A Study Of Non-English Majors' Learning Through Conversation In English Culture MOOCs

In College English Curriculum Requirements(2007),the Ministry of Education listed “intercultural communication” as one of the main contents of teaching,and listed “improving comprehensive cultural literacy” as the main teaching goal.It specifically proposed in its “curriculum provision” that the cultivation of students' cultural qualities and international cultural knowledge should be considered when designing a college English course.Different from English majors,non-English majors do not have courses such as British and American Literature and An Outline Introduction to British and America by reason of limited class hour.Therefore,in the era of interweaving of eastern and western cultures,how to eliminate misunderstandings of cultural ideology,remove the barriers of cultural differences,and improve the effectiveness of college English culture teaching are particularly important.Since 2012,various MOOCs have been launched all over the world.Especially FutureLearn,not only encourages learners to interact with peers,also encourages learners to interact with learning contents,hoping to enable learners to learn through conversations.Its emergence has provided golden opportunities for non-English majors to learn English culture.This research takes an English culture course Exploring English: Shakespeare from FutureLearn as an example to explore Chinese non-English majors' learning through conversation in English culture MOOCs by answering the following three questions:1)To what extent do non-English majors interact with each other in the forum discussions?2)What types of questions proposed by the course team for learners to discuss would trigger more discussions among non-English majors?3)How is the conversation quality of non-English majors?According to the research questions,social network analytic software UCINET6 and NetDraw are used to analyze the extent of non-English majors' interaction in the forum discussions;referring to Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives in cognitive domain,the researcher has classified the questions proposed by the course team in each section and analyzed what types of questions would trigger more discussions among participants through calculating the amount of participants' discussions on certain question types;through the interactive analysis model proposed by Gunawardner,the researcher has analyzed the interaction quality of participants and explored participants' knowledge construction.In this study,72 Chinese non-English majors from two classes at a foreign language university in Chongqing have participated in the 6-week Exploring English: Shakespeare learning.Research data include the frequency of conversations(publications,replies,likes,etc.)between the course team and participants and that of conversations between participants and their fellow learners during the whole period of learning,questions proposed by the course team in 81 sections,and data of 24 participants' discussions on the questions(the 24 participants are randomly selected from the 72),and the contents of the 24 participants' discussions.The main findings are as follows:1)Participants are closely connected and highly interacted with each other in the learning community,but the strong interaction lies in the high involvement of the course team.The conversations made by non-English majors are mainly based on questions proposed by the course team.Meanwhile,the course team have interacted actively with participants and have actively answered questions and doubts for the participants,playing a crucial role in activating the learning community.2)Participants actively participate in the discussions of the questions proposed by the course organizers.Among the 6 types of questions,knowledge-oriented questions and synthesis-oriented questions have triggered more discussions among the participants,while open-ended questions and application-oriented questions have triggered the least discussions.3)Non-English majors' knowledge construction mainly stays at the first phase,namely,participants share various information and opinions with each other and describe the topics discussed,while few of the participants reach a higher phase of knowledge construction.Through exploring non-English majors' learning through conversation in English culture MOOCs,to some extent,this study provides constructive references for the subsequent development of non-English majors' English culture cultivation and the establishment of English culture MOOCs in the information age.