【Research Brief】

Computer-Mediated Asynchronous Discussions
on the International Virtual Exchange
Heather Woodward
Abstract
In Spring 2020, several Rikkyo University discussion lecturers incorporated computer-mediated asynchronous tasks
into their courses. The purpose of incorporating these tasks was to help students achieve the goals of the class: (a)increase their spoken fluency, (b) practice using formulaic discussion and communication phrases, and (c) generatecontent or ideas related to the topic of discussion. In the future, Rikkyo lecturers might wish to incorporate selfstudy discussion tasks in the International Virtual Exchange (IVE) Project. The exchange allows Japanese students
to discuss topics with university students from other countries. The forums are free, sponsored by a Japanese
government kaken grant, and monitored by lecturers whose classes are involved in IVE Project (Hagley & Cotter,2020). Previous students of the discussion class at Rikkyo University reported having difficulty fully formulating theirideas in English in the classroom, but they wished to engage with the international community. Incorporating suchtasks for out-of-class assignments might help students (a) achieve the course goals to a greater extent, (b) assist
in helping students more fully express their ideas in the face-to-face discussion class, and (c) attain some of theirinstrumental motivations for studying English. These reasons are explored in more detail and avenues for potential
research are discussed.
Keywords: CALL, asynchronous, task, computer-mediated, discussion

Introduction
The discussion class at Rikkyo University is required for all first-year students. The course isdesigned to (a) improve students’ spoken fluency, (b) build discussion skills (e.g., giving opinions,giving different viewpoints, and asking to join the discussion), and (c) increase communication skills(e.g., paraphrasing, asking for repetition, and checking comprehension). Pre-coronavirus pandemic,
the discussion class was flipped insofar as students prepared to discuss the topic by reading thepassage in the textbook. Students had weekly reading passages on relevant topics such as theglobalization of Japanese culture, learning a foreign language, or entering the workforce to build
content knowledge of the topic before class. However, in the 2020 Spring semester, administrators
moved all academic courses online due to the pandemic. As a result, many professors and lecturers
adapted, modified, and changed their courses to accommodate new online environment.
University courses utilized software such as Zoom or Google Hangouts to conduct 40- to 50min online lessons in lieu of the pre-pandemic 100-min face-to-face lessons as there were concerns
regarding students’ internet connectivity and bandwidth. To increase student discussion, lecturers
assigned self-study tasks such as participating in online discussion forums and chat rooms with
their classmates and writing online journals. Students were not only reading the weekly passage,
but also engaging with the topics in the textbook in computer-mediated asynchronous tasks with
their classmates. However, students from previous semesters have expressed a desire speak English
outside of the classroom and to use English to interact with the global community. They have also
stated that they felt that they could not fully express their ideas in the face-to-face discussions.
One opportunity to engage Japanese students in intercultural communication is through the81

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International Virtual Exchange (IVE) Project. Hagley, a research fellow at Hosei University, leads
the IVE Project (International Virtual Exchange Project [IVEProject], 2020). The IVE Project brings
students together from around the globe to participate in asynchronous online discussions. Lecturers
monitor student output in the forums and can assign grades according to students’ participation(IVEProject, 2020). Universities and colleges participating in the IVE Project are from many countries
including Colombia, Taiwan, Korea, Brazil, and more (IVEProject, 2020). Over 34 universities andcolleges in Japan have participated to date (IVEProject, 2020). Hagley stated that students involvedin the virtual exchange produce videos, post images, and even exchange recipes as a way to sharecultural information (E. Hagley, personal communication, September 17, 2020). These tasks might beparticularly useful for students in Rikkyo’s English discussion class as textbook units include living
abroad, the globalization of Japanese culture, foreign language learning, and foreign customs.
Affordances and limitations can be categorized according to psycho-social, linguistic, andtechnological domains; however, these domains overlap. Psycho-social benefits to incorporating IVE
Project include the potential effects of IVE Project on students’ second language (L2) motivation,international posturing, and Willingness to Communicate (WTC). Linguistic affordances andlimitations include effects of expanding pre-task planning on language proficiency and other aspects
of discussion performance. Technological affordances include developing greater technology skills
whereas technological limitations include a lack of online access or connectivity issues. Readersinterested in a discussion on the affordances and limitations of incorporating the IVE Project as selfstudy assignments in their English discussion classes might find the following research brief useful.

Discussion
Motivation of Japanese Students
Yashima (2000) posited that international posturing explains Japanese students’ attitude
regarding foreign language learning and the international community. International posturing
captures a propensity for Japanese students to relate themselves to the world community rather thanany one specific English-speaking country such as England or the US (Yashima, 2000). International
posturing consisted of four components: international friendship orientation, interest in international
vocation/activities, interest in foreign affairs, and intergroup approach-avoidance tendency (Yashima,2002). Japanese students with international posturing view themselves as linked to the global
community, have concerns for worldwide affairs, openness to different cultures, willingness to gooverseas, and hold a keenness to work together with foreign people (Yashima, 2009). She statedthat this concept of international posturing influences students’ motivations and that their motivationinfluences their English proficiency (Yashima, 2002). Yashima (2002) found that international
posturing directly tied to students’ WTC. Students who exhibit a WTC actively seek out opportunities
to communicate in their L2.
Hagley and Cotter (2019) conducted a survey on participants’ opinions after 8 weeks of using IVE
Project. In the survey, 79% Japanese participants (n = 594) felt that their L2 was more important after
IVE Project than before IVE Project and 77% of Japanese participants stated that they have greaterinterest in other countries because of IVE Project (Hagley & Cotter, 2019). Japanese participants (n= 264) stated that IVE Project provided “a sense of intercultural understanding” and 227 Japaneseparticipants stated that IVE Project provided “a sense of participating in the international community”(Hagley & Cotter, 2019). Only 31 Japanese participants stated that an increase of motivation was a82

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benefit from participating in IVE Project (Hagley & Cotter, 2019). From Hagley and Cotter’s (2019)study, the term ‘increased motivation’ was ambiguous. It might mean increased motivation to (a)study their L2, (b) communicate with foreigners, (c) learn about other cultures, and so on.
Hagley and Cotter (2019) investigated the common problems or complaints with using IVE
Project. Of the 594 Japanese participants surveyed, 257 participants experienced no complaints
or problems (Hagley & Cotter, 2019). Of the participants who reported problems or complaints,
technological issues were the most problematic (Hagley & Cotter, 2019). Japanese participants (n= 216) stated that they had system issues including uploading photos as well as other tech issues(Hagley & Cotter, 2019). The second major complaint was 51 participants were not satisfied by otherparticipants’ efforts (Hagley & Cotter, 2019). For example, the 51 Japanese participants felt thatinternational participants were not replying fast enough or that at times no one would reply to theircomment or question (Hagley & Cotter, 2019). Researchers suggested that this complaint might bea positive indication that participants wanted a greater number of exchanges and replies from theirpartners (Hagley & Cotter, 2019). It also underlined a shortcoming with asynchronous tasks in a
discussion forum. In synchronous discussions, the likelihood of long wait times and no replies would
be much lower.
In Hagley and Thomson’s (2017) survey, Japanese participants of IVE Project were also irritatedby the few replies and posts from Columbian students, who due to technological issues (e.g., internet
connectivity and lack of training on how to use the forum), were not participating as much as theJapanese and Taiwanese students (Hagley & Thomson, 2017). However, the researchers createdworkshops designed to help educate teachers on how to use the IVE Project so that when the teachers
teach their students how to use IVE Project, students might encounter less technical issues (Hagley& Cotter, 2020). In Hagley and Thomson’s study on IVE Project, students also stated that students felt
the exchange was time-consuming because they had to access the virtual exchange at least two times
a week to write comments and replies (Hagley & Thomson, 2017). In Hagley and Cotter’s (2019)study, only 11 participants wrote that IVE Project was time-consuming. Therefore, participants ingeneral do not report problems or complaints, but when they do, it most likely relates to technologicalissues or the effects of the forum’s asynchronous quality and not due to any negative socio-culturalexperiences that participants encountered.
A possible research study would be to conduct a pre-treatment survey and post-treatment
survey using a pre-existing survey to determine the extent to which participants’ exhibit Yashima’s(2002) attitude of international posturing comprising international friendship orientation, interest
in international vocation/activities, interest in foreign affairs, and intergroup approach-avoidance
tendency. One group of students would participate in IVE Project, but the other group would not,but would still participate in the surveys. Researchers should collect data on the amount of individual
participation in IVE Project to cross-examine whether participants with higher levels of international
posturing correlate to higher number of posts, log ins, and typed words. Additionally, an interesting
avenue would be to collect data on the amount of words participants contribute to in-class discussions
to figure out whether the amount they participate on the forum correlates to the amount they
participate in face-to-face discussions on the same topics.
An important aspect of the study would be participants’ view of IVE Project. In other words,
to what extent do participants believe that participating in IVE Project equates to participating in
the international community and to what extent does participating in the international community
equate to helping them achieve their goals (e.g., traveling, working for an international company,and making friends with foreigners). This survey should also include questions indicating the extent

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to which students feel motivated to increase their L2 proficiency (i.e., more specifically what aspectsof L2 students feel motivated to increase) as a result of either interacting with IVE Project (i.e.,
for treatment group) or hypothetically interacting with IVE Project (i.e., for non-treatment group).
Another avenue would also be to investigate the feelings that students experience when they have IVE
Project tech problems, slow responses by other participants, or no replies to their messages.
Adding a qualitative, longitudinal aspect to the study by asking participants to journal their
feelings about their experiences using IVE Project over the course of the 8 weeks would be helpful
in understanding participants’ thoughts during these experiences. For example, from the journal,
researchers should gather how many Japanese participants experienced no replies or long delays in
response times. Additionally, researchers might ask participants to reflect on reasons they believe
for receiving no replies as well as strategies that they employed to cope with it. Research might help
lecturers better understand ways in which they can help participants who do not receive as many
replies on IVE Project. Motivation is a dynamic, multifaceted, and complex construct (Dörnyei &Ushioda, 2013). Therefore, collecting different types of data over an extended period might provide
a deeper understanding of the effect of using IVE Project on students’ L2 motivation, WTC, andinternational posturing.

Pre-Task Planning Effects on Discussion
During in-class discussions, lecturers follow the stages of Present, Practice, and Produce (PPP).
In addition to PPP, there is an extra production stage (i.e., PPPP). Before the first and second
production stages, there is an opportunity for pre-task planning. Students have roughly 5–7 min toprepare their ideas about the discussion topics with their partner. By incorporating IVE Project as
out-of-class assignments, students have the opportunity to engage in an additional pre-task planningstage. Their engagement with IVE Project might have positive effects on their in-class discussion task
performance. Therefore, another research avenue would be the extent to which IVE Project might
increase L2 proficiency and in-class discussion performance thereby possibly helping students toachieve the course aim to a greater extent.
Following Levelt’s (1989) model of speech production, humans engaging in producing speech
first start by conceptualizing (i.e., idea generation), then formulating (i.e., lexical and grammaticalforms selection), and lastly articulating (i.e., vocal cords and mouth movements use). They monitor
their performance via their speech comprehension system to make conceptual, formulative, or
articulative adjustments (Levelt, 1989). Understanding the rationale behind pre-planning’s ability to
improve discussion performance starts with humans’ limited working memory (Ellis, 2009). Working
memory means human’s capacity for holding information in human consciousness actively as humans
engage in daily cognitive tasks (Carruthers, 2013). Limited working memory might cause students’difficulties in focusing on meaning and form simultaneously (Ellis, 2009). Pre-planning lessens theburdens of limited working memory, which helps students to recall linguistic resources that have notbeen made automatic (Ellis, 2009). Additionally, lessening the burden of limited working memory
might help students focus on other aspects of their L2 proficiency and task performance (Stroud,2019).
Ellis (2009) categorized different types of planning: rehearsal, strategic, and online. Rehearsal
pre-task planning is defined as performing the task to completion before doing the main task (Ellis,2009). Regarding rehearsal pre-task planning of spoken tasks, students engage in conceptualizing,
formulating, articulating, and monitoring. Strategic planning is defined as planning the content of84

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what to say as well as how to say it, but not performing the task (Ellis, 2009). Strategic pre-planningfor spoken tasks includes conceptualizing, formulating, and monitoring, but not articulating. Students
can strategically plan for a discussion by writing key points and that would be categorized as strategic.
Online planning is defined as planning during and throughout the task (i.e., students are given
nearly an unlimited amount of time to complete the task so they can plan as much as they want). For
online planning, students have plenty of time to plan within the task so they might devote attentional
resources to conceptualizing, formulating, and monitoring stages (Yuan & Ellis, 2003).
The type of planning students undertake for IVE Project tasks is categorized as online planning.
They plan during and throughout the IVE Project task. In past discussion classes, students havecomplained that they cannot fully express their ideas during the face-to-face discussions. In termsof Levelt’s (1989) model, students have an idea of what they want to say, but they have difficulty
formulating their idea into English. They often add that they need more vocabulary and occasionally,
they state that they wished they could use more complex grammatical structures to express theirideas. On IVE Project, students have the ability to look up vocabulary words and translate using
applications or websites on the internet. Additionally, they have access to viewpoints of students inother countries if they need help thinking of different ideas.
Yet, IVE Project tasks can also be treated as pre-task planning (i.e., online strategic planning)for in-class, face-to-face discussions. If discussion lecturers ask students to discuss topics that they
will cover in the class on the IVE Project, students will be engaging in conceptualizing, formulating,and monitoring (i.e., cognitive processes that might lift the cognitive load when they do in-classdiscussions with their classmates). In this sense, IVE Project tasks can be categorized as online
strategic pre-task planning for the face-to-face discussions. An avenue of research into IVE Project
would be questioning the extent to which students believe that they can fully formulate their ideason the IVE Project and to what extent they are using the ideas from IVE Project in their face-toface discussions. Yuan and Ellis (2003) stated that online planning allows students to closely attend
to conceptualizing, formulating, and monitoring so students might feel that they have time to fully
express their ideas.
IVE Project might provide a space for developing more complex ideas on the topics coveredin discussion class, but if students want to use ideas from the forum, they would have to recall
and re-formulate for in-class discussion as there might be an extended period of time between
strategic online planning and the face-to-face performance. Yuan and Ellis (2003) noted that for
pre-task planning that occurs right before the task, students would probably remember theirconceptualizations, but not more thorough pre-planned formulations. Students would mostly
paraphrase their ideas from IVE Project interactions rather than be able to recall word for word.
Therefore, Yuan and Ellis stated that increased Complexity, Fluency, and Accuracy (CAF) is a mostly
the result of the effort that students devoted to conceptualization and to a slight extent, formulation,
especially in terms of grammatical morphology. The content from IVE Project would therefore not bein students’ working memory, but would be stored in their long-term memory.
From my own informal observations of adding online asynchronous discussion forums and chatrooms, students had a perceptible increase in their lexical complexity in terms of sophistication (i.e.,rareness of the words) and it might be due to this increase in lexical sophistication that there havebeen a noticeable increase of negotiations of meaning during Zoom meetings. Yet, Suzuki (2017)
examined 28 studies for the effect of pre-tasking planning on CAF and found that the effectiveness on
pre-task planning have been mixed and therefore, contradict literature that has been widely acceptedin the field. For example, some studies stated that it increased a combination of CAF measures85

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whereas others indicated that it did not increase these measures. Suzuki noted that the majority ofpre-task planning studies that she synthesized did not entail specific guidance on how to plan (i.e.,
what students should do during their planning time) nor what they actually do with their planning
time. Thus, there were few verbal protocol analyses in the field to gain insights into the students’cognitive processes and the complexity that pre-task planning entails.
Stroud (2019) also wrote that there have been major issues with the research to-date on
pre-task planning. One problem is that the vast majority of studies have monologic tasks (e.g.,presentations) rather than dialogic (e.g., group discussions or group problem-solving tasks) andtherefore, researchers cannot conclude that the results for monologic tasks would be the same as
dialogic because students in dialogic tasks attend to more processes (Stroud, 2019). These additional
processes include feedback, turn-taking, and negotiations of meaning. These dialogic characteristics
cause more complexity in tasks which might hinder students’ output (Ellis, 2003). Thus, Stroud
stated that the field needs more case studies to uncover the effect of pre-task planning on dialogic
performance. Another issue is the effects of planning can differ according to their proficiency, so
the field needs more case studies that discuss different proficiencies within the same classroom(Kawauchi, 2005; Lynch & Maclean, 2000). Lastly, Stroud stated that previous studies only focusedon the linguistic aspects of CAF; however, participation and interaction should also be measured.
In Stroud’s study, he measured words spoken and turns taken by students to assess the effects ofplanning on participation.
Stroud’s (2019) study was the only research study in the field that I could find that measured theeffects of planning specifically for group discussions. In Stroud’s study, he investigated the immediate
effects of three conditions: rehearsal, strategic planning, or no planning on group discussion task
performance on 24 Japanese university students with an average TOEIC score of 450. Additionally,
he investigated whether there were any differences between participants who contributed a lot to
discussions versus participants who did not contribute as much. He measured the speech rate (i.e.,words per minute) of high versus low participators to determine significant differences occurred influency across three discussions. For the strategic planning, students wrote their ideas on the topic
for 10 min, but were not allowed to discuss it with others. For rehearsal, students were paired withpartners from a different discussion group and practiced discussing the topic for 10 min. The design
was counterbalanced so each participant participated in all three conditions.
In Stroud’s (2019) study, planning outperformed the no-planning condition. The planning
condition had a medium effect sizes for words spoken, speech rate A (i.e., untrimmed), speech rate
B (i.e., trimmed), pauses, reasons per turn, and reference clauses per 100 words (Stroud, 2019). For
rehearsal, there was significant (a) increase in words, (b) increase speech rates, and (c) decreasein pausing (Stroud, 2019). No significant effect for rehearsal compared to no-planning condition
was found for accuracy, complexity, discourse complexity (Stroud, 2019). For strategic planning,participants had significantly (a) fewer pauses, (b) less reference clauses, and (c) gave more reasonsin each turn. No significant effect on accuracy, complexity, or participation was found. Planning had
a significant effect on low participators for more reasons per turn, less reference clauses, and more
words per turn (Stroud, 2019).
A potential avenue of research would be to mimic the design and measurements that Stroud(2019) used, but compare the extent to which IVE Project’s online strategic planning effects in-classdiscussions. Researchers can compare participants with IVE Project online strategic planning toparticipants without IVE Project. Additional measurements might be the amount of negotiations of
meaning episodes and whether there is an increase for other types of discussion skills (e.g., follow-

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up questions, examples, sources of information, and viewpoints). On its own, IVE Project might help
students to improve CAF and discussion performance, but I think researchers at Rikkyo University
ought to collect some evidence that IVE Project can also assist in helping students with performancesof in-class discussions to a greater extent than without IVE Project.

Conclusion
In conclusion, this research brief covers the literature in the field on aspects of motivation andpre-task planning that could potential justify using IVE Project in discussion classes. More workneeds to be done in creating research questions and designing the study. Previous students of the
discussion class have stated that they have difficulty fully formulating their ideas in English duringgroup discussions, but they wished to use English outside of the classroom to engage with theinternational community. By incorporating the IVE Project for take home assignments, lecturersof the discussion class might help students (a) achieve the course goals to a greater extent (e.g.,develop strategic competence, spoken fluency, and use of discussion skills), (b) assist in helping
students more fully express their ideas in the face-to-face discussion class, and (c) attain some of theirinstrumental motivations for studying English.

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