An ethnographic study on the development of online academic language learning communities in a college-level adjunct ESL program

This one-year ethnographic case study seeks to understand how technology mediated teaching and learning take place in a content-based college level English as a Second Language (ESL) adjunct program.;The study found two models of relating to virtual space: extracting information from it as a "warehouse" versus occupying it as a "community center." For a virtual space to be perceived and utilized as a community center, interactions in this space need to be multi-directional and must resemble those in the physical "community center" of the classroom. It discovered that building an Online Academic Language Community (OALC) was conducive to the students' development of scholarly discoursal identity and of college level academic language.;The findings revealed that building a power-with academic relationship among students and between instructor and students in an OALC enabled the students to take ownership of their online space. Developing such a power-with relationship and a sense of ownership enabled the students to shape one another's discoursal identity by co-constructing academic language in discussions on content area knowledge. Furthermore, this study extends previous research findings by discovering that in adopting a social-scientific perspective in this co-construction process, multicultural students were able to not only take a dual position between their personal religious values and the course promoted values, but also learn to transcend both sets of values to eventually internalize their new scholarly identity.;It was found that the instructor's role as a discussion facilitator and moderator was of crucial importance in successful student interaction in the OALC. How instructors approached technology was a conscious choice based on their beliefs about technology and their personal convictions about education, not on their unfamiliarity with technology. It is also discovered that in university settings where access to technology was relatively equal, how the students approached technology influenced their academic language and content-area knowledge learning in important ways. The students' approaches to technology were impacted by their personal educational and technological histories, beliefs about, and attitudes towards technology.