'Welcome to the online discussion group': towards a diagnostic framework for teachers.

Love, Kristina ; Isles, Merle

Introduction

Asynchronous online discussion has been lauded as a powerful communication tool in education, particularly in adult, tertiary and distance education contexts (see, for e.g., Coffin, Hewings & Painter, 2005), where it offers a capacity for building online academic communities that would be difficult to maintain in physical space. As teacher educators, the writers of this paper have been involved in establishing and moderating online discussions for pre-service, in-service and post-graduate groups of teachers. We were thus aware, through the extensive literature in this area (see Andriessen, Baker & Suthers, 2003 for an overview), of the range of models of online discussion available, of key design issues for moderators in selecting appropriate models and of challenges faced by moderators and participants in the tertiary context.

Considerably less support is available for teachers attempting to build such cyber-communities in school contexts (Lapadat, 2005), despite the rhetoric of national and state curriculum as to the centrality of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to an enriched learning environment. The Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VCAA, 2005), for example, identifies, under the domain related to ICT for communicating, that 'Students use ICT to communicate with known and unknown participants with the purpose of seeking and discussing alternative views, acquiring expert opinions, sharing knowledge and expressing ideas'. In a related vein, the Queensland Studies Authority (2005, online) argues that 'As multiliterate citizens, students need to be able to interpret and construct face-to-face paper and electronic texts that use a range of language systems. They also need to be able to draw on a repertoire of resources to interpret and construct texts for personal, cultural, social and aesthetic purposes in their everyday lives'. Such rhetoric about the role of ICTs in the new educational and communicational landscape and the new forms of literacy associated with them is also evident in the English/Literacy curricula of other states of Australia. However, there is as yet little empirical evidence of patterns of uptake of such ICT use for online communication purposes in actual classrooms, the limited extant research focusing more broadly on systemic issues with mainstreaming technology in pedagogically appropriate ways (see, for e.g., Lankshear & Snyder, 2000).

One particularly rich potential of the online mode is for young people to exchange opinions about the literature they are reading, offering students around Australia (and even around the globe) opportunities to share or challenge readings in ways not possible in face-to-face (F2F) contexts. A number of institutionally established web forums currently allow for inter- and intra-school discussion of literary texts, especially for students in the middle years of schooling (upper primary/junior secondary). Each state education authority in Australia, for example, hosts a web forum where the moderator posts discussion prompts about a shared text and students, either independently or in collaboration with their class, post responses. Furthermore, a small, but increasing, number of individual schools host their own online discussions around shared literary texts, seeking exchanges of opinion within the school community or between school communities within and outside Australia.

In our preliminary work with schools in Victoria and NSW, we have been examining some of the challenges still faced by English teachers in designing effective online discussion for the exchange of student opinion about literary texts (Love, 2002, 2005; Love & Simpson, in press). This work suggests that English/Literacy teachers designing such forums, either as a school initiative or as part of a state-wide network, need further support in order to build and sustain effective online academic communities in the way that their tertiary counterparts have been supported in doing for nearly a decade now. Without this support, teachers run the risk of simply placing 'old wine in new bottles' (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003), of reproducing old pedagogic practices in new technological skins. Worse still, without close scrutiny of online text-response discussions as emerging pedagogic practices, it would be easy for busy teachers to unknowingly validate a new mode of structural inequity and disadvantage, whereby inadequate support is available online to the very students who most need it (Love, 2005). We thus have much to learn from a systematic examination of a range of online text-response communities, and of the potential of this new electronic genre. In this paper, we offer a contribution towards the development of a framework that may help English teachers identify the pedagogical issues involved in establishing and managing text-response online discussion. Given the huge range of variables at play in such discussions, including the types of texts selected, the relationship between online and face-to-face modes, and the age, interests and literacy skills of the participants, we are not yet in a position to make recommendations for practice. Instead, through our systematic examination of a range of school sanctioned online discussion sites, in particular, those available for young adults, we hope to make more visible some of the parameters for reflecting on text-response interaction in an asynchronous mode.

The data set

Given the range of 'texts' available for online discussion for young adults, we decided to limit our focus to topics and texts most relevant to English/Literacy teachers - the more enduring literary or popular fiction texts about which considered discussion could be invited. For the same reasons, we decided to examine those sites hosted by state education authorities and individual schools (see Appendix A for a list of those on our database), focusing on those targeted towards students from upper primary and onwards. These sites typically use asynchronous forms of online interaction where contributions tend to be composed prior to posting, rather than the 'chat' modes where participants engage spontaneously with whoever else is on line in real time.

This focus on prose fiction discussed by adolescents in educationally hosted asynchronous online sites narrows the range of text-response sites considerably. However, given that our purpose in this paper is to test the usefulness of a baseline descriptive framework for online text-response discussion, it is important to start with a proscribed set of educational contexts and developing the framework from there.

A principled basis for a descriptive framework

Given our proscribed focus on the type of text for discussion and our proscribed focus on the educational context, we set out to examine three key features of school-based and systems-based online discussions: the substantive content, the interactional features, and the organisational structures. In order to be of any value to teachers, the key features of these types of sites would need to be described in a principled way, drawing from theoretical concepts identified in the literature on Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). Paulsen (1996), for example, classifies facilitation techniques in CMC according to their intellectual, social and organisational functions. In some of our preliminary work on mapping characteristics of online discussions (e.g., Love, 2002), we had mapped these concepts on to Hallidayan notions of field, tenor and mode respectively, to provide a rather crude descriptive tool. Here, we intend to build on the insights made possible through this earlier work by refining the focus within each of these three parameters.

In the specific context of the text-response online discussions under examination, the concept of 'field' permits a focused insight into the demands of the topics selected for discussion. It describes the intellectual focus and purpose of the online discussions, which is largely concerned with expressing opinion about aspects of a book and supporting argumentative stances. In terms of text response, and in keeping with current English curriculum rhetoric (e.g., VCAA, 2005), four key stances can be assumed: one that focuses on the emotional reactions of the characters, the reader or the author (affective); one that focuses on a moral judgement of the characters, other readers or the author (ethical); one that appraises some structural feature of the text (aesthetic); and one that scrutinises the ideological position of the text (critical). Using the concept of 'field' we can also describe various forms of literacy that are evident in the postings, such as the ability to construct an argument based on a close reading of the text or the ability to respond to a counterargument by selecting relevant sections of text or experience.

The concept of 'tenor' permits a focused insight into the nature of the interpersonal interaction generated by these topics in the online environment. It describes the social relationships between online participants, how they respond to each other and to the moderator; the identities they create for themselves online; and the role of the moderator in mediating various forms of online interaction.

The concept of 'mode' permits an insight into the way interactants structure their contributions as more spoken-like or more written-like, depending on the nature of their relationships with other online participants and their sense of the academic content. A written mode such as an email can be organised almost as if it were like speech, whereas a spoken mode such as a formal speech can be organised as if it were a piece of writing. When used to describe the organisation of the whole discussion, rather than the organisation of individual postings, the notion of mode can account for whether postings are 'chained' (i.e., sequentially ordered, but not responding to each other) or 'threaded' (i.e., sequential and responsive).

In a Hallidayan model of language, text and context (Halliday, 1985; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), these concepts of field, tenor and mode together contribute to the 'register' of a text or an interaction, allowing a systematic description of any communication (whether spoken or written) as it achieves particular social purposes within its particular context. Various language structures of the 'text' of the online interaction can be examined in order make more visible those features of its register which relate to the 'context' of its production, thus providing a powerful and more objective tool for analysis than has been previously available.

We focus in the remainder of this paper on how two asynchronous online text-response discussions, one from a state education web forum and one from an independent school site, can be described in terms of field, tenor and mode respectively, and the sub-categories of each, as described earlier. We will not foreground here the linguistic analysis which has contributed to the examination of these features of the register of the online interactions, though they have informed the analysis in significant ways. Given the enormous variations within, as well as between, sites, we are not arguing that the registerial patterns we identify are in any way representative of the types of sites. Rather, by illustrating how some of the variables can be systematically described in terms of a principled model of language, text and context, we suggest factors that could potentially be explicitly accounted for in the informed design of effective online discussions that meet teachers' conscious purposes.

The Tasmanian student web forum

Each state in Australia hosts its own text-response web forum (sometimes called Book Raps), such forums being the most common form of online discussion used in educational contexts. We received permission to examine and publicly discuss postings on the Tasmanian Education Department's web forum, in which popular, generally highly acclaimed novels are discussed by students in the middle years (for confidentiality reasons the Education Department allocated-member numbers are deleted). Here, topics can be initiated by students or by teacher/moderators, who also monitor and regulate the discussion in various ways. Below is a section of a student-initiated discussion thread on the novel Tomorrow When the War Began (1993) by John Marsden. This thread occurred between April and October 2001, but the key characteristics discussed in the extract below are typical of other threads on this book by this author, archived up till 29 September, 2004.

Extract from online Discussion Thread 1

Narla (Member # xxxx)

Hi I'm Narla. I'm the starter of this topic. I think everyone should read Tomorrow when the War Began. My favourite character is Lee. This is John Marsden's best series yet. All the characters are courageous. I started this book at the beginning of grade 6. Please post your comments.

Munchkin (Member # xxxx)

Hey, I love The Tomorrow series. They R so realistic. My favourite person is Homer. Once I finished the first book I went strait on to the next book. My favourite one is the last of the series.

90%_angel (Member # xxxx)

Hey there! I think John Marsden and his books rock! The best are the Tomorrow Series and Winter. My favourite charactors are Elle and Homer.

Sophie Fiona (Member # xxxx)

To everyone out there who loves John Marsden as much as I do: I have read all of the books in the series and I agree with Narla, the books in the Tomorrow series are the best books that John Marsden has written. He has thought of a purely original concept and has brought a touch of reality to the situation of war; Ellie and her friends are just normal teenagers trying to survive. The story teaches us that anything can happen and that we aren't quite as safe and secure as we might think. It also tells us to appreciate what we have while it is still here with us. The little things in life do matter and are sometimes very important. With the attacks on the United States of America being only a few weeks ago, his stories may help people to come to terms with the terrible events.

Much could be said about these postings, but we will restrict our discussion here to key aspects of the intellectual content (field), the interpersonal relationships between online participants (tenor) and the organisational features of the discussion (mode).

The content or field of this online discussion is the mutual endorsement of the author John Marsden and his novels by a group of like-minded fans. The postings require little intellectual effort, there being no disagreement between contributors like 'Narla', 'Munchkin', '90%_angel' and 'Sophie Fiona' who use the online discussion simply to share their general feelings about the novel as a whole, mostly through brief one-off postings. Sophie Fiona's contribution is the longest, going beyond the simple statement of personal feeling to a more considered judgement of the moral relevance of Marsden's message in light of the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York just two weeks previously. She is an articulate contributor, moved to use the novel as a catalyst for sharing powerful feelings in this online community, and thus adopting a 'teacher-like' role. However, her invitation for others to engage further in the moral significance of the novel is not subsequently taken up, the remainder of the online discussion proceeding along the lines of the initial postings. Overall, the field of this discussion thread focuses strongly on students' affective reactions (Iser, 1978), and to a lesser extent with moral argument (Eagleton, 1996), both of which are forms of engagement traditionally associated with text response (Patterson, 1993).

In terms of the literacy skills rehearsed in this site, there is little argumentative complexity (Andrews, Costello, & Clarke, 1993; Kuhn, 1992) developed within or across postings, and thus little evidence of participants' ability to support a position with evidence (from the text or from elsewhere). In the absence of timely teacher/moderator regulation, there is little scope for the development of more advanced forms of literacy, implicating, as this does, more intellectually demanding forms of reasoning from text.

In terms of tenor, the discussion thread above was initiated by a student, and its interactional patterns could be characterised as 'horizontal' (Simpson, 2004), the communication being largely student to student. In face to face text-response discussions, such horizontal interactional structures have at times been promoted as more educationally desirable (Benton & Fox, 1985; Heap, 1985; Horowitz, 1994) than 'hierarchical' interactions where the teacher mediates the pedagogical communication (Cazden, 1988). The spontaneous, generally unsustained and unmoderated postings of horizontally organised threads such as the one above do shape a temporary cyber-community of like-minded enthusiasts. Here, participants appear as concerned with signaling their personal identities as they are with negotiating their position on the novel. Enrolled as they are in a state-run education system, each student has an institutionally allocated identity (member number), but they are also able to design a personal online identity, or avatar (such as '90%_angel'). By focusing on key aspects of tenor, such as the direction of the interaction and the negotiation of online identities, teachers can make more visible the extent to which such interpersonal preoccupations dominate over negotiations about the text. In the online community of which the above thread is an example, there is as much negotiation over avatars as there is over the substantive content about the book, suggesting the need for some teacher intervention in delimiting the identity negotiation.

The mode of online discussion threads such as that above can be characterised as more spoken-like than written-like (Halliday, 1985). The majority of postings show control of the syntax, spelling and punctuation conventions required of literate students in the middle years of schooling, though their brevity, choice of simple sentence structures and everyday lexis suggest a spontaneity and lack of planning more typical of speech. Many contributors use the emoticons, the abbreviations and simplified spelling ('They R so realistic'), the terms of address ('Hey there!') and the colloquial language ('John Marsden and his books rock!') of the 'chat' mode, typical of those used in SMS text messaging and email. This more colloquial mode of online communication flourishes in the absence of teacher/moderator modelling of alternative modes of response. It is perhaps also reflective of the less considered forms of text response and literacy practices being rehearsed in this particular online community. In terms of the organisation of the whole sequence, the postings are 'chained', rather than 'negotiated' or 'threaded' across time, resulting in relatively superficial interactions that do not lead to substantive engagement between members of this online community. If such linear expression of immediate response is an explicitly valued aspect (whether temporary or enduring) of the online discussion, such mode features may be unproblematic. If, on the other hand, teacher moderators wish to re-direct the discussion into more 'written-like' forms of reasoning from text, then making explicit modal characteristics such as those above may be of assistance.

Likewise, making explicit the field and tenor characteristics of the above discussion thread also provides teachers with a means of reflecting on whether their pedagogic goals are being realised. Table 1 summarises the key aspects of each of the registerial features of the discussion thread from which the extract above was taken.

The descriptive framework exemplified in Table I has a diagnostic potential when applied to organisationally designed web forums intended to engage adolescents in electronic modes of text response. The descriptive capacity of this framework will now be tested further as we apply it to a rather different set of online discussions.

A school web forum

As well as the state organised web forums such as the Tasmanian one illustrated above, a growing number of individual schools are designing their own electronic forums for text response. Again with permission, we have collected data on a number of these school-based forums, designed in different ways for different communities of learners responding to a range of texts. We will focus here on one such intra-school, in-house designed online discussion forum at a large independent secondary school in Victoria, Australia. All Form 5 students (aged 16-17 years old) and their seven English teachers were involved, in 27 interclass (but not inter-school) online discussion groups of around six students. Each teacher moderated 5-6 groups and directly posted prompts to which individual students responded independently.

Across the six-week period of online discussion, nearly 200 discussion threads were generated, a thread in this context being a series of contributions related to each other as respondents addressed the teacher-posted topic. The novel for discussion was the postmodernist novel In the Lake of the Woods (O'Brien, 1994), which concerns the psychological and moral difficulties faced by a Vietnam war veteran, John Wade, re-adjusting to family and political life in the U.S. It was included on the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority's list of texts recommended for senior school study because of its status as a 'war novel', raising as this does the larger and more global moral issues with which 16 year olds are expected to engage. As with the selection of the text in the Tasmanian and other state education run web forums, the potential exists for students to negotiate affective, ethical, aesthetic and critical stances.

There are a considerable number of contextual differences in this school-designed online forum when compared to the state-designed web forums discussed earlier. Three key differences are that students here are older; the texts more challenging; and the online discussion is an assessable component of students' work on the text, rather than a site for voluntary postings. Given these substantial variations in context, there will necessarily be concomitant variations in the register of postings, such variations again being describable in terms of our framework. We illustrate some of these variations in our description of the thread below, though clearly we are unable to say that this thread is typical of the 200 collected. There is enormous variation, from those (like the one below) where participants successfully negotiate their opinions on aspects of the novel, to those where there is less successful negotiation (see, for e.g., Love, 2005). Below is an extract from the beginning of one thread, presented inclusive of spelling, punctuation and syntactic errors.

Extract from online Discussion Thread 2

Teacher (21 Feb)

Welcome to the discussion group. I hope you find it interesting. War makes people immoral. Do you agree? Did the war make John wade immoral?

Adriana (2 Mar)

I'm not sure if my last response got through so i'll send another one. War does many things, it changes people's morals and not always to what we believe is right, it challenges people's morals but it does not delete people's morals. How can seeing your friend die in your arms make you feel that killing is ok? John Wade had many horrifing experiences in the war that he did not know how to deal with. John is not immoral, he is confused, a little crazy but he has morals.

Teacher (2 Mar)

What about killing PC Weatherby? Was that a 'moral' killing. Think about why he did it. Ms Mac

Mathew (3 Mar)

War is on eof the most terrible things in the world. Many people say that war makes you immoral, though I would beg to differ. In my opinions war can make you moral. Throughout war all you will see is death and distruction, I dont believe that this would make you immoral, though it would certainly have an effect on you mentally. See ing the cotastrifies of war would only make you stronger and give you morals in life, to distinguish between bad and good. In the case of John Wade I dont think it was the war that made him immoral, it was his past, his childhood and unbringing. The experiances he had with his father. I think that the war made John a somewhat better person, after the events in the village an the killing of weatherby I think that John learnt a lot, and took that into his future.

James (8 Mar)

I do not think that the war made John Wade a better person but I agree that he was deeply effected by his past experiences. The war also had a negative effect on John's mind. There were the horrifying events that he witnessed and took part in, which would have changed the way he looked at life. Before he went to the war, death was not really a reality to him. He would not accept his father's death and kept imagining him there. After going to the war he realised the reality of death as it was all around him, and this may have changed his morals and values towards life and death. War can make some people immoral but in the case of John Wade.... nah.

Mathew (8 Mar)

I agree with your comments James, it is interesting that you say he did not know how to deal with death before he went to the war, What about the death of his father, as you said he never reall dealt with this he never really dealt with this, war didn't make John immoral, but I dont think that he learnt how to deal with death and thats why he couldn't deal with the death of Kathy after he killed her.... ahh

James (16 Mar)

what i meant was that he didn't know how to PROPERLY deal with the reality of the death of his father. After seeing all the death around him in Vietnam he was able to percieve the REALITY of death, and accept the fact that lives did have an end.

Mathew (27 Mar)

Ahh now I understand, do you think John understood the reality of death enough to kill Kathy? Mat

The content or intellectual field of this online discussion is clearly more challenging than that of the web forum examined earlier. Students are required to clarify, articulate and negotiate a moral position on the effects of war on individual personalities, using a close reading of the novel to support their positions. Postings are longer, more argumentatively sustained and more open to negotiation over the duration of the online discussion than was evident in the Tasmanian web forum. Adrianna, Mathew and James use considerable intellectual effort to negotiate their divergent opinions of the effects of war, drawing on their knowledge of different aspects of the novel to support and clarify their stances in interaction. In terms of the literacy skills rehearsed in this site, there is considerable argumentative complexity (Andrews, Costello, & Clarke, 1993; Kuhn, 1992) developed across the postings, particularly in terms of participants' ability to support a position with evidence (from the text or from elsewhere). These more advanced forms of reasoning from text are likely to be a result of the in-class text analysis experiences these older students have had, though their capacity to use the online forums to rehearse these further is scaffolded by teachers such as 'Ms Mac', who regularly intervenes online, as above, to challenge and clarify student postings.

In terms of tenor, though initiated by the teacher, the thread's interactional patterns are a combination of 'hierarchical' (as students respond upwards to the teacher's prompt) and 'horizontal' (as students interact confidently, authoritatively and responsively with each other). The teacher's authoritative and directive role is visible throughout the discussion thread, but does not detract from the spontaneity of the students' interactions with each other. This combination of interactional stances appears to support both the productive negotiation of substantive content and the spontaneous negotiation of personal identities in this online community. There was none of the play involved in selecting and negotiating online identities evident in the Tasmanian web forums, since students in this forum belonged to the same physical school community and were likely to know each other (even though they did not belong to the same class groups).

The mode of online discussion threads such as those above can be characterised as more written-like than spoken-like. The majority of postings show control of the syntax, spelling (with some interesting exceptions!) and punctuation conventions required of literate students in the upper years of schooling, with their more complex sentence structures and technical lexis. The interactive nature of the online communication becomes evident in more spoken-like indicators of emotion at the end of some statements, such as James' 'War can make some people immoral but in the case of John Wade.... nah' and Mathew's 'thats why he couldn't deal with the death of Kathy after he killed her.... ahh'. Other more colloquial forms such as the use of capitals for stress (see James' last posting) and the use of modality ('I'm not sure'; 'ah, now I understand'; 'what I meant') take the place of emoticons to express more restrained forms of emotional amplification. Such forms are not so much indicative of a lack of planning, but of a spontaneity and desire to signal interactivity which draws on the more spoken-like affordances of the online mode. In terms of the organisational structure of the whole thread, the postings are 'threaded' across time, indicating substantive engagement between members of this online community

Collectively, the field, tenor and mode features of the discussion thread above reflect the more considered forms of text response and literacy practices being rehearsed in this particular online community. Table 2 below offers a summary description of the discussion thread from which the extract above was taken.

Comparing Tables 1 and 2, we can identify a number of key differences. Firstly, in terms of field, the second discussion thread, initiated by the teacher, sets a line of inquiry that focuses more prominently on ethical/ moral than on affective/emotional response to text. The absence of a focus on the aesthetic or critical is not surprising, given the nature of the prompt here, though the almost exclusive persistence of the affective and moral focus across our data is noteworthy in light of the critical literacy rhetoric underpinning recent English/Literacy curricular documentation (see Love & Simpson, in press). Students in the second discussion thread above subsequently post a series of 'divergent' moral positions about the effects of war on individuals, being prepared to argue different points of view, rather than simply reinforce each other's preferences. Timely teacher intervention regulates the direction of the discussion and the forms of sustained reasoning from the text required. In terms of tenor, students respond both hierarchically to the teacher's prompt, and horizontally to each other. The mode in Discussion Thread 2 is more written-like than the first one examined here, with fewer occurrences of the colloquial language, abbreviations, simplified spelling and terms of address typical of the 'chat' mode used in SMS text messaging and email. Clearly many of these registerial differences are a result of important contextual differences, such as the age of the students, the type of text and the assessment context. Yet tabulating them in the above ways makes more visible, and therefore more open to management, those design features of online discussion that can be altered.

Conclusion

The framework suggested above provides a preliminary diagnostic tool for teachers/moderators to evaluate key features of the design of their online discussion in their particular educational context. Without requiring detailed linguistic analysis, use of the Hallidayan model of register allows teachers to systematically make visible key aspects of the field, tenor and mode of the online discussion. In particular, it makes more visible the extent to which teachers:

* have designed their prompt questions and any subsequent online intervention to engage students in particular fields of response, whether these involve affective, ethical, aesthetic or critical stances

* support particular forms of interaction between students and with the teacher/moderator, and around the negotiation of personal identity in online communities

* require students to post formulated opinions in a written-like mode or encourage a more exploratory, spoken-like mode.

Together, these considerations may help teachers identify the extent to which they have explicitly conceived of their own purposes for online discussion and how they have communicated these purposes to students.

It must be recognised, however, that the categories identified in Tables 1 and 2, though rigorously based on a principled model of text, analysed within its context, are preliminary and as not yet tested in a range of online text-response situations. The framework is deliberately based on two contrasting data sets, the intention being to show how these discussions can be systematically described, and thus made available for reflection. The purpose was not to 'test' which is the best discussion model and we can offer no advice yet about the best way to structure online discussion, especially given the complexity of the variables operating within the larger context of each discussion. There is some evidence in our data to suggest that more deliberate teacher moderation results in more 'literate' forms of reasoning by adolescents about prose fiction and more interpersonally productive forms of negotiation than does less teacher intervention. In the next stage of our project, we will investigate this further by examining a range of online text response discussions in contexts that are comparable in terms of age of participants; nature of the literary text; assessment regimes; and type of face-to-face support.

We also aim to extend the diagnostic framework to account for a wider range of text-response discussions outside the school context. Many adolescents, as well as participating in educationally hosted online discussions such as those discussed in this paper, simultaneously contribute to commercially hosted popular fiction online discussions (e.g., the Official Harry Potter Website (http://boards.harrypotter.warnerbros.com/web/forum) and commercially hosted popular culture online discussions such as 'Total Girl' (http://www.totalgirl.com.au/index.cfm). These online discussions operate with different configurations of field, tenor and mode variables, some inviting brief, spontaneous, spoken-like, even multi-modal discussion about fashion products, media personalities and teenage identity issues; while others require more sustained insights about literary texts, often multi-modally negotiated in interpersonal contexts that are very different to those of the school sanctioned electronic discussions.

The different intellectual fields, forms of interaction (with their varying forms of negotiation of online identities) and modes of structuring postings in these commercially hosted online discussions may have some relevance to educational communities. By systematically examining how young people, as the multiliterate citizens envisaged in current curriculum documentation, use a range of online forums to share feelings, negotiate judgements and critique perspectives, we may be able to design more effective approaches to management of online discussion in school contexts. This could form a small, but important contribution to the development of the electronic literacies fundamental to adolescents' success in a world of increasingly globalised and technology-mediated communication.

Appendix A

Database of web sites used

In-house school web sites for Year 8 and Year 11 students

Department of Education Tasmania Student Freeway Web Forums for Students http: // forum.education.tas.gov.au / webforum / student /

Australian Author Studies: Tomorrow When the War Began Discussion Forum Archive

http: // forum.education.tas.gov.au / webforum / student / General Novel Discussion: Artemis Fowl1

http: // forum.education.tas.gov.au / webforum / student / cgibin / ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=140;t=000003

General Novel Discussion: NipsXI

http: // forum.education.tas.gov.au / webforum / student / cgibin / ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=140;t=000010

Commercial web sites referred to but not analysed in this paper

ABC Online Forum: Saddle Club http: // www2b.abc.net.au / rollercoaster / saddle / forum / default.htm

Godrics Hollow Forum http: / / www.godrics-hollow.net /

Ashton Scholastic Harry Potter Discussion Chamber http: // www.scholastic.com / harrypotter / reading / archive.htm

Total Girl Totally Gossip Forum http: // www.totalgirl.com.au / index.cfm

Adbooks email list discussion http: // www.adbooks.org /

The Official Harry Potter Website http: // www2warnerbros.com

JKRowling Official Site http: // www.jkrowling.com

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Leu, D. J., Castek, J., Henry, L. A., Corio, J. & McMullan, M. (2004). The lessons that children teach us: Integrating children's literature and the new literacies of the internet. The Reading Teacher, 57(5) 496-503.

Love, K. & Simpson, A. (in press). Online discussion in schools: Towards a pedagogical framework. International Journal of Educational Research.

Love, K. (2005). Framing in online school discussions: A new mode of educational inequity? In K. Love (Ed.), The Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, Special Edition Series $19 Language and Social Life: Functional Perspectives, 64-86.

Love, K. (2004). On line discussion in secondary English: Shaping interactive practice for ESL students. In C. Davison (Ed.), Information Technology and Innovation in Language Education. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 149-172.

Love, K. (2002). Mapping on-line discussions in secondary English. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 45(5), 382-409.

Marsden, J. (1993). Tomorrow When the War Began. Chippendale, NSW: Pan Macmillan. New South Wales Board of Studies (1998). English K-6 Syllabus. Sydney: Board of Studies, NSW.

O'Brien, T. (1994). In the Lake of the Woods. Flamingo: London.

Patterson, A. (1993). 'Personal Response' and English Teaching. In D. Meredyth & D. Tyler (Eds.), Child and Citizen: Genealogies of Schooling and Subjectivity. Griffith, QLD: ICPS, 61-86.

Paulsen, M.F. (1996). Moderating educational computer conferences. In Z. Berge & M. Collins (Eds.), Computer Mediated Communication in the On-line Classroom, Vol. 3. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 94-104.

Queensland Studies Authority (2005). Years 1-10 English Syllabus (Open Trial). http://www.qsa.qld.edu.au /yrs1to10/kla/english/docs/syllabus/

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State Government Curriculum Frameworks referred to

Curriculum Council, Western Australia (2005). Curriculum Framework Curriculum Guide--English. Osborne Park, Western Australia.

Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (2004). Victorian Essential Learning Standards. http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/31.10.05.

Department of Education, Tasmania (2003). Essential Learnings Framework 1 and 2. School Education Division. http://www.education.tas.gov.au 31.10.05

Board of Studies, New South Wales (2004). Years 7-10 Syllabus and Support Materials. http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au / 31.10.05

Department of Education and Children's Services, South Australia (2001). South Australian Curriculum Standards and Accountability Framework. http: // www.sacsa.sa.edu.au / index 31.10.05

Queensland Studies Authority (2005). Years 1-10 English Syllabus (OPEN TRIAL). http://www.qsa.qld.edu.au/yrs1to10/kla/english/docs/syllabus/31.10.05

Department of Education and Training, Australian Capital Territory (2001). ACT Curriculum Frameworks and Across Curriculum Perspective Statements. http://www.decs.act.gov.au/31.10.05 Table 1. Register features of Discussion Thread 1. Intellectual content Interaction Organisation (Field) (Tenor) (Mode) * initiated by student * 'horizontal' student- * colloquial, spoken- * brief expressions of student postings like patterns of opinion about text * limited moderator language * superficial, reactive regulation/ * 'chained', rather forms of reasoning intervention than 'threaded' from text * strong initial organisational * largely affectively establishment of structure and (sometimes) individual online ethically focused identity Table 2. Register features of Discussion Thread 2. Intellectual content Interaction Organisation (Field) (Tenor) (Mode) * initiated by teacher * 'hierarchical' * largely formal, * extended expressions student-teacher and written-like of opinion about 'horizontal' patterns of language text student-student * some colloquial, * divergent forms of interactional spoken-like patterns reasoning from text, patterns of language supported by close * directive * extensively reference to the intervention 'threaded' details of the text by teacher organisational * ethically focused * real names as structure reflections of individual online identity within existing corporeal community