Engaging pre-service teachers in online spaces using interpersonal meaning making resources

Online learning is a well-established mode for initial and ongoing teacher education, made more popular during COVID-19 and beyond. However, participant engagement in online learning is a perennial issue, despite the increasing body of knowledge regarding that which constitutes effective online learning and teacher training. In particular, the critical need to build and maintain relationships in learning is complicated by the geographic and temporal distribution of online participants as well as the nuances of the technology in use. Online learning occurs in collaborative text-spaces within learning management systems, social media spaces and their attendant learning objects such as forums. As such, persistent challenges to engagement in online PLD may be met by considering the language-based interpersonal affordances of these text-spaces. This paper presents a case study of the use of evaluative language resources by one teacher educator to engage initial teacher education students in online learning. Appraisal analysis of weekly forum posts across three iterations of a unit of study shows how a change in language choices impacted positively on student experience. This illuminates the relationship between online learning design and language, and how the meaning making resources associated with the interpersonal metafunction may be deployed judiciously to improve online participant engagement.