Introduction Social influence is considered to have a significant impact on academic success (Schunk, 1999; Riese, Samara, & Lillejord, 2012). It postulates that if students are more able to maintain their social relationships with others in school, they are likely to perform better academically than those who are not. In second or foreign language (L2/FL) learning, there has been great interest among L2/FL researchers and educators in how learners interact with one another for knowledge co-construction or the negotiation of meaning in traditional face-to-face settings in order to enhance linguistic knowledge in the target language, e.g., Foster and Ohta (2005), and Dobao (2012; 2014). Thanks to emerging technology or computer use for daily communication, e.g., emails and chats, socialization has inevitably become part of our everyday lives. In particular, the Internet has been one of the most important resources for strengthening students' learning experiences at the tertiary level (Lee & Tsai, 2011; Liu, Lan, & Ho, 2014); it potentially provides genuine communication to foster autonomous learning (McLoughlin & Lee, 2010). Such meaningful communication via the Internet for educational purposes has been widely researched in recent years, as it is believed that it engenders students' meaningful learning experiences and improves their motivation and engagement (Chu & Kennedy, 2011; Hwang, Wang, & Sharples, 2007; Cheng & Chau, 2013; Winke & Goertler, 2008; Cho & Kim, 2013; Razon, Turner, Johnson, Arsal, & Tenenbaum, 2012; Lan, 2014; Lee & Tsai, 2011; Cho & Jonassen, 2009). However, the relationship between motivation and collaborative learning in a specific context has remained under-explored in the conventional classroom setting (Jarvela, Volet, & Jarvenoja, 2010) or in the web- based environment. Taken together, in this study, the main focus is on the impact of online text-based collaboration outside the classroom on the constructs (e.g., motivation and vocabulary gain) by examining the quantitative data of the questionnaire survey and the Google Docs log files. Socially web-based learning in FL Socially web-based tools have been increasingly adopted for L2 or FL learning. As such, online text chats are being utilized for examining modified interaction between less and more capable interlocutors in order for L2/FL development to occur. During a problem-solving task, a learner's non-target linguistic items that often cause misunderstanding or communication difficulty need to be corrected through employing a clarification request or comprehension check. Such corrected items provide the learner with linguistic input that learner may then use it to generate his/her output; it potentially pushes the learners' production (Yilmaz, 2011). In Collentine and Collentine's (2013) study by adopting a corpus approach to examining learners' complex syntactic structures in Spanish in a SCMC setting, their results show that learners are likely to produce the target sentences (nominal clauses) to reply to their expert interlocutors. Their findings suggest that interaction taking place in SCMC can promote leaners' syntactic knowledge in the target language. Supportive of negotiated interaction that leads to L2/FL development, Smith and Renaud (2013) have put it forward that due to network delay time that affords learners to have more time to process input and monitor their output. In their study, they employed eye-tracking technology to explore L2 learners' attention paid to lexical and grammatical features of the corrective feedback provided by their instructors during text chats. The way in which learners fixated on the target items had a great impact on their linguistic knowledge; learners who were likely to notice the linguistic items tended to acquire them. The results of their study suggest that the amount of eye fixation time significantly associated with the posttest scores (e. …
['Sarah Hsueh Jui Liu', 'Yu Ju Lan']
Social Constructivist Approach to Web-Based EFL Learning: Collaboration, Motivation, and Perception on the Use of Google Docs.