Weaving Reflexivity and Revealing of the Self in Online Foreign Language Practice

In the context of collaborative online foreign language practice, we look at how metacognition and revealing of the self-combine when the full potential of the digital tools are put to use. We present a qualitative study of a corpus of written contributions by English as a foreign language distance French learners and look into a model for teaching and learning in which emotions are integrated. We study how expression of emotion and commenting on learning are combined in the learners’ discourse. Throughout our study, various appropriation regimes appeared, such as redundancy, in which the student publishes the same message on the forum and on the learning diary, or progressive appropriation, in which the student goes from a descriptive post about vocabulary to a post including the use of the first person pronoun “I”, to a socio-affective post using exclamation marks and reference to the family. There were cases where references to cognitive processes, inclusion of the peers, revealing of the self and use of technology form an intricate cognitive-socio-affective weaving. We relate this weaving to maximum engagement of the learner at the heart of a community of trust, and make an attempt at modeling this engagement.