Harmony through disharmony in online communication : an investigation of rapport management in discussion forums from a perspective of situated learning
This thesis investigates how people build and maintain rapport or harmony in interpersonal relations in the context of language learningârelated forums in two websites, Japan Reference and Reddit. In the intercultural contexts of these fora, the participants negotiate their beliefs and values about communication alongside learning language, which I suggest is a part of what they learn through the forum activities. The thesis aims to answer the question of what aspects of their language use enable them to build rapport for better experiences in online fora by examining the interactions in Learning Japanese in Japan Reference and /r/Languagelearning in Reddit, drawing on the rapport management model (Spencer-Oatey, 2008b) and some ideas about social learning from the model of situated learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). Herringâs (2004) computer-mediated discourse analysis was applied as the main methodology. I collected 753 threads from Learning Japanese and 832 threads from /r/Languagelearning, which were posted between January 2011 and December 2014. These threads were analysed by quantitative and qualitative methods: (1) I identified the recurrent use of expressions using the two corpora
Sato, Ami
Harmony through disharmony in online communication : an investigation of rapport management in discussion forums from a perspective of situated learning. This thesis investigates how people build and maintain rapport or harmony in interpersonal relations in the context of language learningârelated forums in two websites, Japan Reference and Reddit. In the intercultural contexts of these fora, the participants negotiate their beliefs and values about communication alongside learning language, which I suggest is a part of what they learn through the forum activities. The thesis aims to answer the question of what aspects of their language use enable them to build rapport for better experiences in online fora by examining the interactions in Learning Japanese in Japan Reference and /r/Languagelearning in Reddit, drawing on the rapport management model (Spencer-Oatey, 2008b) and some ideas about social learning from the model of situated learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). Herringâs (2004) computer-mediated discourse analysis was applied as the main methodology. I collected 753 threads from Learning Japanese and 832 threads from /r/Languagelearning, which were posted between January 2011 and December 2014. These threads were analysed by quantitative and qualitative methods: (1) I identified the recurrent use of expressions using the two corpora
harmony online communication investigation rapport management discussion forum perspective situate learning investigates people build maintain rapport harmony interpersonal relation context language_learn relate forum website japan reference intercultural context forum participant negotiate belief_value communication alongside learn_language suggest part learn forum activity aim_answer question aspect language_use enable build rapport well experience online fora examine interaction learning japanese japan reference person draw rapport management model spencer oatey idea social learn model situate learning computer_mediated discourse_analysis apply main methodology collect thread learning japanese thread post thread analyse quantitative_qualitative method identify recurrent use expression use corpus