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In recent years, language massive open online courses (LMOOCs) have been considered an effective approach to developing English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ language skill at various levels (e.g., Barcena & Martín-Monje, 2014; Ding & Shen, 2019; Hsu, 2021b; Luo & Ye, 2021; Martín-Monje & Borthwick, 2021; Sallam et al., 2020). They not only allow people to learn regardless of geographic boundaries (Barcena & Martín-Monje, 2014), but also provide rich and authentic target-language environments in which learners can interact, challenge, and negotiate meaning with one another (Chong et al., 2022; Ding & Shen, 2019; Jitpaisarnwattana et al., 2021a; Jitpaisarnwattana et al., 2022c). A recent review further showed that social constructivism was the most frequently mentioned theoretical framework in studying technology-enhanced collaborative language learning (Su & Zou, 2020).
Grounded in a social constructivist perspective on learning, Garrison et al. (2000) proposed the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, and reflected the assumption of social constructivism through three basic elements – cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. The CoI framework was originally proposed as a lens for understanding educational experience. Subsequently, it was shown to be effective at explaining meaningful learning, both in non-MOOC online EFL contexts (e.g., Assalahi, 2020; Herrera Díaz & González Miy, 2017) and in MOOCs across various domains (e.g., Cohen & Holstein, 2018; Ouyang et al., 2020; Zou et al., 2021).
However, only a limited number of scholars have adopted the CoI framework in their studies of online language teaching and learning (e.g., Herrera Díaz & González Miy, 2017; Yang, 2016), as “less attention has been paid to fundamental aspects such as the educational theory that should sustain LMOOC design” (Sallam et al., 2020, p. 19). Within that small group, hardly any have looked specifically at LMOOCs, or simultaneously at course-design and teaching practices (Goshtasbpour et al., 2020). Perhaps more importantly, this small body of literature has tended to overstate the effects of CoIs on online language learning because it has focused on correlations, either within the CoI framework (e.g., Assalahi, 2020; Smidt et al., 2021), or between the framework and language-learning proficiency (e.g., Mo & Lee, 2017; Wu et al., 2017). At the same time, it has tended to understate how influential the framework has been on online instructors’ course designs and teaching practices. The root of these gaps is that the existing CoI measurement instrument cannot “capture the more nuanced elements of … [online] educational experiences” (Kaul et al., 2018, p. 1).
Therefore, it is important to develop a reliable and valid CoI observation protocol that the instructors of LMOOCs can follow (Kaul et al., 2018), and the aim of this study is to provide one. Having done so, a worthwhile next step would be to use the developed protocol to identify exemplary practices that reflect high-level CoI (Fiock, 2020), with the wider aim of informing educators about effective instructional practices, and ultimately, improving the quality of their courses.