Collaborating with ‘familiar’ strangers in mobile-assisted environments: The effect of socializing activities on learning EFL writing

Abstract Learners in computer- or mobile-assisted collaborative learning environments could remain anonymous or unfamiliar, as educators might not provide explicit socializing activities with the assumption that effective interactions could happen naturally in these situations. However, from the perspectives of social presence, it was hypothesized that for learners who were unfamiliar to their peers in online collaborative learning environments, performing explicit socializing activities prior to learning phases would help them have better learning performance, experience lower levels of working memory load, and experience higher levels of social presence than performing implicit socializing activities. This research was conducted to test the hypotheses with 60 participants. The results showed that providing explicit socializing activities to unfamiliar learners in mobile-assisted collaborative learning environments increased the level of social presence, facilitated their acquisition of complex cognitive skills such as EFL argument essay writing skills, and reduced the level of cognitive load in learning. These results are discussed in light of human cognitive architecture and the social presence theory.