Interthinking in asynchronous online talk: A study of Hong Kong English as a second language learners

Engaging in productive forms of classroom talk has been shown to positively impact students’ thinking and language exposure. To maximize the effects of classroom talk on students who learn English as a second language (ESL) and to create more learning opportunities by leveraging the affordances of dialogic teaching in enabling interthinking, this study set out to explore the influence of asynchronous online talk on students’ thinking through a micro-blogging tool, Padlet. Twenty-five students from a local secondary school were recruited. They were asked to post their views on current news articles and conduct dialogues with one another through the commenting function. After the discussion, the students were invited to self-evaluate the process of the discussion. Five students were also invited to participate in semi-structured interviews. Results indicated that the asynchronous online talk had the potential to broaden and deepen students’ thinking through the creation and maintenance of their intermental development zone (IDZ). The talk also facilitated the internalization of co-constructed ideas for individual production. Drawing from these findings, it is recommended that the conceptualization of interthinking could capitalize on students’ self-evaluation and that the evaluative stage could be structured in interactive tasks in future instructional practices.