Date

2011

Author

Akayoğlu, Sedat

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In the study, it was aimed at determining the discourse patterns of text-based CMC in Second Life in terms of social presence, negotiation of meaning and turn distribution of the students. During the data collection procedure, 54 freshman students participated in the study. Some reading and writing tasks were carried out in Second Life. During the data analysis, the taxonomy adapted by Akayoğlu & Altun (2008) was used for negotiation of meaning and the taxonomy prepared by Rourke, Anderson, Garrison and Archer (2001) was used for social presence. Finally, the words uttered by each student were counted and the equality of turn distribution of the students was measured using Gini Coefficient. At the end of the study, it was found that the most frequently used social presence function was “expression of emotions” and the least frequently used function was “quoting from others’ messages”. In terms of negotiation of meaning functions, the most frequently used function was “confirmation” and the least frequently used function was “reply vocabulary”. As for the third research question, the numbers of the words uttered by the students were counted and Gini Coefficient was calculated. At the end of this analysis, it was seen that there was equality in all sessions in terms of turn distribution of the students as it was hypothesized in literature. The findings of this study might be helpful for students, educators and researchers who are willing to attend to and design language courses in Second Life. They might better understand the context.

Subject Keywords

English language, Computer-assisted instruction.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12614173/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/21156

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis