedagogy and education
Keywords interaction; computer-mediated communication; conversation analysis; ellipsis marks; discussion forum; English as a foreign language
Attached files
Description The aim of this paper is to introduce selected results of an analysis of pre-intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ interaction on asynchronous discussion forums. The findings are based on a learner corpus (299 postings within 8 discussion threads) compiled from two discussion tasks which were a part of a blended learning EFL course. The participants were Czech university students in the EFL course. Conversation analysis (CA) was conducted on the corpus. The inductive and emic nature of CA made it possible to uncover some specific mechanisms underlying the learners’ interaction on the forum. The results presented in this paper are related to non-verbal aspects of the learners’ interaction on the forum, particularly to the use of ellipsis marks (i.e. multiple dots). It was discovered that ellipsis marks were used for listing, transition, personal evaluation, referring to the previous posting and asking for response when taking leave, thus ranging from non-interactive uses functioning on a sentence level to highly interactive uses which co-constructed exchanges on the forum.
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