peer-assessment and studentdriven negotiation of meaning: two ingredients for creating social presence in online efl social contexts

With the current availability of stateoftheart technology, particularly the internet, people have expanded their channels of communication. this has similarly led to many people utilizing technology to learn second/foreign languages. nevertheless, many current computerassisted language learning (call) programs still appear to be lacking in interactivity and what is termed social presence, which is in turn an obstacle to the learners assuming active roles in their online experience of l2 learning. consequently, the existing call programs do not seem to have updated themselves from the obsolete behavioristic and communicative genres to reach for the integrative one to yield optimum interactivity. the present study has attempted to cast light on the prospect of creating an online learning community that could optimize the patterns of interaction among the students and the teacher with the intention of creating online social presence. using a qualitative research based on grounded theory, the researchers attempted to collect and analyze the data visàvis the participants’ feedback on the research questions that were cyclically obtained from 42 english students of the first researcher’s weblog through 41 semistructured interviews at the end of each virtual class on skype and discord over one year. the results suggested that contentbased instruction (cbi) in which the students can opt for and create the content of the course through engaging in asynchronous activities and performing peerassessment in the comment forms and discussion boards before practicing negotiation of meaning in each synchronous class could maximize the level of studentstudent interactivity and social presence among the l2 learners.