Week 4 Reading : Language Learner Behavior in a Virtual Environment

Roed, J. (2003). Language learner behaviour in a virtual environment. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 16(2-3), 155-172.

Frankly speaking, I haven’t thought of that the study about the changes of learners’ behavior could be conducted in an effective and interesting way as it is showed in this paper. In this study, the author analyzes students’ online dialogues in a language task. The target is to find out how online communication can affect learners’ behavior.


Through detailed analysis, the author concludes students’ behavior and made comparison between their performance in actual classroom and that in a virtual environment. The result is inspiring. In the cases of Tom, Linda and Julie, they are students who are active participants in the online work, which would never happen in their regular classroom. They probably well benefit from this computer based language learning tasks. Thus, to some extent, online communication could give shy and introvert language students a more comfortable place to talk and comment. If designed and adopted appropriately, programs based on CALL could become quite useful in students’ language learning, especially in helping students with high anxiety to achieve better results.


Besides, in the discussion, the author mentions that it would be an interesting study to see whether this higher level of online participation from shy students could be transferred back to their regular classroom. I thought this following study is important and worth of efforts, as if this kind of transformation could be fulfilled, it means that students with high anxiety could have a way to solve their problems.

After reading this paper, I ever thought of conducting computer-based language tasks among my students and also recording their performance and making similar comparison. Maybe some changes would happen.