Complexity and Interaction across Oral, Written and Online Discourse

Most research that observed online discussions compared them to either written (e.g., Hewing& Coffin, 2007) or oral discourse (e.g., Joiner et al., 2008), never compiling the three modalities, and they did not provide comprehensive results regarding both form and Interaction. Academic essays and oral debates have been widely consumed in the EAP classroom. However, the effectiveness of synchronous online forums in the EFL academic classroom and their discourse features need to be compared to oral and written academic tasks simultaneously through a comprehensive analysis of both complexity, accuracy, and Interaction. The present study investigated the use of complex syntax, grammatical accuracy, and Interaction in the argumentative discourse of academic essays, oral debates, and synchronous online forums of EFL undergraduate students (N= 54) enrolled in a 12-week module of English for academic purposes. The methodology encompassed qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis. All data were qualitatively transcribed and coded. Then results were quantitatively calculated using ANOVA and post hoc t-tests to find the differences across tasks for each variable. Results revealed a higher impact of academic essays and synchronous online forums on syntactic complexity and grammatical accuracy than oral debates and a greater influence of online forums and oral debates than academic essays on interactional features. Synchronous online forums revealed the highest impact as a task combining both structure and Interaction. Pedagogical implications then highlighted how synchronous online forums could be used in the rhetoric and composition EFL classroom