1. Alex Ding University of Nottingham
Reflective Collaborative Tasks for Trainee English as a Foreign Language Teachers in a Blended Learning Environment: Investigating Attribution, Intersubjectivity and Analogical Apperception.
Alex Ding
University of Nottingham

2. Background MA ELT (School of Education) Module
English for Academic Purposes and New Technologies
20 hours of lectures
A one week on-line seminar (with invited experts from around the world)
An on-line discussion board

3. Background On-line tutorials 80 hours of independent study
On-line collaborative zones
12 Students
Students have considerable EAP teaching experience
Students have a vast range of experience of using new technologies for teaching and learning

4. Research Framework Key theoretical concepts:
Intersubjective collaborative autonomy
a version of autonomy which stresses not only the ‘virtues’ of collaboration as a means of facilitating autonomy but argues that promoting autonomy necessarily entails complex relations of interdependence. These relationships with others are at the core of autonomy, and it is these relations (with institutions, teachers, students, native speakers, friends etc.) that help determine – along with individual factors – the extent to which learners take control of their learning.

5. Research Framework Key theoretical concepts:
The main theoretical arguments for intersubjective collaborative autonomy come from the works of Crossley (1996), Husserl (1991), Kojéve (1969), Mead (1967) and Merleau-Ponty (1962).
These philosophers and social theorists have different visions of intersubjectivity, however, all of them have contributed to a powerful explanation of self and group identity and, more specifically, how concepts such as self-hood, communication, power and community can be understood.

6. Research Framework
Intersubjectivity emphasises the social and dialogic nature of knowledge and thought. Thoughts and experience are interwoven and are not the property of individuals, but are shared. Human speech, identity and action are necessarily social and meaning is derived from social contexts.

7. Tasks
Students were asked to carry out a number of on-line collaborative tasks:
Peer discussion of articles
Group investigation and presentation of aspects of EAP and new technologies
Group preparation for on-line seminar

8. Research
In order to examine students’ perceptions of on-line collaboration the following was set up:
Students were asked to keep a reflective journal during the six-week period.
Students were asked to keep all electronic correspondence with other group members.
The lecturer kept a daily journal of impressions of how the students were collaborating.
All electronic discussion was saved and a mini-corpus created.
All students were interviewed orally using semi-structured questions to tease out students’ perceptions of on-line collaboration. Each oral interview lasted at least 60 minutes. Interviews were conducted on a one-to-one basis.

9. Research Questions
How do students explain the success/failure of collaboration in a VLE?
How do these accounts (see above) correlate with i) teacher-researcher observations ii) data and iii) other students’ accounts of the collaboration?
How do students differ in their accounts?
Do students ‘perform’ in online collaborative tasks in ways which are consistent with their idealised and normatively constructed collaborator?
Are there any discrepancies?

10. Research Questions
What do students do in a VLE? How much of their use of VLE can be said to relate to collaborative tasks?
(How) Do students ‘break the rules’ of collaboration? Do they break constitutive rules and/or regulative rules?
Have these collaborative tasks in a VLE had any influence in changing students’ views on collaboration on-line?
Are these changes positive/negative, substantial?

11. Research Questions
Obstacles to collaboration in VLE and strategies to overcome obstacles: A measure of student autonomy? A question of responsibility?

12. Key Findings Locus of control Perception of self and others
Responsibility and autonomy