English 895 Blog Entry 1: A comparative study of modalities in a collaborative online assignment

Ciekanski, Maud and Thierry Chanier. "Developing Online Multimodal Verbal Communication To Enhance The Writing Process In An Audio-Graphic Conferencing Environment." Recall 20.2 (2008): 162-182. Academic Search Complete. Web. 21 May 2012.

Maud Ciekanski and Thierry Chanier share their findings from a methodological study that tracked the use of multimodal verbal communication in an audio-graphic synchronous environment (AGSE). Both L1 and L2 participants collaborated in a variety of modes (textual, spoken, iconic, graphic, and spatial) to produce an online text document, using a variety of modalities: word processor, text chat, whiteboard, audio, vote, and others. The purpose of the article is to provide a better understanding of the features of these modalities and their roles in a collaborative online writing process.

Ciekanski and Chanier point out that, in verbal communication, speakers make choices about the best way to represent meaning (168). Online environments give users a limited set of options for making meaning, and they wish to track the use of those options and their roles in the writing process (Ciekanski and Chanier 168-169). They describe the coding system used to track the use of certain modalities and discuss their findings. They point out that, throughout the collaborative writing process, audio conference was used the most (Ciekanski and Chanier 173). They determined the reason it was favored was its speed and ease, affording a “more ‘synchronous’” experience than text chat (Ciekanski and Chanier 173). Text chat and audio were used most often to navigate roadblocks in the writing process and to prewrite and edit (Ciekanski and Chanier 174 and 176). For L2 learners, audio was actually used at times to produce a first draft of the written work (Ciekanski and Chanier 178).

They discovered that, for the group participants, the more difficult the task, the more modalities were used in the process (Ciekanski and Chanier 178). They conclude that intermodality, or the combined use of audio, text chat, and others, promotes the writing process and facilitates collaboration among participants (Ciekanski and Chanier 175 and 178). The use of different modalities throughout the process also enabled learners of different abilities to participate in different ways, further promoting the level of collaboration (Ciekanski and Chanier  175).

I would recommend this article for anyone interested in focusing their pedagogy project on a collaborative writing assignment that utilizes different modalities in the process (text chat, video or audio conferencing, whiteboard, etc). It may also benefit anyone who is interested in the exploring the similarities and differences between different modalities as they are used in the writing process. For my pedagogy project, (for now) I’m interested in the role audio plays in online education, the writing process, and collaboration, so I found the emphasis on audio conferencing and the affordances of this modality particularly notable.