The role of personality factors in second language acquisition

2.3 Methodology

This chapter is based on a case study carried out in one of the universities in New Zealand in a course offered in semester A of each year which is part of a Post Graduate Diploma. The data collection took place in 2012 and seven students and their lecturer participated in this study. In order to capture the experiences and perspectives of the participants in this research, individual interviews with the students and teachers, observation of online learning activities, online profile questionnaire and document analysis were used as methods of data collection. The learning technologies that facilitated the synchronous and asynchronous learning activities of this course comprised Adobe Connect virtual classroom and the university learning management system (LMS), Moodle.
The aim of this study was to examine factors that affect students’ motivation and engagement in a specific online learning environment. In exploring mediational factors that affect students’ motivation and engagement that exist in activity systems, Engeström’s (1987) Activity Theory framework was used in this research. The constituents of an activity system include subject, object, tools, rules, community and

Fig. 2.1 The basic structure of an activity system. (Adapted from Engeström 1987)
division of labour. Activity Theory provided a framework to guide data collection, analysis and interpretations of our study. The framework allowed us to recognize the whole structure of the course and learning activities as activity systems and examine how different elements of activity systems influenced and affected each other in this context. Figure 2.1 shows the basic structure of the Activity Theory.

2.4 Factors Affecting Students’ Motivation and Engagement

This Post Graduate Diploma course was taught fully online for a period of 12 weeks and delivered via the university LMS. The participants included seven students (six New Zealanders and one from the Middle East) and the lecturer (New Zealander). The activities which provided the data for analysis included synchronous virtual classroom and discussion forum that was facilitated by the LMS.
In this context, the elements—tools and community—seemed to mediate students’ active participation and motivation in the process of achieving their ( subject) learning objectives ( object). Tool mediation, which is a key principle of Activity Theory, highlights that human activity is mediated by various tools (Kaptelinin 1996). These tools can be external (physical)—a computer or a book—or internal (psychological)—a mental model, concept or a plan, for instance. The tools that mediated students’ motivation and engagement in this context included the educational technologies—Adobe Connect virtual classroom and the university LMS, Moodle.
The Adobe Connect virtual classroom facilitated a synchronous activity in this case as an individual assignment which represented 30 % of the marks students received. The objective of this activity was to present their research to the members of the class in the virtual classroom environment. The dates of presentations were predetermined and posted on the Moodle site for students to choose the day that best suited them (out of 3 days from 7.30 to 9 pm). The presentations took place during week 10 of the semester. Figure 2.2 shows the virtual classroom activity system that is overlaid in Activity Theory framework.