This article investigates the communicative styles of three different peer mentors in the context of online language learning, and considers their effect on student engagement. A key objective is to show how an innovative corpus-based technique, keyword analysis, can be used as a first step towards identifying communicative styles. We view communicative style as a linguistic means by which rapport is managed amongst participants (Spencer-Oatey 2008). Our primary data includes 685 forum posts, of which 273 (over 26,000 words) were by the mentors at the heart of our study. We show that the three mentors have different communicative styles: different rapport management orientations are achieved in different ways. Furthermore, we bring together multiple data sources, including participants’ posts and self-reported perception data. This allows us to find evidence on if and how communicative styles impact on student engagement and perception. We discovered that rapport enhancement aligns with increased active participation, especially if a self-effacement strategy is used, and positive student perception, but that the lack of such rapport does not automatically imply negative student perception.

中文翻译：

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交流方式、融洽关系和学生参与：在线同伴指导计划

本文调查了在线语言学习背景下三位不同同伴导师的交流方式，并考虑了他们对学生参与度的影响。一个关键目标是展示如何将基于语料库的创新技术关键字分析用作识别交流风格的第一步。我们将交流风格视为一种语言手段，通过这种手段在参与者之间管理融洽关系（Spencer-Oatey 2008）。我们的主要数据包括 685 个论坛帖子，其中 273 个（超过 26,000 字）来自我们研究的核心导师。我们表明三位导师具有不同的沟通风格：以不同的方式实现不同的融洽管理取向。此外，我们汇集了多个数据源，包括参与者的帖子和自我报告的感知数据。这使我们能够找到关于交流方式是否以及如何影响学生参与度和感知的证据。我们发现，融洽的增强与积极参与的增加相一致，特别是如果使用自谦策略和积极的学生看法，但缺乏这种融洽并不自动意味着消极的学生看法。