Encouraging language development through an online community: lessons learnt from an action research project

This chapter provides an account of a classroom teacher's experience as she identifies a problem she has encountered in her classroom and then takes systematic steps to create a solution. Through this process of teacher inquiry, or action research as described later, she experiments using a social media tool to encourage English language interactions between her Japanese exchange students. Students can contribute to the social media platform by responding to teachers' posts and links, posting on a public board, sending private messages to the teacher, uploading content and embedding video. Students' personal interest in "sharing" can be harnessed to encourage the development of language by using the target language to negotiate meaning with their classmates while also building a sense of community. The learning theory "Communities of Practice" (CoP), as introduced by J. Lave and E. C. Wenger, is used to explore how learning occurs in an online learning community.