The communicative environment of a synchronous online Russian lesson in Chinese groups

Full Text

Introduction

The most important scientific task of methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language (RFL) nowadays is to develop the basics of digital linguodidactics. This, on the one hand, would make it possible to use all the opportunities of modern information technologies, and on the other hand, could compensate for the limitations of the virtual environment including mediated and limited interaction between the subjects of the learning process (Rozina, 2004; Zheng et al., 2020; Cherkasova, 2021, etc.). Teachers, discussing the difficulties of the distance form of teaching, note that the mediated contact with students decreases the quality of the material taught and the degree of collective cooperation (Cherkasova, 2021). At the same time, teachers of Russian as a foreign language place certain hopes on new forms and ways of interaction in the digital environment, because effective integration of technologies in collaborative work and hybridization of synchronous and asynchronous communication of participants in the educational process can bring new opportunities for teaching Russian to foreigners (Lebedeva, 2022: 1342).

The role of productive educational communication in successful online Russian language learning can hardly be overestimated. On the one hand, on the general didactic level, modern educational concepts of constructivism and connectivism recognize the priority of social interaction between the counterparts of the educational process (see, for example: Mattar, 2018). Theoretical works on online learning also affirm the key role of the communication aspect in distance learning (Moore, 1997; Hou, Wu, 2011; Barri, 2020), which, according to some studies, may stand above other aspects such as curriculum content and technical implementation in importance (Garrison, 2020). On the other hand, on the particular didactic level, the communicative approach, which proclaims teaching communication to be the main goal and assumes that it could be achieved directly in the conditions of communication, has been the leading approach in foreign language teaching for decades (Passov, Kuzovleva, 2010). The traditional RFL methodology defines the lesson as a two-way dialogic process where teacher’s optimal behavior stimulates students' activities and creates an atmosphere of cooperation in the classroom (Dobrovolskaya, 1981). Therefore, it is really important that the teacher in the process of online teaching Russian as a foreign language forms the conditions for effective communication between all participants of the educational process, eliminates or minimizes the limitations imposed by the digital environment, using special methodological techniques.

In the context of teaching RFL, the communicative aspects of online learning of Chinese students in Russian universities are of particular interest. The relevance of this issue lies in the fact that Chinese students are the most representative group in Russian higher education: in 2012, an action plan was signed to develop Sino-Russian cooperation in the humanities, aimed at reaching 100 thousand students studying in partner countries (Luzyanin et al., 2020). In 2019 (i.e., before the epidemic), there were about 30,000 Chinese students in Russia (Luzyanin et al., 2020). At the same time, the online format remains popular for the Chinese students. It was widely implemented during the pandemic and is now used in universities in different organizational configurations (e.g., hybrid learning).

The specifics of Chinese students' communicative behavior related to cultural norms is of particular importance for the methodology of online RFL teaching, which is now developing in the framework of the communicative approach. As noted by the researchers of the PRC educational system, traditionally the leading role in the classroom is the role of the teacher. This is partly due to the fact that compared to Western countries and regions, China is a typical country with a high power distance (Hofstede, 2010). Cultural traditions in Chinese education prescribe absolute respect for teachers. The relations between teachers and students in the classroom are rather formal, and communication is characterized by standardization, rigor, and considerable distance. Outside the classroom, however, relationships can be less formal, the teacher can interact with students in a friendly way and give them more emotional support and encouragement.

Empirical studies on Chinese education confirm this. For example, they show that in Chinese secondary school teachers mostly dominate classroom communication, give relatively low emotional support in the classroom, and atmosphere in the classroom is generally characterized as formal and cautious (Zhang et al., 2021). Chinese students actively respond to the teacher's questions, follow his tasks and instructions, but communicate little with each other and do not participate in collaborative work, which may be a barrier to developing communication skills in RFL learning, especially online.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the experience of mass online learning in PRC universities was investigated, including the communicative learning environment and learners' behavioral patterns. There are works devoted to the communicative aspect of online learning, its measurement, as well as the analysis of the factors influencing its quality in the Chinese education system (Ge et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2020; Zhang, Guo, 2012). It is indicative that the scholars are focused on the teacher's communicative behavior (Li, Jiang, 2009; Wang, 2020). This indirectly confirms the idea that the Chinese educational system is centered on the teacher. Chinese researchers have also found that low levels of students’ engagement in the communicative environment of an online course in national education correlate with low learning outcomes (Zhu, 2021; Sun et al., 2022). On the contrary, online courses where the teacher forms and maintains a productive communicative environment and involves all the participants are more effective in terms of educational outcome. Researchers attribute this to the fact that online learning requires more effort and self-discipline from students, and it is difficult to maintain this alone. On the contrary, “socially present” students help and encourage each other, which ensures active participation and intensified work. Optimistic assessments of the online format impact on the effectiveness of the communicative environment are noteworthy: in the context of mass online learning, students proved to be more inclined to communicate with teachers, and this is due to the fact that physical distance makes it easier for the students to express themselves in a virtual learning environment (Be, Liu, 2020).

Since the main goal of the communicative approach is the formation and development of communication skills in Russian, it is necessary to develop methodological foundations for a productive communicative environment in online learning of the Russian language. One of the components of such an environment, according to researchers and methodologists, should be the so-called “social presence” of all participants in the learning process, created by the teacher in the online class and outside it in a special way ‒ with the help of certain pedagogical strategies and technologies. Under social presence we understand, following R. Garrison (Garrison et al., 2000: 94), the learners’ ability and readiness to project themselves socially and emotionally in virtual learning communication. In the aspect of RFL learning, this category is significant because the high level of social presence despite mediated learning, according to researchers, predicts learners' satisfaction with distance learning and provides the productive communicative learning environment necessary for RFL learning tasks (Gunawardena, Zittle, 1997; Richardson, Swan, 2003). In this paper, social presence is used as an operational concept to analyze the communicative environment of an online RFL lesson; its content is adapted to consider the specifics of teaching RFL in a digital environment.

The aim of the research is to describe the features of educational communication in Russian in Chinese groups and to develop a methodological framework for creating a productive communicative environment in synchronous online lessons, recognizing the specific students’ behavior.

Methods and materials

The research material was the corpus of recordings of synchronous online lessons on RFL RuTOC (Lebedeva et al., 2022). A sample was formed which included 10 practical lessons in RFL in groups of Chinese students from the spring semester of 2020 to the spring semester of 2022 in four different Russian higher education institutions was formed: Pushkin State Russian Language Institute, Lomonosov Moscow State University, MGIMO University, and Kosygin Russian State University. The level of students’ proficiency in the Russian language ranged from A2 to B2. The total duration of the audio in the sample was 15 h 51 min, and the volume of the subcorpus was 61 344 words.

All lessons were held on the Zoom video conferencing platform. Students and teachers were informed that the lessons were recorded.  The video recordings were transcribed, and each lesson was labeled by date, name of the institution, duration, number of participants, their educational level (e.g., pre-university or master's program), main topic, and approximate level of students' Russian language proficiency.

To achieve the goal of the study, content analysis of the selected material was applied in processing results with the help of Atlas.ti. Coding was based on a deductive approach (Bohn-Gettler, Olson, 2019: 5): at the first stage a list of codes was formed, based on the system proposed by L. Rourke, T. Anderson, D.R. Garrison, W. Archer (Rourke et al., 1999) and used in subsequent studies of the social presence construct. According to this system, efficiency of communicative learning environment is represented in three groups of students’ behavioral manifestations: a group of affective indicators connected with expressing feelings, emotions, humor, disclosure of personal information in Russian; a group of indicators of communication interactivity including questions, invitations to speak, speech acts of consent, gratitude, approval, cases of continuation, quotation or paraphrasing of another participant’s statement; a group of indicators of social presence, including etiquette speech acts, calling interlocutors by name, referring to the group as a whole, phatic communication without a learning goal.

The authors also applied elements of the inductive approach to content analysis. This allowed to expand the coding scheme and supplement the list with those manifested indicators of social presence, which were not taken into account in the original theoretical framework. In addition, the proposed markup system showed the roles of the participants in communication: teacher or student. The final version of the markup system for social presence indicators is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Markup system of synchronous online RFL lesson communicative environment

Group of indicators	Indicator description	Markup code
Learner and teacher strategies to maintain interactivity of learning communication	Appreciation expressed by the teacher	Appreciation_Teacher
	Appreciation expressed by a student	Appreciation_Student
	Approval, praise from a student	Approval_Student
	Approval, praise from the teacher	Approval_Teacher
	Student enters into an argument, opposes a teacher or a classmate	Argue_Student
	Teacher encourages a student	Support_Teacher
	Question asked by a student	Asking_Q_Student
	Question asked by the teacher	Asking_Q_Teacher_
	Student continues a thought expressed by the teacher or a classmate	Cont_Student
	Teacher continues a student's thought	Cont_Teacher
	Teacher explicitly invites a group of students to speak out	Group_Invitation_Teacher
	Teacher invites a specific student to speak out	Personal_Invitation_Teacher
	Student invites another student or teacher to speak out	Invitation_Student
	Student paraphrases others' words to demonstrate understanding	Paraphrase_Student
	Teacher paraphrases student’s words to demonstrate understanding	Paraphrase_Teacher
	Mentioning or quoting someone else's words by a student	Quoting_student
	Mentioning or quoting others' words by a teacher	Quoting_Teacher
Learner and teacher strategies to create a collaborative atmosphere in the learning group	End of the lesson, goodbye from a student	Closure_Student
	End of the lesson, goodbye from a teacher	Closure_Teacher
	Teacher greets the group or  an individual student	Greeting_Teacher
	Student greets the group, the teacher, or an individual student	Greetings_Student
	Mentioning the group as a community (e.g., using the pronoun 'we' for group, 'our', 'group', 'team', etc.)	Group_Student
	Initiation of a 'phatic communication' without a pragmatic or learning aim from a student	Phatics_Student
	Initiation of a 'phatic communication' without a pragmatic or learning objective from the teacher	Phatics_Teacher
	Student calls another student or the teacher by name	Vocatives_Student
	Teacher calls a student by name	Vocatives_Teacher
Learner and teacher strategies to maintain emotionality in learning communication	Student expresses emotion	Emotions_student
	Teacher expresses emotion	Emotions_Teacher
	Joke, humorous expression by a student	Humour_student
	Joke, humorous remark by the teacher	Humour_Teacher
	Disclosure of personal information by a student	Self-disclosure_student
	Disclosure of personal information by the teacher	Self-disclosure_Teacher
	Observation by the teacher, interpretation of actions or feelings of a student	Observation_Teacher

Results

The analysis established patterns in manifestations of communicative behavior of Chinese RFL students on the material of the analyzed synchronous online lessons. Table 2 shows the distribution of the indicators of the three groups in the subcorpus.

Table 2. Distribution of indicators of the three groups across the subcorpus

Group of indicators	Indicator description	Number of representations
		By a teacher	By students
Learner and teacher strategies to maintain interactivity of learning communication	Appreciation	25	12
	Approval, praise	167	0
	Agreement	113	126
	Disagreement, opposition	1	5
	Support	5	0
	Question	317	50
	Continuation of an interlocutor's thought	14	11
	Invitation to a specific participant to speak out	128	2
	Inviting the whole group to speak out	33	0
	Paraphrase as a demonstration of understanding	32	0
	Mentioning or quoting a statement from an interlocutor	9	11
Total number of cases of interactivity in communication		844	217
Learner and teacher strategies to create a collaborative atmosphere in the group	Greeting	7	6
	Goodbye	8	11
	Mentioning the group as a community	4	0
	Phatic communication	74	16
	Calling the other person by name	432	26
Total number of demonstrations of an atmosphere of cooperation		525	59
Learner and teacher strategies to maintain emotionality in learning communication	Expressing emotions	7	3
	Joke, humorous remark	17	4
	Disclosure of personal information	5	24
	Observation, interpretation of actions or feelings of the interlocutor	4	0
Total number of expressions of emotionality in communication		33	31
Total number of expressions of social presence		1402	307

The analysis of the communicative environment of synchronous online lessons on RFL for Chinese monolingual groups in Russian universities shows that the most common strategies in RFL lessons are those aimed at maintaining the interactivity of educational communication in the teacher's speech. Behavioural manifestations of educational communication related to its emotional aspect are less represented.

Discussion

The analysis of the obtained results in the context of the methodology of teaching RFL is aimed primarily at clarifying the content of professional and communicative competence of RFL teacher, working online. By professional-communicative competence, following V.V. Molchanovsky, we understand “a set of knowledge about the peculiarities of communication as the most important tool to achieve the learning objectives and tasks formulated on the basis of these objectives,” whereby “the operational side of professional-communicative competence implies mastering pedagogical communication technology and pedagogical technique” (Molchanovsky, 1999).

Let us comment on the main results from these positions and illustrate them with some discourse fragments from RuTOC corpus (all examples are given in conventional orthography, but preserve lexical and grammatical errors in students' speech).

In general, the conclusion we made when studying the entire RuTOC corpus about the “teacher-centeredness” at online RFL lessons and the predominance of frontal forms of work is confirmed (Lebedeva et al., 2022). It is quite natural that Russian language teacher at the lesson asks a lot of questions, agrees with the students, praises them, refers to their words, etc., but it is indicative that the strategies manifested in the students' speech (1402 vs. 307) are not that significant in the total volume of discourse.

The emotional aspect of communication is poorly represented at the analyzed lessons. At the same time, the degree of the teacher's emotional manifestation is significantly higher compared to the students' manifestation. Out of almost 16 hours of communication only 31 cases can be attributed to students' expressions of feelings, emotions, humorous statements in Russian. The indicators related to the Chinese students' disclosure of personal information, their story, their character traits, preferences, etc. are somewhat broader. Thus, in (1) the communication fragment combines a humorous, ironic statement of the student with an element of self-assessment (and possibly self-criticism):

(1) Instructor: Student A, what did you do at the weekend?

Student: Honestly, yesterday I was learning two new words. These might describe how to spend a day off. It's glutton and sleepyhead. [laughter.]

Indicators reflecting the atmosphere of cooperation in the group is represented, first of al,l by the etiquette speech acts of greeting and farewell. At the same time, in all the analyzed lessons these speech acts are addressed from the teacher to the students and from the students to the teacher; the students joining the lesson (and, probably, not having seen each other before the lesson) do not greet each other. Compared to the situation of a face-to-face class, where students gather in the classroom before the teacher enters and have the opportunity to exchange greetings and a few remarks before the lesson begins, this part of group communication seems to be lost in the situation of an online class.

It is logical that phatic communication is represented quite extensively in the analyzed subcorpus, and yet it is located, as a rule, at the very beginning of the RFL lesson. Obviously, this is because teachers initiate conversation on extracurricular topics in order to get students talking, to “warm them up” and include them in the Russian-language environment of the lesson. At the same time the teachers implement different strategies of pedagogical communication. Thus, in example (2) the teacher picks up on the student's remarks, showing a keen interest in the personal information he or she has shared.

(2) Teacher: Student A, what did you do at the weekend?

Student A: Mmm. I, um, went to a restaurant. And...

Teacher: So...

Student A: Oh, I was preparing for a presentation.

Teacher: Great. Okay, well done. Did you go to a Chinese restaurant?

Student A: Yes. Of course.

Teacher： Of course. Good. [laughs] Good for you. Okay. Who else do we have here? Student B, what did you do this weekend?

Student B: I went to the cafe that I always go to.

Teacher: Yeah. Did you enjoy that café?

Student B: Of course. And it's a very nice café.

On the contrary, example (3) contains the traditional phatic question “How are you?” addressed to each student. This question in turn resembles a mechanical roll-on. The teacher seems to deceive the expectations of his interlocutors by not expressing sympathy in response to Student A's complaint about fatigue, by showing no interest in the dish that Student B liked.  In such a situation, phatic communication is probably not capable of significantly increasing the effectiveness of the communicative environment of the online RFL lesson and cannot be regarded as a successful methodological technique.

(3) Teacher: Wonderful, uh-huh, Student A, how are you?

Student A: Fine.

Teacher: Okay, got it. Student B, how are you doing?

Student B: Fine, but a little bit tired.

Teacher: A little bit what?

Student B: Uh, tired.

Teacher: Yeah, a little tired. That makes sense, uh-huh. <…> Student C, how are you?

Student B: Very nice and I’ve just had a very tasty meal.

Teacher: Yeah, great, great, uh-huh, Student D, how are you doing?

In most cases such communication follows a standard frontal scenario: the teacher asks a question, the student answers it, while other students do not participate in the communication and wait their turn. However, from the perspective of the communicative environment of an RFL lesson, situations where this standard scenario is violated are particularly interesting: for example, when other students are included in the dialogue of the teacher and the student, as in example (4).

(4) Teacher: What a lovely... [shows] the headband.

Student A: [laughter]

Teacher: Can we see a little bit further away? Then we can see your ears. A little bit of your head...

Student B: Beautiful.

Teacher: Beautiful. Beautiful.

Student A: I haven’t washed my hair, so...

Teacher: I see. Well, it's also very beautiful.

The level of social presence of the participants of this fragment of communication can be estimated as high: the teacher demonstrates to student A that he/she sees him/her, notices the details of his/her image. Student A receives compliments from the instructor and his/her classmates and at the same time feels safe enough (but also, obviously, embarrassed) to share personal information (she has not wash her hair).

Separately, we note one more indicator of the communicative environment of the lesson as the expression of disagreement, which was not presented in the original system of indicators (Rourke et al., 1999), but was found in our analysis. This indicator is of particular interest in the context of our study because Chinese culture considers disagreement with the teacher to be unconventional. We believe that the Chinese student's readiness to argue with the teacher in Russian indicates a reduction in the distance between them and indirectly indicates a high level of social presence (see example (5)):

(5) Teacher: Yes, well done. That's great, that's great. Yes, that's it. Now that's right. Don't forget, right? Missing the preposition. Depends on what?

Student: But the first time I said. On.

Teacher: [shakes head].

Student: No, I am sure I said.

Teacher: No. You didn't say exactly. [laughter]. I wrote it down on purpose.

Student: No, I said [laughter].

Teacher: [laughter] Okay, okay. Yes. But anyway, yes, pay attention.

Thus, on the one hand, on the whole, the thesis that Chinese students do not tend to actively express themselves during classes and interact with the teacher and other students is confirmed. The empirical material demonstrated the predominance of communicative-behavioural patterns in academic communication in Chinese students: Chinese students prefer to listen to the teacher, to enter into communication after direct invitation, to respond to the teacher’s questions in the dialogue and avoid proactive remarks, to express consent. This is consistent with the works on Chinese educational traditions, which point out that since high school, Chinese students have been taught a predominantly silent attitude, a willingness to answer questions but not to ask them, a tendency to agree with the teacher as an unquestionable authority and not to express their opinions, especially those that differ from the teacher’s ones (Be, Liu, 2020; Zhang et al., 2021). Such cultural prescriptions determine Chinese students' communicative behaviour, even outside the Chinese educational system.

The specificity of Chinese students' communicative behaviour is especially significant in the context of foreign language learning. The communicative approach, student-centered language teaching, delegating the responsibility for the learning process to the active independent student, the transformation of the teacher's role as a facilitator ‒ all these topical trends characteristic of the modern stage of the development of RFL teaching methodology collide with the cultural attitudes of Chinese students. This clash is even stronger in online learning, where the student's active position, manifested, among other things, in his or her communicative behaviour, is fundamental. Consequently, the most important special task of a teacher working online with Chinese students becomes the purposeful creation of the social presence of all participants of the lesson with the help of a set of methodological strategies and techniques.

As the analysed material has shown, such strategies and techniques can overcome the limitations imposed by both mediated communication and Chinese cultural prescriptions. Thus, the results of the study show some deviations from the conventional behaviour of Chinese students in the classroom. In the analysed material, Chinese students demonstrated the ability to joke, argue with the teacher, and engage in group interaction (e.g., addressing each other by name, joking with each other, or referring to each other's statements). Although we record a low level of social presence in our material, compared to samples of learning discourse in Western educational systems, we are nevertheless far from equating it to zero, as has been shown in Chinese works (Zhan, 2014).

This confirms our thesis that, despite the strong influence of national cultural attitudes, the level of social presence in Chinese groups can vary depending on the teacher's efforts. At the same time, as D. Be and Q. Liu, the online format can be not a limitation but, on the contrary, a favourable condition for increasing the level of social presence and activating the student's role (Be, Liu, 2020: 21). Thus, the most important task of contemporary methodological science is to describe and evaluate the effectiveness of those pedagogical strategies, techniques, and technologies that can form a productive educational environment for online RFL learning. Some of the strategies used by the teachers in the material we analyzed can be characterized as effective ones. These include, among others, initiation of phatic communication, showing interest in personal information shared by the student, clarifying interrogatives, verbalized interpretation of teacher’s observations of the students’ actions or feelings as an indicator of their engagement in the communication.

Thus, the communicative environment of a synchronous online lesson in RFL requires the teacher to possess the following components of professional and communicative competence:

1. The interactivity of communication involves the teacher's deliberate efforts to organize polylogue communication in an online lesson where students interact with each other, pose questions to each other and the teacher, pick up and continue each other's thoughts, refer to each other's statements, agree and argue with each other.
2. The formation of an atmosphere of cooperation and cohesion of the online group suggests that effective group online language learning is possible only under the conditions of a formed learning team, whose participants, being separated by the screen, realize themselves not as separate independent individuals, but as members of a coherent group.
3. Support of communication emotionality is expressed in psychological techniques, aimed at personal disclosure of each participant, considering his/her psycho-emotional states, development of students' empathy and skills of emotional support of each other.

Note that this study is limited, because it only uses the material available for analysis ‒ recordings of online lessons in the format of video conferencing. At the same time, other ways of communication between the participants of the study ‒ for example, group chat or personal messages in a messenger, which, according to the experience of one of the authors of the article, are often used by Chinese students during the class ‒ remain beyond our observation. Perhaps it is this kind of written communication that performs the function of enhancing students' social presence, but this material, due to its confidentiality, is not available for research. However, the features we formulated apply to online learning in general, including its synchronous and asynchronous components.

Conclusion

The authors conclude that the formation of communicative environment of a synchronous online RFL lesson requires that the teacher possesses the following components of professional and communicative competence: the ability to manage the interactivity of communication, the ability to form an atmosphere of cooperation in online groups, the ability to maintain emotional communication in the process of RFL online teaching.

The study contributes to the development of digital linguodidactics of Russian as a foreign language, creating a scientific basis for developing methodological techniques and technologies to design a productive learning environment in online teaching RFL.

A promising development of this research will be a contrastive analysis of online lessons with different parameters, which will allow to more accurately identify the factors that positively affect the effectiveness of educational communication in online RFL learning, and basing on them to develop a system of pedagogical strategies and technologies.

About the authors

Maria Yu. Lebedeva

Pushkin State Russian Language Institute

Author for correspondence.
Email: mylebedeva@pushkin.institute
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-9893-9846

Candidate of Philology, Head of the Laboratory of Cognitive and Linguistic Research

6 Akademika Volgina St, Moscow, 117485, Russian Federation

Do Wu

Sichuan University of Foreign Languages

Email: 254937816@qq.com
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-5188-7268

M.A. in Philology, senior lecturer

33 Zhuangzhi St, Shapingba District, Chongqing, People's Republic of China

References