Are you polite on discussion boards?
September 3rd, 2009
How do people interact on discussion boards in an education setting? In my experience, people are much more polite and restrained in classroom discussion boards than on more general boards on the web. It turns out that politeness is actually a construct studied by sociolinguists. They define it in the context of discussion boards as phrasing statements to show respect and esteem for others.
Diane Schallert and her colleagues have been investigating politeness on discussion boards, and in an article in Computers & Education look at relationships between discourse functions, synchronous/ asynchronous sessions, and politeness. They analyzed 3 synchronous and 3 asynchronous discussions of a class of 24 students. Of some note, the class was a graduate level psycholinguistics class and the students all had 12 face-to-face meetings. The psycholinguistic class content is important because these students may be more aware of their language use than the average student. The in-person meetings are important to note because these conversations all happened between people who also have face-to-face contact, which may influence how polite they are on discussion boards. The researchers examined a total of 1475 messages.
Before looking at politeness, the researchers looked at discourse functions in synchronous versus asynchronous discussions. They report that communication in the asynchronous discussions was more formal and serious. 65% of their moves focused on content, versus 58% for the synchronous sessions. The asynchronous chunks also tended to be longer. The synchronous sessions contained more social comments (14% versus 5% for synchronous).
Interestingly, when the researchers turned to politeness, they found that students were equally polite, using similar numbers of polite moves in both synchronous and asynchronous sessions. Approximately 56% of the discourse chunks across both types of sessions contained politeness moves. That seems to confirm my impression that students are relatively polite on classroom boards.
Like a lot of research, this certainly raises more questions:
- Would similar results hold in different content areas?
- Would you get similar results if students did not meet face to face?
- What is the opposite of politeness? Harshness? What was the frequency of those comments?
- Is there any relationship between politeness and learning? Yang et al (2006) in the Yearbook of the National Reading Conference suggested politeness might interfere with learning.
Schallert, D., Chiang, Y., Park, Y., Jordan, M., Lee, H., Janne Cheng, A., Rebecca Chu, H., Lee, S., Kim, T., & Song, K. (2009). Being polite while fulfilling different discourse functions in online classroom discussions Computers & Education, 53 (3), 713-725 DOI: 10.1016/j.compedu.2009.04.009
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