Ellipsis Marks in Interaction on Discussion Forums: The Case of Czech Pre-intermediate EFL Learners
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The aim of this paper is to introduce selected results of an analysis of pre-intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ interaction on asynchronous discussion forums. The findings are based on a learner corpus (299 postings within 8 discussion threads) compiled from two discussion tasks which were a part of a blended learning EFL course. The participants were Czech university students in the EFL course. Conversation analysis (CA) was conducted on the corpus. The inductive and emic nature of CA made it possible to uncover some specific mechanisms underlying the learners’ interaction on the forum. The results presented in this paper are related to non-verbal aspects of the learners’ interaction on the forum, particularly to the use of ellipsis marks (i.e. multiple dots). It was discovered that ellipsis marks were used for listing, transition, personal evaluation, referring to the previous posting and asking for response when taking leave, thus ranging from non-interactive uses functioning on a sentence level to highly interactive uses which co-constructed exchanges on the forum. |
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