Dawn Grimes-MacLellan 
(Center for Liberal Arts, Meiji Gakuin University, Japan)

 

Abstract: Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is often promoted as an exciting new educational medium that will be attractive to students. As it is commonly assumed that contemporary youth are as comfortable in virtual worlds as in face-to-face contexts, one might expect that a social presence naturally emerges within online educational environments that automatically generates student involvement and increasingly motivates them to actively participate in the ongoing online conversation. However, observations of a Skype EFL classroom at a Japanese university in which small groups of four or five students met with Philippine instructors twice a week over an academic year suggest that even among contemporary university students accustomed to an abundance of online communication platforms in their daily lives, the social presence of a virtual world cannot be taken for granted in online language-learning environments but must be actively managed. This paper discusses social presence in online educational environments and suggests ways in which teachers can actively frame instruction to harness the possibilities of CMC in foreign language contexts by creating both a meaningful and effective learning environment online.

 

Key words: English as a foreign language, computer-mediated communication, Skype, social presence, Japan