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ONLINE LEARNING CLOSE UP: There may be more opportunity for informal exchanges in study groups and with face-to-face tuition The tutor in this online tutorial is represented by the red circle marked T, the researcher by the yellow circle marked O and the students by the green circles numbered 1-5. The different coloured lines show the language being used: blue = English, pink = German, and purple = mixed language. The students are practising a structured dialogue working in pairs. Each line represents verbal communication between participants. You can see, in this online tutorial, that students are talking predominantly in German. A comparable activity is taking place in the face-to-face classroom. The tutor is more in the background than in the online example. The students are able to take part in the activity with very little further input needed. While most of the interaction is in German, some between the students is in English. 22 The Linguist JUNE/JULY © ISTOCKPHOTO the same opportunities for interactive language learning as face-to-face tuition. We recorded and transcribed three face-to-face and nine online tutorials, and then analysed the transcribed data, using software for analysing qualitative data (QSR N6). The data indicated that lively, communicative interaction was taking place in all online and face-to-face classrooms. There were, however, some differences. Our coding structure provided information on the nature of the spoken interaction. We looked at the amount of German and English being used. We became aware that there were times during the tutorial when more English was spoken face-to-face than online. This may have been due to the nature of the activity at that time, but it seems likely that there are increased opportunities face-to-face for unstructured asides and general social talk in English, whereas the online environment is more structured. There was evidence of a more managed and controlled environment by the tutor online, and students needed support with ICT queries at times, as expected. It was unclear whether the more managed structure was a result of tutor style or the newness of the medium for some of the students, or whether the tutor needed to spell things out in greater detail because of the lack of non-verbal communication. Tutor talk was more dominant online, while student talk was significantly higher face-to-face. Online, there was more evidence of one-to-one exchanges initiated by the tutor, but face-to-face, student talk was more likely to be directed to the whole group and to be more spontaneous with less prompting. Reasons for these differences may go beyond the tutorial mode itself, including tutor style, turn-taking netiquette and the restrictions of non-verbal communication. We felt it would be extremely useful to compare a single task in the two learning environments and decided on an individual role-play activity, which we looked at in one face-to-face and two online classrooms. The main aim was to enable students to talk as much as possible to each other in German, maximising learner involvement. All three tutorials indicated a similar pattern of language use during the task: German is the main language used, with some English, particularly for clarification of the task. However, individual tutor style seemed to have a significant influence on the amount of target language used and the degree of independence given to students. There was some evidence supporting previous findings regarding the higher incidence of classroom management in the online environment. The research showed that it is, indeed, possible to provide learners with a rich and interactive language learning experience in the online classroom. There is plenty of opportunity for target-language use by tutors and learners. The online classroom seems to result in tighter management of the tutorial by the tutor. The face-to-face classroom appears to offer greater opportunity for unstructured language use. Time will tell whether these differences are inherent to the media or simply tutors' and students' greater confidence in the traditional face-to-face classroom. Co-authors: Annette Duensing, Barbara Heins and Ursula Stickler. There were times during the tutorial when more English was spoken face-toface than online www.iol.org.uk