NETWORK-BASED LANGUAGE TEACHING

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282 R. KERN, P. WARE AND M. WARSCHAUERdevelop and refine comments—possibly leading to greater precisionand sophistication of expression; (iii) encouragement of a collaborativespirit among students; (iv) enhanced motivation for language practiceand, in particular, greater involvement of students who rarely participatedin oral discussions; (v) reduction of anxiety related to oral communicationin a foreign language; and (vi) positive effects onstudents’ writing ability and perhaps speaking ability as well.There soon followed a number of studies that systematically comparedthe dynamics of synchronous conferencing with face-to-faceclassroom interaction (reviewed in Ortega, 1997, and Warschauer,1997). These studies confirmed the expected benefits of synchronousconferencing, with the exception of its effects on general writing andspeaking abilities—an area that has been taken up more recently (seeMajor Contributions later). They also revealed an overall greater levelof sophistication of students’ language use (in terms of the range ofmorphosyntactic features and discourse functions). However, synchronousconferencing was also found to introduce a number of unsettlingchanges. For example, Kern (1995) noted that teacher control overclass discussions was compromised, that the rapid pace of written discussionsometimes taxed students’ comprehension abilities, and thatalthough participation was more equitably distributed than in normalclassroom discussion, the coherence and continuity of discussionsoften suffered. Kern concluded that effectiveness had to be evaluatedin relation to instructional goals. Synchronous conferencing fosteredfree expression, student responsiveness, and the voicing of multipleperspectives on issues, but it did not improve grammar or reinforcestandard discourse norms.Noticeable in early NBLT studies was a tendency to test the technologyto see what effects it might have on language use. In the nextsection, we see a gradual shift toward testing theories of second languageacquisition (SLA) within the context of computer-mediatedcommunication.MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONSTwo general trends characterize the bulk of current research on NBLT.The first emphasizes SLA theory and interactionist models of learning.Data analysis typically consists of quantitative counts of the occurrenceof morphological, lexical, and syntactical features in online discourse.The second trend, described by Kern and Warschauer (2000) in theintroduction to their key collection of research articles on NBLT, isinformed by sociocultural and sociocognitive theories and draws on amixture of quantitative, qualitative, ethnographic, and discourse analyticmethods. At issue here is not only quantifying language development,
NETWORK-BASED LANGUAGE TEACHING 283but also understanding how learners interpret and construct meaningonline across culturally situated contexts.Although the primary research emphasis of each trend differs,the studies typically share a focus on discourse written by postsecondaryforeign language learners in asynchronous and synchronousenvironments.SLA-Grounded ResearchMost studies grounded in SLA theories of networked classroominstruction are either (i) comparison studies that examine the effectivenessof online vs. face-to-face interaction in promoting negotiation ofmeaning, noticing, comprehensible output, and form-focused learning(for a review see Kern, Ware, and Warschauer, 2004), or (ii) transferstudies that explore the degree to which language use online transfersto language proficiency more generally, particularly to speaking andlistening.Promoting negotiation of meaning. A major benefit for SLA-basedresearch is the ease of collecting interactional data online. In contrastto face-to-face conversation, online negotiation of meaning takes placein writing, which provides a readily usable database of transcripts forclassroom and research use. In classrooms, this database of interactionshas been used to facilitate the development of students’ metacognitiveand metalinguistic awareness (Sengupta, 2001). A significant numberof studies have examined task type in promoting negotiation of meaningin the network-based classroom. In a synchronous chat study ofintermediate level Spanish learners in a university course, Pellettieri(2000) found abundant evidence of form-focused modifications andcorrective feedback among ten dyads of English-speaking adult participants,leading her to conclude that online chatting can improve learners’grammatical competence (cf. Kern, 1995). Additionally, shefound that closed, goal-oriented tasks promoted greater frequency ofmeaning negotiation than open-ended tasks. A recent study by Smith(2003) supports Pellettieri’s finding, except that he found that decisiontasks promoted more negotiation of meaning than jigsaw tasks.Transfer studies. Implicit in this line of research is the expectationthat the linguistic and metalinguistic awareness developed online willtransfer to other domains of language learning. Students who can conversein spontaneous online chat discussions, for example, should havean easier time contributing to the ongoing flow of a face-to-face conversation.Not surprisingly, a wave of research has put this hypothesisto the test, with differing methods and outcomes. For example, usingrigorous quasi-experimental methods to examine the question of transferinto oral proficiency, Payne and Whitney (2002) provide strong
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