Innovation in Language Learning

This study aims to shed light how the community of inquiry (CoI) framework that includes social presence, cognitive presence and teaching presence can explain online interactions in a discussion forum in a 10 week flipped English writing course. Participants were post graduate students from the STEM field form a large South Korean University. During the course, students engaged in scientific writing tasks and online interaction in English. They worked collaboratively online and in class. Questionnaires distributed to capture students’ levels of social, cognitive and teacher presence. Online participation and interaction was then measured in the form of discussions created and replies posted to discussion in an online forum relating to class topics. These behaviors indicate two distinct rhetoric purposes and in order to understand this further, the data was correlated with the levels of social, cognitive and teacher presence. It was found that cognitive presence and initiating discussions were positively correlated but not with the continuation of discussions in the form of replies posted on the forum. The suggestion is that students engaging in the cognitive dimension may be more likely to initiate discussion topics during online interaction in EFL writing classes but not with following up on these discussions. This current study adds to existing literature on the relationship between CoI framework and online posting behaviors in the ELF writing context.

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