Communicative Competence of ESL Students

¶ … Communicative Competence of ESL Students Using Electronic Discussion Boards" by Shenghua Zha, Paul Kelly, MeeAeng Ko Park, and Gail Fitzgerald

Many young people enter the school system today with an entirely new set of skills and expectations concerning the use of technology in the classroom. Not surprisingly, these trends have also affected the manner in which English as a second language (ESL) instruction is being delivered to even very young learners. The study by Zha, Kelly, Park and Fitzgerald (2006) took advantage of these new skills to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate communicate competency levels among elementary-aged ESL pupils using electronic discussion boards to communicate with each other and their teachers as described further below.

Subjects or participants. Twenty-eight ESL pupils in grades 2 to 5 participated in this study. The participants were drawn from seven ESL classes in six different elementary schools. About two-thirds (64.2% or 18) of the participants were boys and eight (35.8%) were girls. A quarter (7) of the participants spoke Spanish, five spoke Chinese and other participants spoke French, Russian, Korean, Arabic, Pohnpeian, Urdu, or Samoan as their native languages. In order to ensure that the electronic discussion board was the sole forum available for participants from the same schools, pupils were assigned into different discussion groups. Consequently, every group with three or four pupils which had its own electronic discussion board for message exchanges.

Methodology. Although many young people enter the classroom today with the skill set needed to "hit the ground running" when it comes to electronic discussion boards, because the participants came to the classroom from various backgrounds with varying levels of computer knowledge, the researchers conducted training for the first week to ensure that everyone knew how to compose, edit and post messages as well as how to navigate the other features of the system such as accessing the board, logging out and using the spell check function. The first week was also used as an opportunity for the participants to practice using the electronic discussion board hosted on the school's server by exchanging messages and becoming acquainted with each other. All students and teachers, as well as the researchers, had individual accounts for the electronic discussion board; in addition, all of the participants were furnished with wireless-Internet equipped Hewlett-Packard laptops.

Following the completion of the training week, the researchers assigned a series of three activities that were deemed relevant and interesting to the participants: (a) activity 1 was "Creating Clubs"; (b) activity 2 was "Recommending a Holiday Menu," and (c) activity 3 was "Planning a Party." Because each of the activities involved different social settings, the participants were required to use English that was appropriate to their audience, purpose and setting. Although ESL teachers were available to assist the participants one-on-one with respect to using the electronic discussion board, they were instructed to not interfere with the postings by the participants.

Data collection procedures. The qualitative data for this study was collected by capturing the participants' 956 messages on the electronic discussion board and the data entered into NVivo 2.0 (a qualitative analysis software program offered by QSR International). Following the completion of each week's activity, the researchers captured the posted messages in a single document and sorted them chronologically. The messages were coded following the national ESL Standards for Pre-K-12 Students to evaluate participants' communicative competence. Based on these standards, the researchers used nineteen competence indicators from four areas for their qualitative analysis. Following the qualitative analysis of each week's postings, the researchers also used a quantitative analytical approach to evaluate changes in participants' communicative competence as assessed the above-described ESL Standards during the administration of the three activities. The variables used in the quantitative paired sample t-tests analyses were the frequencies of children's use of language coded using the specific indicators in the ESL Standards. Subsequent qualitative analyses were also conducted to evaluate participants' improvements in their use of English through the three consecutive activities.

Data collection instruments. As noted above, the messages were captured using NVivo 2.0 as a data collection tool.

B.

Explanation of the adequacy of the following:

1.

Data analysis procedures. The use of both qualitative and quantitative data analysis procedures helps to improve the trustworthiness of research findings (Owen & Demb, 2004). This point is also made by Neuman (2003) who notes that, "Both qualitative and quantitative researchers use several specific research techniques, yet there is much overlap between the type of data and the style of research. Most qualitative-style researchers examine qualitative data and vice versa" (p. 16).

2.

Study results. Some of the findings that emerged form this study were fairly predictable (i.e., the more the participants used the electronic discussion board, the more competent and comfortable they became), but the researchers' findings that peer-assistance facilitates English language use in computer-mediated forums more than participants working alone was a particularly noteworthy finding.

C.

Evaluation of the conclusions of the research study

Although there were no earth-shattering findings to emerge from this study concerning the efficacy of peer interactions on improving English competency levels, the researchers did a credible job of developing their weekly activities using evidence-based practice guidelines. In addition, and notwithstanding any constraints to each of the methodologies to the contrary, Zha et al. (2006) also followed accepted qualitative and quantitative data analyses methods. To their credit, the researchers also acknowledged the several limitations to their study and formulated several recommendations to help overcome these constraints in future research.