The primary goal of this thesis is to investigate the way in which learners interact when asked to work together to write and revise a composition in an online environment. Specifically, the first research question explores the working styles of learners in the context of a wiki. It seeks to determine whether the various dyads work collaboratively or cooperatively to write and revise a composition in Spanish. The second research question deals with the type and degree of politeness that students express towards each other when working together to write and revise their composition. Specifically, it investigates the nature of politeness displayed by the dyads who worked collaboratively when compared to those who worked cooperatively. The interactions/written discourse displayed in the chat logs of each dyad is analyzed to understand how varying degrees of politeness characterized each dyads working style. The third research question explored how students interpreted and incorporated instructor feedback that was given to them in the wiki on their first draft of the composition. The scores that each composition received were used to determine which type of group work improved more. Chat logs and interview transcripts were analyzed to answer this question.
The results of the study indicate that the majority of students/dyads in this study tended to work collaboratively, meaning they truly worked together to write and revise all parts of their composition to achieve the goal of the project vs. those groups who divided the writing and revision tasks and worked on the compositions in a more individualized manner. It was found that collaborative groups improved more in their compositions. The politeness strategies that collaborative groups used more were those of Strategy 1 (attending to the addressee) and Strategy 10 (offering) as described in Brown and Levinson (1987).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-11182010-131545 |
| Date | 18 November 2010 |
| Creators | Boudreaux, Madeline |
| Contributors | King, Jeremy, Thoms, Joshua, Martins, Laura |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-11182010-131545/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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