Complexity and Interaction across Oral, Written and Online Discourse

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54855/ijte.222117

Keywords:

Interaction, Syntactic Complexity, Academic writing, Oral Debates, Synchronous Online Forums

Abstract

Most research that observed online discussions compared them to either written (e.g., Hewing& Coffin, 2007) or oral discourse (e.g., Joiner et al., 2008), never compiling the three modalities, and they did not provide comprehensive results regarding both form and Interaction. Academic essays and oral debates have been widely consumed in the EAP classroom. However, the effectiveness of synchronous online forums in the EFL academic classroom and their discourse features need to be compared to oral and written academic tasks simultaneously through a comprehensive analysis of both complexity, accuracy, and Interaction. The present study investigated the use of complex syntax, grammatical accuracy, and Interaction in the argumentative discourse of academic essays, oral debates, and synchronous online forums of EFL undergraduate students (N= 54) enrolled in a 12-week module of English for academic purposes. The methodology encompassed qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis. All data were qualitatively transcribed and coded. Then results were quantitatively calculated using ANOVA and post hoc t-tests to find the differences across tasks for each variable. Results revealed a higher impact of academic essays and synchronous online forums on syntactic complexity and grammatical accuracy than oral debates and a greater influence of online forums and oral debates than academic essays on interactional features. Synchronous online forums revealed the highest impact as a task combining both structure and Interaction. Pedagogical implications then highlighted how synchronous online forums could be used in the rhetoric and composition EFL classroom

Author Biography

  • Mayada Tawfik, Cairo University, Egypt

    Mayada Tawfik has a Ph.D. in applied linguistics from Cairo University and an MA in TESOL. She is currently a researcher and an academic reviewer for academic journals. She is currently designing courses on corpus linguistics, assessment, and research methodology. She has been teaching English for Academic Purposes and EFL for twenty years in international universities in Egypt including the British University in Egypt. Her research focused on syntactic complexity in EFL learners, discourse analysis, online discourse, and development of language proficiency levels. And her conference presentations addressed formative and performance assessments, flipped classrooms strategies, Interaction and identity in online courses, argumentation in EAP, and local versus global literacies.

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Published

16-02-2022

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Research Article

How to Cite

Tawfik, M. (2022). Complexity and Interaction across Oral, Written and Online Discourse. International Journal of TESOL & Education, 2(1), 272-295. https://doi.org/10.54855/ijte.222117

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