Some problems coming to mind re. potential dissertation topic: it would be necessary to compare 2 sets of learning, 1 in an online role-play and 1 in a face-to-face role-play. This presents some difficulty, not insurmountable, in being able to observe both sets of learners. But... much more importantly, there are simply too many variables in this project, as it stands at present: let's say that the online participants are more active than the F2F learners. This could tell you about:
- their personality
- the strength of the teacher
- the time they take their lesson
- etc etc etc
So... the project will not be explanatory. If it still runs, it needs to be exploratory, and would simply measure participation in the online role-play.
Bigger problem still: when I taught in Japan, despite the reputation of Japanese learners for being afraid of making mistakes, I had few significant problems in getting learners involved in F2F role-plays. This came down to skill of teacher and sensitivity too.
The dissertation could be significantly scaled down so that it focuses only on wiki role-play (my idea from the OLL course). A new question would be required, and very probably the (ill-conceived) Japanese culture idea should be scrapped.
Comments
There also seems to be a matter of the teachers individual style and skills. This raises for me a number of questions. First of all, is one researching one's own practice, or is one looking at the practice of a colleague, or group of colleagues. I think that very often when a particular innovation seems highly successful in one setting, and yet doesn't appear to transfer to another setting, there may often be an unrecognised matter of the particular skills of the teacher. It might be felt that spelling out a procedure in meticulous detail is all that is required to ensure successful transfer. But perhaps the receiving teacher just "doesn't get it".
Of course, this will undoubtedly be extremely complex. But one could probably come to a conclusion about whether the problems that one sees in the innovative situation that one is monitoring are more to do with the innovation in practice per se, or more to do with the contextual situation in which that innovation has come to be located. Again (I've said elsewhere) the research process proceeds insteps - an exploratory study may just throw up more questions. How often is it said of an important piece of research that it "raises more questions than it answers"?