Enriching Literature Reviews with Computer-Assisted Research Mining. Case: Profiling Group Support Systems Research

Johanna Bragge1, Sami Relander1, Anne Sunikka1 and Petri Mannonen2
1Helsinki School of Economics, 2Helsinki University of Technology
1firstname.lastname@hse.fi; 2firstname.lastname@soberit.hut.fi

Abstract
In this paper we discuss and demonstrate how traditional literature reviews may be enriched by
computer-assisted research profiling. Research profiling makes use of sophisticated text mining tools
designed for structured science and technology information resources, such as the ISI Web of Science, INSPEC or ABI/INFORM ProQuest. Besides aiding in summarizing and visualizing knowledge domains, these research mining tools act as interactive Decision Support Systems for researchers. We illustrate research profiling with 2.000 publications on Group Support Systems between years 1982-2005.

1. Introduction
The literature review is a key concept within the scientific process of publishing academic research articles. Here, we assume familiarity with the issue, which according to Hart [1, p. 13] is simply about selecting “available documents on the topic written from a particular standpoint to fulfill certain aims or express certain views on the nature of the topic and how it is to be investigated, and the effective evaluation of these documents in relation to the research being proposed.” In addition, to augment this definition, Webster and Watson [2] state that a good, high-quality literature review is complete and focuses on concepts, not on authors. The literature review has many functions, perhaps the most notable of which is that it positions the study in question within an existing stream or body of literature and demonstrates that the author is familiar with the most important prior works related to his or her field. Additionally, it shows that the author can synthesize and link existing works in a meaningful way to yield new insights and open research gaps. The literature review is thus a standard section in every research article, and its length is determined on the purpose of the article: from one chapter to whole stateof- the art review articles with extended length. The former ones are by far the most common, especially in information systems research, which is a relatively young and multidisciplinary field, thus adding complexities to assembling thorough reviews.With the advent of various online journal databases, the amount of literature at the fingertips of researchers has exploded. As a result, the classic literature review has had to adapt to accommodate these changes. No longer is the task about retrieving selected hardcopies from the library, but more about mastering various search engines and indexes that categorize papers.
Recently, the literature review concept has received increased attention due to these technological changes and developments. Insightful text mining and information visualization tools are being developed to help the researcher in profiling, mapping and visualizing knowledge domains [3, 4]. Some of these tools are designed for fielded research abstracts imported from scientific databases, and some tools transform free form text into data that can be analyzed for information extraction [see e.g. 5 for a list]. Building on from the current state of affairs regarding the literature review and the issues it presents, we have a twofold objective. Firstly, we seek to argue for an extension to the traditional notion of a literature review into the research profiling approach as initially presented by Porter and his colleagues [4]. This is an interesting new direction with potential to overcome at least some of the main challenges and pressures we face regarding the literature review and its place within research. The emphasis is not so much on a bibliometric perspective (statistics related to the production, distribution and usage of documents [6]), but more on the viewpoint of how to actively use research profiling to uncover research gaps and/or new, emergent scientific domains by focusing on the content of prior articles. This should aid researchers to position the literature review away from a mere passive tool to an active means of generating and refining new ideas and concepts on which to conduct research.

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INTERDISCIPLINARY: COMPUTER ASSISTED LINGUISTIC RESEARCH AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF LSP COURSEWARE

Marina Dodigovic
Bremen, Germany

ABSTRACT
The properties of German as a special language of mechanical engineering are examined on the basis of a newly compiled corpus including samples from all important disciplines and discourse styles. The syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of passive voice are the chief research goal, necessary in order to evaluate the existing and to develop new courseware. Other linguistic and metalinguistic features of the sublanguage will be investigated and transferred into teaching theory and practice.
LSP —TRANSLATION — TEACHING, CALL
What is LSP (Language for Special Purposes)? Why should it be a subject of linguistic research? How does that affect teaching? What are the implications for CALL? Research goal: To transfer the intuitive knowledge of an LSP specialist into linguistic ten-ns and make it common.
INTRODUCTION
In our world of specialization and subspecialization with partly still existing traditional division into arts and sciences with sacrosanct and institutionally defended barriers between them, we desperately need bridges. Objective reality is one, and so should be the knowledge of it. The walls that were raised between areas of knowledge were maybe necessary at a certain stage of development, but they should always be subject to the centrifugal and centripetal motion of dialectic change. The structure of knowledge is easier to change than the structure of institution. The people who start the change have to reckon with resistance toward it. CALL people made an attack at institutional thinking, and some of them still feel the bitter consequences. In that relentless fight they have, however, learned to build bridges, to unite their efforts with other brave people from different fields in order to integrate that magnificent flow of free thought into the institution itself. At the same time LSP people were fighting their own isolated fight until they discovered CALL. An obvious drawback of this liaison was that they were both equally ignored by the institution. An advantage was that they were able to build so many bridges to a vast number of sciences as to make them invincible forever. In support of that I would like to tell a true story of a bridge between LSP and CALL. LSP teachers are desperately courageous people who wander in no man's land between language and a vast diversity of scientific disciplines to be described by the kind of language they are supposed to teach, which - both the sciences and their means of expression - they mostly do not know. They, the teachers, are a free target for both, the
so called serious linguists and the specialists in those fields of knowledge whose language is at issue. As if that were not enough, LSP teachers prefer to use the computer as a teaching or learning medium. They add one more discipline to the whole lot, as if to show that they are highly aware of the interdisciplinary status of their particular subject. Indeed, the fact that they have crossed the border of traditional science divisions and faced another world of ideas makes them ready to look even further and possibly in another direction.

The question what Language for Special Purposes really is, remains yet to be answered?  So far, every LSP teacher has had to develop his or her own approach, which is not only a terrible waste of time, but also a waste of many brilliant ideas that come up from teacher intuition. Unfortunately, stiff institutional frameworks have suppressed the research which has been badly wanted for years, ever since the teachers have been forced to teach LSP without having been given a fair chance to find out what it is. My story does not differ very much from the mainstream. I started as a technical translator with very good general education and specialization in languages. Soon I discovered that my knowledge of language does not help me very much in LSP, if at all. What I could rely on was my high-school knowledge of physics and chemistry and my colleagues, technicians who with lots of patience on both sides, tried and succeeded in teaching me the basics of technology. This is how I was able to do my job in a satisfactory way. After several years of practice as a translator I became a lecturer of LSP at a technical university. My subject was German for mechanical engineers. With students LSP was
the most detested subject, not without reason. The educational authorities of the country decided simply to make it a compulsory subject at all universities. The educational goal was to train students to read the publications in their domain. There was no serious research behind these goals. It was primarily a political decision. The teachers found themselves in trouble. The method seemed to be dictated by the set goals: grammar-translation method. The language teachers were not trained to make more out of technical texts. The texts were selected to promote reading comprehension, and comprehension was what most teachers desperately wanted themselves. I found the knowledge I gained as a translator most useful in this matter. I was able to pick out relevant texts which even I understood. That made interaction between me and the class possible. I did everything in my power to arouse their interest and they responded. At that time I discovered the fascination of the computer. I discovered the potential it had as a challenge for my students. So I started using it. We all had lots of I un experimenting with new ways of teaching and learning. The miracle occurred spontaneously as a result of interaction of different powerful factors. I decided to use the computer where everything else failed. It was a very special and clearly definable problem. The passive voice is a grammatical structure that occurs ceaselessly in German technical texts. Contrastively, the passive voice is very difficult for Croatian learners since in Croatian there is no language immanent passive structure. The semantics as well as the pragmatics of passive had never been taught to my learners. Their teachers were instructed to follow the structuralist views, so they were under the impression that passive was equivalent to active. Having a choice between what they thought were two semantically and pragmatically equal structures they preferred of course, the active, the way of expression in their native language. Another difficulty was the fact that German passive voice is formed with the same auxiliary verb as the future tense. Add to this the particularity of the German sentence which puts a lot of lexical information at the end, e.g. the main verb in case of either the passive voice or the future tense, and there you have complete failure to recognize the passive voice at all on the part of an intermediate stage Croatian learner of German.
After numerous failed attempts to teach them the passive voice I decided to write a computer program which would get their minds working on it. It was a neat little program based on principles of programmed learning, pragmalinguistics, and some psycholinguistic theories. As if by miracle, it did the job for me. I had enormous success in my attempts to teach the passive voice. My learners seemed to have understood what it was all about. From total lack of pattern recognition they moved into voluntary attempts to use the passive voice whenever it seemed plausible. We were all in a frenzy.

The affective element played of course an equally important role. They were highly motivated, not only by the new medium, which no doubt had the charm of novelty, but also by the enthusiasm of their lecturer who made it all possible for them. Wishing to explore that success and eventually get some support for my good work I applied and was funded to do some research into the matter. I observed a population of German learners, tested their performance before and after having worked with the program. I also tested the general language proficiency and retention. The attitude of students towards the medium was explored through questionnaire and interview. The research goal was unfortunately somewhat restricted to the efficacy of the program use. This kind of research orientation belongs to an early CALL era where the chief goal of research was to justify the costs and persuade the authorities to put some more money into it for the sake of enormous time saving, individualization, and adjustability. I was aware of the fact that there was more to it than just the stated and generally known facts. There was for instance an implied hypothesis on the nature of LSP and the passive voice as a true element of it in that software. The computer as a medium helped me present it in an acceptable way and immediately. I did not have to wait for new linguistic ideas to influence language teaching methodology and consequently learning materials, which would have lasted at least ten years. I could transfer my intuition directly into a powerful learning device. That was the beauty of it. Since I was to pursue my ideas about special language anyway, I decided to try and find out in what way the success of the program was connected with a linguistic hypothesis, and through that indirectly with teacher intuition.
WHAT IS LSP?
According to experts (Hoffmann, Fluck, Littmann) the research into LSP is still on the pre-scientific stage. Much research work has been done in the scope of word statistics, but all the carefully compiled corpora and sometimes even manually derived frequency lists could not replace a hypothesis on the true nature of LSP and the testing of it. The result of this state of affairs is that there is no plausible and, in the sense of formal logic, no valid definition of LSP. A valid definition has to contain certain indispensable formal and structural elements: it is a statement which subsumes the term to be defined under a whole class of terms which have something in common with it. Not just any class would do. It has to be the closest related class, the so-called genus proximum. The second constituent element of definition is the differentia specific, the specific differenceof the defined term in relation to the class, the feature that no other element of the same class possesses. Lothar Hoffmann, the most persistent explorer of LSP, came closest to fulfilling these stipulations. He defined special language as language used by specialists in a certain field of knowledge in order to communicate with their fellow specialists on the issues of their special field of knowledge. What we learn from Hoffmann is that special language belongs to the class "language." He does not tell us what its specific difference is. In that he makes it an attribute of intradisciplinary communication, he o y determines the scope of LSP, he does not tell us anything about the essence of it. What is it then that language? Everyone agrees that LSP is more than language itself, because the knowledge of language is not enough for an outsider to understand an expert text. What is it then that makes a familiar natural language appear so strange and incomprehensible. What prevents us from understanding differentiates special language from anything else that falls under the category
the message even with the aid of a dictionary? Semiotics teaches us that within culture we have to do with systems of signs. Culture itself is a an overall system including various subsystems like language, religion, commerce, art, science. Culture also implies interaction between the different systems, relations of superordination, subordination, and coordination. Sign systems have their evolutions, they live so to speak according to their own immanent laws of dialectic change; they interfere with each other, superimposing a new organization method on the already organized, which is how structures of vast complexity are called into being. That we would call multiple encoding.

From the semiotic point of view one could say that special language is a result of interference of another system of signs with the lingual code. Language as it is, with its elements, lexemes, and its rules, grammar, is simply encoded again. There is a superimposed structure, another principle of organization to govern it, and that is in the first instance that of formal logic. What happens is that the lexeme as the basic linguistic unit of meaning together with its significance — the word and its significance — the whole field of meaning is re-initiated as a significance of a new sign on a different, hierarchically higher level. The sign is called "a term" and the significant is called "definition." The cross-associative richness of the lingual sign, its mythological potential in ambiguity and vagueness is pressed into a strictly speaking binary code: genus proximum and differentia specifica, the typical and the characteristic, totally according to the logical principle of contradiction: no one thing can be both or none of two wholly exclusive contradictory terms.
Furthermore, a sentence as a language unit becomes a statement. There are strict rules about that. Not any sentence can become a statement. A question, an exclamation, an expression of hope, grief or anger cannot function as logical statements. The semantics of a logical statement is different than that of a sentence. Whereas the sentence chiefly expresses relations between certain syntactically selected lexical meanings, a statement points out to a logical value TRUE or FALSE. Logical values T/F are not immanent in natural language. In natural language nothing has either value per se. It takes an additional code, where these values are assigned to statements by convention, agreement. It takes the logical structure and the axioms of a particular science to assign a TRUE or FALSE value to a statement. As opposed to science, which is the filling of a
logical structure with content, the truth in natural language is mostly only a matter of the point of view. It gains more plausibility if there is a declaration of axioms or pseudo-axioms, but that already is a prerogative of logical code, which can interact with language outside the strictly confined limits of science. There are different theories to describe a logical statement. They all agree that a statement consists of a subject and a predicate. However, some of them are relatively
new, so they could not have had a crucial influence on scientific thought, and consequently, on special language. The predicate theory is the oldest and the most widespread statement theory. It tends to describe the predicate as an argument to the subject. In the statement "The king is old" "the king" is the subject and "is old" is the predicate. We see that the verb in the sentence which expresses the logical relations between the subject and the predicate is merely a copula. It has no lexical meaning in the given context. The predicate theory cannot really cope with the lexical verb. Research into LSP grammar has shown that there is a parallel between the structure of an LSP sentence and predicative statement. The clear tendency towards a desemantization of lexical verbs, the definition-based semantics of technical terms, as well as the rules of syllogism clearly suggest that LSP discourse encodes natural language once more, and that the superimposed structure, the secondary code, is that of formal logic.Introducing binary logical organization into natural language does not totally eradicate ambiguity or vagueness. This has something to do with the nature of the primary code, the natural language itself, which is older than formal logic and, which still allows for analogy, contradiction, nonsense. Secondly, not all of the discourse within an LSP communication act is doubly encoded. Sometimes there are passages of pure natural language. This is only too understandable, since apart from being experts, the people involved in expert communication are still human. Besides, in an interdisciplinary environment there is sometimes a need to translate from the special language of another field of knowledge. Thirdly, there is an interference with the third code or codes, the sebeing special fields of knowledge which are referred to. Misunderstandings may arise from the variety of fields of knowledge involved. Under these circumstances it is possible that one significant, one word or lingual sign is associated with different definitions, depending on the special area involved at the time. The same happens to grammar: grammatical categories become the significant or logical
relations between the terms within a statement. The statement tends to be built in the manner of predicate theory: S(ubject) is (copula) P(redicat).= > TRUE

There are people who have a rather arbitrary objection that grammar cannot be an element of special language, that it is purely an attribute of natural language. This claim is mostly based on total inexperience with LSP and is never connected with any kind of proof. As opposed to this rather affective attitude we can say that the syntax of LSP is reincoded. It is encoded again according to statement building rules. The predicative statement type being the oldest statement type, most of the sentences in LSP discourse get reincoded as statements of predicative type with pre-agreement assigned logical values TRUE or FALSE, which according to Günther Littmann do not tell us much about objective reality, but everything about the way language is used or rather to be used. In other words, it is a prescriptive, metalingual function, and is therefore outside the natural language itself. This is where our passive voice research sets in. The implied hypothesis in my passive tutor was that passive voice in a way also becomes an element of LSP. At the time the program was designed I was maybe not able to formulate it, but it was there. This is how I would express it today: The passive voice is used to imitate the predicative structure of the most widespread statement type.The house(S) is (copula) built (P).
We tried to test the hypothesis on German as a special language for mechanical engineering. The analysis was performed on a newly compiled corpus containing 463 samples of written and spoken discourse (total 50,095 words). The corpus was compiled at the Polytechnic of Bremen thanks to a research scholarship awarded to me by DAAD (Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst). The original plan was to have it parsed and make a sentence pattern statistics. The research goal was actually to determine the passive voice frequency and distribution in the corpus and to find out if and in what way it emulates the predicative statement type. In German there are different constructions with the passive meaning. We chose several: For organizational reasons the parsing was postponed so I had to do some pre-research work in that I analyzed the structure of main clauses in the whole corpus manually. I chose the main clauses only because they are in most cases clearly distinguishable. It would have been a time-consuming job to make distinction between clauses and phrases in a subordinate function, in addition to doing the analysis manually.
CONCLUSION
It was interesting to see that most of the active statements in the corpus had the predicative structure. As Table I shows, the use of the passive voice proved to be a conversion from sentences with lexical verbs and lexical and semantic meaning into
logical statements with predicative structure and an assigned TRUE or FALSE value. This happened with verbs whose valence demanded several actants, at least a subject and an object. Since a full lexical verb with more than one actant does not comply with the predicative statement, the language was rearranged so as to produce a logical statement with a subject term and a predicate consisting of a quasi copulaic verb and an imitated nominal part (the past participle). In cases where the passive principle was carried out by some verb other than the standard passive format, the used verb was delexicalized and desemantized, forced into the conjunctive function of a copula. Final results are yet to be obtained. The research however seems to confirm the implicit intuitive hypothesis on the basis of which a highly successful CALLware package dealing with the passive voice was developed. It provides linguistic reasons for its success in the classroom. To come back to the initial issues, teaching and learning is an
instance of one and undivided reality, which demands holistic approach, in research as well as in the application itself. There are innumerable reasons why a computer in a language class sometimes fails and sometimes succeeds. One should be very careful about generalizations. To state simply that the computer is better than a teacher in a language class would be faticous. The research goal would have to be in what cases, given what factors, the computer is really superior or applicable at all. The answers to these questions will never be final. The development of technology will dictate new educational roles for the computer. One thing, however, will remain unchanged: the need to explore the computer as an educational medium in interaction with a number of different parameters. The content itself must determine the role.

Critical Thinking and Transferability: A Review of the Literature

By
Gwendolyn Reece
April 9, 2002


Since the 1960s, concern that American students may not capable of transferring the skills they have gained from their education to the practical problems of life has troubled educators. Of greatest concern is whether students have mastered “critical thinking” or “higher order thinking skills” and can apply them outside of school curricula. These concerns have given rise to the “critical thinking movement.” To demonstrate that the movement is successful, it must prove that its efforts not only increase the critical thinking of students in school, but that students can transfer critical thinking to novel situations, including those encountered in daily life. The primary purpose of this review is to ascertain if there is compelling evidence that efforts
to teach critical thinking have had this result. What became apparent in the process of this review, however, was that several subsidiary problems must first be answered before the problem of evaluating the effectiveness of critical thinking transfer can be approached. The first of these problems is whether the movement has a common theme or definition of “critical thinking.”
Second is the question, does “critical thinking” encompass “creative thinking” or is it antithetical to it. The third problem might be formulated thus: is “critical thinking” generalizable or is it tied to subject matter? The fourth problem is whether adequate evaluative measures of critical thinking are available to measure the effectiveness of efforts to teach critical thinking. Answering these prior question is essential before inquiring whether there is compelling evidence that teaching critical thinking results in a transfer of skills or dispositions that students can use in other arenas. This line of inquiry supplies the structure for this review of the relevant literature. The scope of this review is limited. Most critical thinking literature provides
program and instructional technique description. This material is out of scope for this review except as it bears directly upon the question concerning subject-dependence in relation to critical thinking. Furthermore, although this review addresses the works of most seminal thinkers in the critical thinking movement, constraints and limited access to information means that some major figures, such as Harvey Siegel, have not been included. Finally, although philosophical literature on this subject abounds, evaluative studies using either qualitative or quantitative methods to measure the effectiveness of whole programs are comparatively scarce. I have included relevant examples of these studies, yet it can be said at the outset that the dearth such studies needs to be redressed by the research community.
The Common Theme of the Critical Thinking Movement
The first step in understanding the Critical Thinking Movement is to uncover the essential characteristics of critical thought and examine the commonality of agendas for the Critical Thinking Movement. Proponents of the critical thinking movement posit numerous reasons for teaching critical thinking. A common reason is a reflection of the shift in economic patterns away from an industrial society into arenas in which laborers must solve complex problems (Bloom, 1956; Reich, 1992; Paul, 1993; Nickerson, 1987).
Another reason frequently proposed is that critical thinking skills are necessary for effective citizenship in a democracy, for example, in selecting leaders and being a juror (Ennis, 1987; Paul, 1993; Nickerson, 1987). Paul (1993) and Nickerson (1987) also call attention to the capacity of human beings for self-delusion and note that irrational human behavior causes great suffering in the world. They see critical thinking the antidote. Finally, both these thinkers uphold the notion that thinking is a significant part of being human; therefore, mastery of critical thinking is a necessary for being a fully developed human being.
Another premise of the proponents of the critical thinking movement is that critical thinking does not always unfold naturally as a part of growth. Furthermore, critical thinking is not effectively taught in traditional school settings that rely heavily upon rote memorization and didactic teaching methods (Kennedy, 1991; Paul, 1993; Schrag, 1988; Nickerson, 1987). Therefore, leaders of the movement have developed numerous programs to teach critical thinking. The common theme of the critical thinking movement is that critical thinking skills involve the ability to make reasonable decisions in complex situations, such as those found in a rapidly changing and complex society. The movement emphasizes “knowing how” more than “knowing that” (Roland, 1961). Furthermore, helping individuals gain these abilities, requires a self- conscious attempt on the part of educators to address the cultivation of critical thinking by utilizing methods other than simply rote memorization and didactic instruction.
What is Critical Thinking?
The unity of the movement disintegrates once the question “what do you mean by critical thinking?” is asked. There is a significant divergence of opinion about what constitutes critical thinking. Some scholars identify critical thinking with the mastery of specific skill sets and provide schematics or taxonomies to express their inter-relationships. A Committee of College and University Examiners created one of the early taxonomies. (Bloom, 1956).
Bloom and his colleagues identified six major classes of cognitive skills: Knowledge (by which they mean recall); Comprehension; Application; Analysis; Synthesis; and Evaluation. One reason for this construction is that the lower skills are required in order for the higher skills to be used. Comprehension requires Knowledge, or recall. Therefore, critical thinking, in Bloom’s view, is gaining mastery of these skill sets and selecting the appropriate techniques when encountering a novel situation. The primary strength of Bloom’s taxonomy is that it is logical and hierarchical, guiding the educator in a process leading from the most simple to the most complex form of cognitive skills. It is also comparatively easy to evaluate the mastery of these skills because they link to particular behaviors (Bloom, 1956, p. 12). Bloom supplies numerous evaluative techniques linked to the taxonomy. There are, however, disadvantages with Bloom’s taxonomy. Historically, many teachers have used it as a “cookbook” without demonstrating critical thinking skills themselves (Paul, 1974, pp. 375-383). Paul also criticizes Bloom for overemphasizing recall and for insisting on neutrality. Paul believes that critical thinking should be used to reach substantial value judgments. Finally, Paul conceives Bloom’s taxonomy as neglecting the dialectical dynamic of critical thinking. With regard to his first point, Paul overstates his case; misuse of the taxonomy does not invalidate the design itself. The emphasis given to Knowledge or recall is a more controversial, relating to the question whether or not critical thinking is subject-dependent. I do believe that Paul is correct in criticizing Bloom’s view that critical thinking is value neutral, since real life decisions are never value neutral; but again, that does not invalidate the structure of his taxonomy. The neglect of the dialectical process in critical thinking, however, is a substantial criticism that does seem borne out in the construction of the taxonomy, which is designed to flow from simple to complex. Another general criticism of defining critical thinking as being comprised of a set of skills is that critical thought also requires particular dispositions or habits to use those
skills. Dispositions, unlike skills, cannot be taught ; they can only be cultivated through
such activities as modeling. Many proponents of critical thinking classify both abilities
and dispositions that are necessary in critical thought.
In light of these criticisms, Ennis (1987) revised his taxonomy to incorporate
dispositions as well as specific abilities, thus defining critical thinking as a combination
of the two. He drew his list of abilities from the field of logic and these abilities are often
taught in “informal logic” courses. The abilities are comparatively easy to evaluate
(Ennis, 1961). In fact, Ennis authored the Cornell Critical Thinking Test, which is a
popular evaluative tool that measures critical thinking according to his taxonomy of
abilities (Royalty, 1995). Dispositions are more difficult to measure.
Similar to Ennis, Paul (1993) created a scheme that addresses both abilities and
dispositions, but Paul tended to stress the activities of the thinker more than the thought
itself. He defined critical thinking as a “unique kind of purposeful thinking in which the
thinker systematically and habitually imposes criteria and intellectual standards upon the
thinking; taking charge of the construction of thinking; guiding the construction of
thinking according to the standards; and assessing the effectiveness of the thinking
according to the purpose, the criteria, and the standards” (Paul, 1987, p. 21). In this way,
Paul accounts for the dispositions of the thinker as well as requiring that the thinker
master a certain skill set in identifying and using standards and criteria. His standards
and criteria seem, like Ennis, to be primarily drawn from the field of logic.
At the far end of the spectrum are thinkers who identify critical thinking with the
virtue of thoughtfulness (Schrag, 1988). The cultivation thoughtfulness leads individuals
to engage in purposeful and deliberate thinking (Schrag, 1988, p. 7). Schrag defines a
virtue as mediating between two contrary inclinations, in this case, between the
inclination towards impulsiveness and the inclination towards rigidity (Schrag, 1988, p.
14). If we ascribe to Schrag’s notion that critical thinking is a virtue, then it is highly
transferable. However, it is also exceedingly difficult to evaluate whether or not
someone possesses a virtue. Although not explicitly stated, Schrag seems still to hold
that deliberate thinking should be in alignment with the laws of logic, although his
emphasis is on character building rather than skill- mastery. However, an important
distinction is that, unlike skills, virtues cannot be taught ; they can only be fostered. To
accept Schrag’s proposition would entail that more attention be given to creating
environments and situations that cultivate virtues rather than teaching them. In this he
seems to be influenced by John Dewey’s ideas of reflective thinking (Dewey, 1933).
Critical vs. Creative Thinking
A significant criticism of all of these theories about critical thinking is that,
drawing on the laws of logic, they focus almost all attention on teaching students how to
evaluate propositions. This approach may help individuals decide what to do or believe,
but it does not address what Nickerson (1987) calls “thinking at goals” or “thinking about
value systems.” Nickerson is referring to an even higher level of critical thinking, not
merely evaluating propositions, but thinking about what one’s goals should be. Such
critical thinking also has a creative aspect that helps generate new propositions.
For all of the above thinkers, creative thinking is not in conflict with critical
thinking, even if it is not part of it. Using Dewey (1933), Schrag (1988) argues that
thinking is an action that creates experience. Therefore, any thinking is creative and adds
to the individual’s repertoire of experience that will generate new growth.
Some scholars, however, believe that critical thinking and creative thinking are
different cognitive skills (Belenky, 1986; Walters, 1990). Part of their concern is that the
emphasis on critical thinking privileges certain epistemologies at the cost of others.
Walters (1990) places special value on imagination and intuition but is silent on the
subject of whether or not they can be taught.
This position is most clearly articulated by the gleeful maverick Edward DeBono
(1971). DeBono’s main thesis is that so-called “vertical thinking” cannot construct new
hypotheses but can only evaluate propositions. He creates a dichotomy between “vertical
thinking” and “lateral thinking,” which might be called “creative thinking.” Lateral
thinking involves creating whole new ways of looking at things, instead of evaluating old
ways of looking at things. Additionally, DeBono claims that lateral thinking can be
taught.
The creative/critical thinking dichotomy is problematic because new, creative
insight is clearly essential to good thinking, yet how it occurs remains shrouded in
mystery. Furthermore, creative thinking is clearly not tied to specific skill sets, nor is it
readily identified by the possession of certain dispositions. Although creativity may be
recognized, it is difficult to evaluate.
Is Critical Thinking Subject-Dependent?
In addition to the critique of the critical thinking movement privileging rational
epistemologies at the expense of creative thinking, another essential debate within the
movement is whether general critical thinking skills that are not subject dependent even
exist. McPeck (1981), for example, argues that since thinking is always thinking about
something, then any kind of thinking is dependent upon the subject being thought about.
Furthermore, he claims that different subjects or domains have different epistemologies,
the idea of critical thinking having different meanings from subject to subject. “[S]kills,
like critical thinking in general, are parasitic upon detailed knowledge of, and experience
in, parent fields and problem areas” (McPeck, 1981, p. 10). He redefines critical thinking
to mean reflective epistemology that is “the analysis of good reasons for belief,
understanding the various kinds of reason involves understanding complex meanings of
field-dependent concepts and evidence” (McPeck, 1981, p. 24).
The ramifications of the proposition for subject dependence are enormous. If
true, it undermines the claim that there are universal intellectual standards of reasonable
thought. Moreover, it means that critical thinking can only be taught from within a
particular subject, invalidating the many “critical thinking courses” that currently exist.
Finally, the claim of subject specificity utterly negates all claims to the general
transferability of critical thinking skills.
Paul (1993) and Ennis (1989) criticize McPeck for reifying the concept of
“subject,” which he uses interchangeably with the academic disciplines. Although one
cannot think about “everything in general” but must think about a topic, that is not the
same as thinking within a discipline, they argue.
Four possible overarching schemes for teaching critical thinking emerge from this
debate. The “general” approach involves teaching generalized critical thinking skills in a
critical thinking course. The “infusion” approach requires self-consciously teaching
critical thinking skills from within a subject course. The “immersion” method assumes
that students will gain the subject-specific critical thinking skills through taking the
subject course. The “mixed- model” approach combines a general course with either an
“infusion” or “immersion” approach (Ennis, 1989). Neither the “mixed- model” nor the
“infusion” approaches rule out the possibility of generalizable critical thinking skills.
Wilen (1995) emphasizes the role of metacognition in critical thinking and advocates an
infusion approach in which the expert models critical thinking in light of their subject
matter through thinking aloud. He endorses this teaching method not because critical
thinking is restricted to subject matter but because such teaching is efficacious. Only
through evaluating and comparing the general and the infusion methods will it be made
apparent whether critical thinking skills are generalizable or subject-dependent.
Evaluation of Critical Thinking
Careful evaluation of critical thinking is vital, not only to answer the question of
the generalizability, but also to assess program strengths and weaknesses and to redress
the weaknesses. Baron (1987) identifies four dimensions in the evaluation of programs
teaching critical thinking skills. The first axis is Formative-Summative. The Formative
evaluation has to do with improving the program, while the Summative evaluates the
effectiveness of the program. The second is Product-Process. The Product evaluation
focuses on what the students produce while the Process is concerned with the workings of
the critical thinking instruction and thinking of the students. A third axis is Qualitative11
Quantitative. Both Qualitative and Quantitative studies are meant to capture the
experiences of the people in the program. Finally, Experimental-Quasi- Experimental is
another way of testing program effectiveness. Baron (1987) also suggests testing for
sustained effect, transfer, side effects and metacognition.
A number of tests measure critical thinking skills, (Baron, 1987; Ennis 1961,
1989), but measuring dispositions and “virtues” is more difficult. A danger is that the
ideals of critical thinking dispositions and Schrag’s idea of the virtue of thoughtfulness
(Schrag, 1988) could be overlooked in application because evaluating skills is easier.
Halpern (1993) highlights a number of challenges in evaluating the effectiveness
of critical thinking instruction. Pre-tests and post-tests convey some information, but
reveal nothing about retention. Also, cognitive skills improve with practice, so
presumably the real effects of critical thinking instruction would take some time to
become apparent. Long-term gains are difficult to assess by testing students long after
they have taken a critical thinking course, because it is difficult to measure whether any
improvement from their baseline resulted from the course or from normal maturation and
skills gained in other course. This problem of assessing program effectiveness is further
complicated by the fact that virtually all campuses that offer critical thinking courses
require them for all students; there is no control group. One possibility is to create a
control group from students at a similar university.
There are also significant criticisms about the critical thinking instruments in
addition to the fact that they only test skills and neglect habits, creativity and the “virtue
of thoughtfulness.” McPeck (1981) argues that they are indistinguishable from IQ tests.
One (Royalty, 1995) has been to test students using both IQ tests as well as critical
thinking instruments. However, even if an immediate post-test does reveal information
and is distinguishable from an IQ test, the program cannot be deemed successful until it
can demonstrate transferability of the skills by the student into a new context.
Transferability of Critical Thinking
As previously mentioned, if critical thinking is subject-dependent, critical
thinking should not be transferable across domains. If critical thinking is not
transferable, then most of the reasons for teaching it are invalidated. However, other
impediments may prevent the transfer of critical thinking skills. Perkins (1987)
enumerates three stages of critical thinking development: acquisition, making it
automatic, and transfer. Most critical thinking programs focus on acquisition, but
without the other two steps, Perkins argues, critical thinking tends to remain within the
context of the course. Perkins postulates two types of transfer. “High-road transfer” is
the intentional transfer of a “frame” or critical thinking tactic from one learning context
to another context. Instructors should create exercises that help students achieve this type
of transfer because it typically does not occur automatically. “Low-road transfer” occurs
more spontaneously. By “low-road transfer” he means the phenomenon of perceiving
similarity in a new circumstance and applying the “frame.” The primary significance of
Perkin’s thesis is that without instruction in transfer, students will be less likely to be able
to apply critical thinking skills to novel situations.
Some Studies of Critical Thinking Program Effectiveness and Transfer
Although most works dealing with critical thinking tend to be abstract and
philosophical, there have been some notable attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of
critical thinking instruction. One of the most impressive was conducted in Venezuela
(Hernstein, et.al. 1986). Four hundred seventh graders took a yearlong critical thinking
course in which they were taught fifty-six lessons. Four tests were given before, during,
and after the course. The same tests were administered to a control group. These tests
were supplemented with a design and an oral argument post-test of randomly selected
individuals from the experimental and control group. The results of one objective test
were marginal, but the others were significant. The higher performance on the General
Abilities Test and a Target Abilities Test developed for the program was especially
notable. The two post-tests also revealed higher achievement in the experimental group.
The tests measured critical thinking as skills. This study seems to strongly indicate
transferability. The objective tests were cross-discipline and the oral arguments and
design exercises cross domains.
Royalty (1995) created a study in an attempt to prove the generalizability thesis of
critical thinking, and therefore, its transfer. He acknowledges that the lack of agreement
about what constitutes critical thinking creates problems in its measurement. He
conducted two studies to see whether or not critical thinking skills could be applied to
novel domains. To measure this, he attempted to identify areas that did not require
specialized subject knowledge in order to test them.
Royalty’s first study used the Cornell Critical Thinking Test, which was created
by Ennis and reflects his theory of critical thinking. He also administered an IQ test, the
Belief in the Paranormal Scale, and The Paranormal Experience Scale. His results
showed a strong correlation between IQ and critical thinking but that neither critical
thinking nor IQ accounted for the variance in belief in the paranormal. There was,
however, a strong correlation between The Paranormal Experience Scale and the Belief
in the Paranormal Scale. He explained his conclusion by postulating that belief in the
paranormal and metaphysical speculation may rely upon other “ways of knowing” that
are not part of critical thinking.
I believe that his first study was flawed because of some of the researcher’s
assumptions. “Although the relationship between paranormal beliefs and experiences
may represent logical consistency, it would represent critical thinking only if one
discounted the importance of the content truth of the premise” (Royalty, 1995). Clearly,
the researcher has already identified belief in the paranormal as illogical. He seems to be
subscribing to a materialist ontology and a logical positivist epistemology. If Dewey
(1933) is correct, then it is no surprise that experience of the paranormal is positively
correlated with belief in the paranormal. It seems to me that his first study was flawed in
its conception.
Royalty’s (1995) second study, however, is more promising. He administered the
Cornell Critical Thinking Test, an IQ test, and a Statistical Reasoning test. Both IQ and
the critical thinking accounted for variability, but critical thinking accounted for a unique
portion of the variability. Therefore, the test indicates that critical thinking skills can be
applied to novel subject areas and, therefore, transfer.
In an attempt to understand transfer, Lehman and Nisbett (1990) examined three
types of reasoning: verbal, statistical-methodological, and conditioned reasoning. They
tested University of Michigan undergraduates during their first term in the first year, and
then tested the same undergraduates during their second term in their fourth year. This
study was looking primarily at the immersion model, not testing students who had formal
critical thinking instruction. The students were given three tests, one for each reasoning
type, that included both academic and “real life” questions. The first year showed no
distinction based upon discipline major. After four years, there was no statistical
significance shown for verbal reasoning. Those majoring in the Social Sciences or
Psychology made significant gains in the statistical- methodological reasoning, while
those majoring in the Natural Sciences or Humanities made marginal gains. The Natural
Science and Humanities majors made significant gains in conditional reasoning, but the
Social Science and Psychology majors did not improve. This study seems to support the
conclusion that different types of reasoning are taught in different fields. Still, it does not
rule out the possibility of general critical thinking skills. The improvement on the “real
life” sections of the tests indicates that the skills were transferable, although different,
depending upon the major in which the student was immersed.
In opposition to these studies, Hendricks (2001) studied critical thinking
instruction looking at the distinction between traditional schooling that decontextualizes
knowledge vs. situated learning. Two hundred and twenty seventh graders were studied,
assigned randomly to experimental or control. The students were then taught about
causality, an important component of critical thinking. They were given a “transfer task”
to complete two weeks after the instruction and another six weeks after the instruction.
Interviews were conducted after six weeks. Transfer was very poor for both groups of
students. Hendricks suggests, in agreement with Perkins (1987), that more direct transfer
training was probably needed.
Conclusions and Needs for Additional Research
At this point, the evidence is mixed concerning the transferability of critical
thinking skills and, therefore, the usefulness of critical thinking instruction. The
confounded state of research into the transferability of critical thinking skills stems from
fundamental disagreement about what is meant by critical thinking. All of the evaluation
instruments test critical thinking as skills and do not test for dispositions nor for
thoughtfulness. They are unable to account neither for “wrong” answers that might be
reached through critical thought nor for “right” answers that might be reached through
“test wiseness.”
The evidence also demonstrates the limitations of philosophy as a tool to explore
these problems. Although philosophy is important to articulate goals and aims, all of the
models have logical consistency and cannot be discredited using philosophical methods.
Clearly additional research is needed. Generally emphasis should shift from the
philosophy of critical thinking to the evaluation of critical thinking and critical thinking
programs. Detailed comparison between IQ test results and the Critical Thinking
instruments is needed in order to ascertain if they are actually measuring different
phenomena. Ways of studying critical thinking dispositions or thoughtfulness need to be
created to ascertain whether or not these characteristics have been inculcated through
critical thinking instruction. More quantitative and qualitative studies are needed to
amass sufficient data for macroanalysis. The infusion model and the general model of
critical thinking instruction should be subjected to tests and compared in order to
ascertain whether general critical thinking skills exist or whether they are subject dependent. The impact of “transfer instruction” needs to be tested through more studies
of transferability, including longitudinal studies and studies that measure the application
of critical thinking to novel situations and new domains. Furthermore, the interaction
between creative and critical thinking requires more exploration, including whether
creative thinking, imagination and intuition can be taught. Of course, formative
evaluative work to gauge the effectiveness of various methods of critical thinking
instruction is still important.

A Tale of Two Communities: Group Dynamics and Community Building in a Spanish-English Telecollaboration

MARK DARHOWER
North Carolina State University

Abstract:
This study provides a theory-driven account of community building in a bilingual telecollaborative chat setting. A symmetrical arrangement of 70 L1 English learners of Spanish and L1 Spanish learners of English engaged in weekly Internet chat sessions in small groups. The learning metaphors of community and participation serve as the theoretical framework to describe linguistic and social behaviors and interpersonal relationships among participants in two ongoing chat groups, while, at the same time, discourse data are used to build upon theory of (virtual) community. Based on Brown's (2001) classification of levels of online community, the findings illustrate the discursive construction of one community that reached the third, cooperation/camaraderie, level and another that struggled to maintain the second, membership, level.

INTRODUCTION

'Telecollaboration' (known as 'tandem learning' in Europe) has been an active area of second language acquisition (SLA) research in recent years. A telecollaboration consists of groups of geographically separated learners in which half of the learners are native speakers of the language the other half are learning, and vice versa. Telecollaborations are by nature virtual learning communities (Renninger & Shumar, 2002). 'Community,' a metaphor oft employed in scholarship throughout the humanities and social sciences, is especially robust in SLA research as the field increasingly embraces the social, as well as cognitive factors involved in learning languages (Block, 2003; Firth & Wagner, 1997). Much of this research has been cast in the Vygotsky-inspired sociocultural theoretical framework (for an overview, see Lantolf & Appel, 1994) complemented with constructs such as 'community of practice' (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Although recent SLA studies have been carried out in the context of virtual learner communities (e.g., Belz, 2001, 2002b), research has yet to sufficiently define a role for community in L2 learning (Darhower, 2006). Studies are needed to enlighten the specific processes by which learners become full fledged members of L2 discourse communities (or not).

The current study analyzes a virtual community named the¹ Bilingual Chat Community (BCC). This collaboration between the North Carolina State University and the University of Puerto Rico unites L1 English speakers learning Spanish with L1 Spanish speakers learning English. The purpose is to initiate learners into a bilingual discourse community in which they can coconstruct meaning with native speakers in the L2 and share with each other aspects of their respective cultures. This study explores linguistic and social behaviors involved in community building in two groups of the BCC who chatted for a 10-week period. One of the groups constructed a cooperative, cohesive communicative environment in their chat room, whereas the other group established a very different type of communicative environment. Discourse analysis will illuminate the trajectory of each group as it constructs the communicative norms of its community.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Community as Language Learning Metaphor

According to Lantolf (1996), SLA research is largely metaphorical. Metaphors applied to the field range from single constructs (e.g., input/output) to theories of language and language acquisition (e.g., information processing or mind = computer). Metaphors help researchers conceptualize abstract ideas in a more concrete way. Community is a metaphor currently of great interest to academics across the humanities and social sciences. A related metaphor in learning theory is participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991), which views learning as a process of becoming a participant in a community of practice (CoP). This contrasts with other common learning metaphors, such as the acquisition metaphor which equates the human mind with a container to be filled with certain materials of which the learner is then the owner (Sfard, 1998, p. 5).

The CoP is perhaps the most developed concept of community in psychology and learning theory. A CoP consists of individuals who interact on a regular basis around a common set of issues, interests, or needs. Wenger (1998) established three criteria for defining a CoP. When members of the CoP accomplish something on an ongoing basis, they have a 'joint enterprise.' Members have 'mutual engagement' when they interact with one another to clarify their work and to define and even change how the work is done. Through this mutual engagement, members establish their identities relative to the community. A 'shared repertoire' refers to the methods, tools, techniques, language, and behavior patterns that comprise the cultural context for the members' work.

In the participation view of SLA, learners ideally integrate themselves as full participants in some type of community that employs the L2 as its means of communication. As Sfard (1998, p. 6) puts it, "learning a subject is now conceived of as a process of becoming a member of a certain community. This entails, above all, the ability to communicate in the language of this community and act according to its particular norms." Defining whether a collection of human beings constitutes a community or not is an elusive endeavor, however. Some theorists establish specific criteria for community, such as Wenger's CoP. Riel and Polin (1994, p. 18) make the distinction that "a community differs from a mere collection of people by the strength and depth of the culture it is able to establish and which in turn supports group activity and cohesion."

The social activity that occurs in CoPs is inherently tied to group membership and identity (Riel & Polin, 1994). Norton (2001) argues the importance of understanding how learners develop identities as 'legitimate speakers,' that is, how they come to be accepted as fully functioning members of different CoPs with which they engage. The process of becoming a "fully functioning member" implies that learners evolve over time in their social roles and identities relative to the group. Rogoff (1994, p. 210) considers this process of "transformation of participation" an essential part of learning.

However, not all members of a community actively participate or necessarily enjoy participating. Some group members might not develop strong connections with each other, especially if the groupings are involuntary. As Riel and Polin (1994) point out, communities do not always entail healthy contexts of close interpersonal relationships but rather may be dysfunctional, scattered, or otherwise troubled.

As participant roles develop and are played out through discourse practices, the social history of the group is created and stored (Hall, 1993). Such history can then be brought forth for reconstruction. 'Historicity' (and futurity) can be noted in groups that have a mutual engagement as they build on their past and plan and prepare for their future.

Linguistic and Social Affordances

According to Wenger (1998, p. 72), "The negotiation of meaning is the level of discourse at which the concept of practice should be understood." In the L2 context, learners attempt to coconstruct meaning with each other or with more proficient speakers of the L2. Proficient speakers can offer linguistic resources to learners. Borrowing from psychologist James Gibson, Van Lier (2000) refers to linguistic resources available to learners as 'affordances.' Affordances can include such familiar SLA constructs as comprehensible input (Krashen, 1981, and elsewhere), negative feedback ( Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994), and scaffolding

 (Donato, 1994; Guerrero & Villamil, 2000; Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). Additionally, affordances are aspects of the linguistic world which can be "demands and requirements, opportunities and limitations, rejections and invitations, enablements and constraints (Shotter & Newson, 1982, as cited in Van Lier, 2000, p. 253). These can be considered 'social affordances.' In a social view of SLA, participation in a CoP is the activity of language learners. As learners participate in CoPs, affordances are available for them to make use of--or not.

Virtual Communities and Telecollaboration

Rheingold (1993) is credited with pioneering the concept of 'virtual community,' which he describes as social aggregations that emerge on the Internet when enough people carry on discussions long enough to form personal relations in cyberspace. In her extensive research into online community-building, Brown (2001) delineates three levels in the evolution of online communities. In the 'acquaintance' level, participants get to know each other. Brown refers to the 'community conferment or membership' level as the "membership card" for the community. Learners usually feel that they are members when they are part of long, thoughtful discussions with each other. The final level is 'camaraderie,' which is achieved after "long-term and/or intense association with others involving personal communication" (Brown, 2001, p. 24). These levels are not necessarily linear. In other words, a community that reaches camaraderie level could regress to membership level, and individual community members can be on different levels at different times. Brown also pointed out that community can be present for some individuals but not for others who for whatever reasons do not engage well with their counterparts.

In observing hundreds of online communities, Kim (2000) noted that participants always fit into some type of role, ranging from 'visitor' to 'novice,' 'regular,' 'leader' and eventually to 'elder.' Many participants evolve from the visitor or novice role to regular member, and most communities have one or more individuals in a leader role at any given time. Renninger and Shumar (2002, p. 298) note that "learners play a variety of roles and may participate in various ways, from active to passive."

SLA scholars remain intensely interested in the emergent culture of electronically mediated discourse (e.g., Belz & Thorne, 2005), although studies that specifically address community as a construct are relatively few. Darhower (2006) made a case for a stronger role for community in National Standards-based L2 learning. Arnold, Ducate, Lomicka, & Lord (2005) demonstrated the unique types of learning that take place when teachers in training from geographically dispersed places unite in an online community.

Studies of telecollaborative learning communities highlight linguistic, social and cultural factors of the communities, providing information on both the benefits and potential disadvantages of telecollaborations (Belz, 2001, 2002a; Kramsch & Thorne, 2002; Schneider & von der Emde, 2005). In telecollaborations between American and German students, for example, Belz (2001) found that such factors as language valuation, access to technology, and matching of proficiency levels have a profound effect on the linguistic and interpersonal nature of telecollaborative learning environments. Belz's conclusion was that "telecollaboration does not unproblematically afford target language interaction in all cases" (p. 229).

The current study seeks to complement extant research on telecollaborations by illustrating the specific social discursive processes involved in participating in and acquiring membership to virtual bilingual language communities.

THE STUDY

Context and Participants: The Bilingual Chat Community (BCC)

The BCC is a web-enabled community which provides a forum for English-speaking learners of Spanish to communicate in weekly chat sessions with Spanish-speaking learners of English. The physical space of the BCC resides in the chat rooms hosted by the WebCT server at the North Carolina State University and the BCC web site containing photographs and biographical information on the participants, as well as information they need to be productive members of the community, such as weekly topic assignments (see topics list in Appendix A) and the chat schedule. The participants in the semester's BCC were approximately 35 Spanish students from North Carolina State University (NCSU) and 35 English students from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). Those included in the study were 12 members of two different groups. Four of the 12 were male, and 8 were female. All 12 members were the traditional university age (19-22), and all were estimated to be somewhere in the intermediate-mid to intermediate-high ACTFL oral proficiency level.

Research Question

The general research question driving this case study is: What linguistic and social behaviors define the process of forming a community and becoming full participants in the community?

Data Collection

Weekly transcripts collected by the chat server were the principal data source. In qualitative research, it is often necessary to reduce large quantities of data. With 11 groups chatting for 10 weeks, there were a total of 110 chat episodes, each consisting of anywhere from 5 to 11 pages of text. To reduce the enormous amount of data collected, the researcher employed purposive sampling (Miles & Huberman, 1994), selecting two groups for analysis: Group E and Group D. The participants in Group E appeared to form a cohesive community throughout their ten weeks of chat, developing meaningful interpersonal relationships mediated by electronic discourse. Group D, at the other extreme, did not appear to form a tight social bond. The two groups were selected to contrast levels of community development. The researcher does not wish to give the impression that these two groups are representative of the BCC as a whole. The remainder of the 11 groups fell somewhere between Group E and Group D in terms of a cohesion continuum, based on the researcher's impressionistic review of the 110 chat logs.

To answer the research question, the researcher made reiterative passes through the data, viewing the chat scripts through the lens of the three-level framework established by Brown (2001) (i.e., acquaintance, membership, and camaraderie levels). Within that framework emerged several categories of analysis: experiences with the L2, historicity and futurity, integration of new members, member roles and regulatory behaviors, members versus nonmembers, and linguistic and social affordances. Discourse excerpts were selected to illustrate each category.

DATA ANALYSIS: GROUP E

Five learners were assigned to Group E: two from NCSU and three from the UPR. There were also six visitors who joined the group for one to three sessions, but the analysis focuses on members originally assigned to the group. Group E had an attendance rate of 88%, that is, a total of only six absences dispersed among the five participants over the course of 10 weeks. Table 1 shows which participants attended each weekly chat session.²

Acquaintance Phase (Weeks 1 and 2)

Experiences with the L2

In Week 1, Bob, Manuela, and Ricardo become acquainted with each other. (It is noteworthy that these three participants had excellent attendance, so they chatted with each other all 10 weeks.) In Excerpt E1, the chatters discuss the extent of their experience with their L2 (lines 1-7) and aspects of using the L2 that are most challenging for them (lines 8-20). In lines 22-24, they look favorably upon their chat experience in helping them develop their L2 skills.³

Excerpt E1 (Week 1): Experiences with the L2

Discussing their experiences with their L2 sets the stage for the bilingual social relationships that the participants will develop throughout ten weeks of chatting together.

Historicity and Futurity

After the first moments of their initial chat, the chatters not only have a present but also a past and a future. In other words, they possess historicity and futurity. An example of this is found in Excerpt E2 in which Ricardo remembers that Bob had a birthday (line 2), then both Bob and Lisa wish Ricardo a happy birthday (line 10). (Coincidentally, three of the group members had a birthday during the semester.) Later, in Week 10 (not included in this excerpt), the other birthdays are remembered.

Excerpt E2 (Week 10): Historicity/Futurity

The group's sense of historicity and futurity is a good indicator that by Week 2 they were already developing a sense of community.

Integration of New Members and Establishment of Roles

In Week 1, Bob, Manuela, and Ricardo are novices since they had never chatted together before. Since the BCC has preestablished rules governing chat topics and equal use of English and Spanish, somebody must take on the role of initiating and maintaining the topic, switching languages, and ending the chat session. Bob fulfills this role in the first chat. Interestingly, as shown in Excerpt E3, Manuela (the only female in the group) asks the two gentlemen to change the topic of discussion to something to which she can relate (line 1). In doing so, she asserts her rights as a full member while still a novice in the community. In lines 3, 5, and 6, Bob demonstrates that he is happy to accommodate Manuela's request.

Excerpt E3 (Week 2): Manuela's request to change topics

Later in Week 2 (not illustrated in the excerpt), Lisa and Nilsa integrate themselves into the community. Nilsa enters and greets the others, then asks to be initiated: es la primera vez que entro asi que ubiquenme 'it's the first time I'm entering, so orient me.' Lisa enters and greets the community members, then instantly integrates herself into the discussion by exchanging introductory information with her fellow chatters. Manuela is pleased that she is no longer the only female in the chat: chicas nuevas en la sala … al fin no me siento sola jejeje 'new girls in the room … at last I don't feel alone hahaha.' Bob directs the group to get to know the newcomers before continuing the conversation: Parece que tenemos que empzar a conocernos otra vez! 'It looks like we have to get to know each other again!'

All assigned participants have chatted at least once by the end of Week 2. The requirements for membership seem to be clear to them, so the community enters the community membership level.

Community Membership Level

By the third chat session, most members of Group E become regulars of the community (except Nilsa, who is absent the third and fourth weeks), meaning that they are initiated into the norms and communicative patterns of the community.

Roles and Regulatory Behaviors

Wenger (1998, p. 74) notes that "The kind of coherence that transforms mutual engagement into a community of practice requires work. The work of 'community maintenance' is thus an intrinsic part of any practice." During the membership level, participant roles evolve. As shown in Table 2, Lisa picks up the regulatory functions soon after she enters her first chat (Week 2, to which she was 19 minutes late) and maintains these functions almost exclusively throughout the 10 weeks, except for the week she is absent (Week 6). It can be said, then, that Lisa fulfills the leader role, taking this over from Bob after Week 1.

Members and Nonmembers

After a few weeks of chatting, the group members know who is part of their community and who is not. Excerpt E4 shows what happens when a visitor (Adalia) enters.

Ricardo simply greets Adalia (line 2), but Manuela must make it a point to find out who Adalia is and if she is male or female (lines 3-8) before she and Ricardo can integrate Adalia into their discussion.

Linguistic Affordances

Beginning the first week, the chatters provide linguistic affordances to each other, which have the potential to aid in the development of their L2. In just one example of this, Excerpt E5 shows Ricardo requesting the meaning of the expression "lift weights" (line 2). Bob explains the meaning in lines 4 and 5, and by line 6, Ricardo seems to understand and thanks Bob for the linguistic affordance.

Excerpt E5 (Week 1): Request for meaning (I)

In Excerpt E6, line2, Ricardo returns the favor, although he provides the meaning in Bob's L1 (English) instead of explaining it in Spanish. The provision of such linguistic affordances is an important function of the reciprocity of the chat community. That is, each member of the community can alternate between the language expert and language learner roles.

Excerpt E6 (Week 6): Request for meaning (II)

Throughout the 10 weeks, one of the chatters in particular (Bob) makes abundant use of affordances provided by the Spanish speakers. In Week 2, for example, Bob begins using the conditional tense verb debería 'ought,' a tense generally not yet employed by learners at this (intermediate) level, after seeing Ricardo use the verb form. In Excerpt E7, Bob repeats the conditional tense verb twice in response to Ricardo's question and then uses the form once again in a question directed back to Ricardo. Bob eliminates the preposition de from the verb form;presumably because he does not think it necessary, and, in fact, it is not. He may have lifted the word debería from Ricardo as a lexical item rather than analyzing it as a conjugated verb form because he did not change the verb ending to the second person familiar form (deberías).

Excerpt E7 (Week 2): Bob's use of a linguistic affordance

Bob also employs circumlocution to help the Spanish speakers provide him the linguistic affordance he needs. In Excerpt E8, Bob negotiates the word anestesiológo 'anesthesiologist.' In lines 5 and 6, Josefina and Manuela indicate that they do not understand what Bob means in line 2 by "she makes sure you don't have pain." When Bob adds "person who gives medicine" to this in line 7, the Hispanophones figure out what he means and give him the word in Spanish (line 10).

Excerpt E8 (Week 2): Negotiation of a lexical item

This circumlocution, coupled with Bob's independent use of affordances as illustrated in Excerpt E6, demonstrates that Bob has appropriated chat room discourse as a mediator of his L2 development, a desirable accomplishment for chatters to attain.

One type of linguistic affordance widely believed to aid acquisition is negative feedback or error correction. BCC members were not specifically instructed on how and when to correct L2 errors because the instructors wanted to allow learners the autonomy to determine for themselves what the communicative norms would be in their chat rooms. As a result, a range of error correction patterns emerged from group to group. In Group E, there seemed to be an implicit norm that errors would not be corrected unless the speaker requested correction or if the error impeded comprehension. While the lack of negative feedback makes for fewer interruptions to the flow of conversation, there were a number of opportunities to provide such affordances which could have helped the learners in their L2 development. For example, Manuela says in Week 8, "lisa did u saw havanna nights?" The same week, Ricardo says, "Did every vary saw "Dance with me"?" Neither time was "saw" corrected, and, in fact, Ricardo misspells every "vary" (everybody) throughout the entire chat without anyone bringing it to his attention. This is one area, provision of negative feedback, in which instructors might want to intervene to guide chatters in providing and taking advantage of linguistic affordances in their chats.