Social presence in virtual communities of foreign language (FL) teachers

This paper investigates the development of social presence in communities of language teachers at two universities. Specifically, our research sheds light on how social presence is characterized according to the technological tools used to link the community of language teachers. Over the period of a 14 week semester, nine electronic journal entries were collected from 14 FL teachers-in-training. The participants were divided into three different groups: traditional journalers (four individuals), dialogue journalers (two pairs), and group journalers (six students). Using the theoretical framework for communities of inquiry created by (Rourke, L., Anderson, T., Archer, W., Garrison, D.R., 2001. Assessing social presence in asynchronous, text-based computer conferences. Journal of Distance Education 14, 51–70), the discourse from each of these discussions was coded and analyzed to investigate changes in social presence in conjunction with the technological tools used to link the communities. Results suggest that while paired and group journalers produced more discourse than the traditional journalers, social presence trends vary across each type of journaling, and each group co-constructs their social presence differently.