A Comparative Analysis of Forum and Barrage Interactive Patterns in Online Language Learning

With the development of interactive technology, communication in barrage is popular in social media for its timeliness, situationality, and diversity. Some studies believe that barrage can improve the learning experience and enthusiasm of distance learners, so as to promote learners' learning. Therefore, more and more online education courses begin to use this emerging technology to promote students' learning. Forum has always been the main communication means of online learning due to its convenient use. In order to understand the difference between the barrage communication mode and traditional forum communication mode in terms of students' knowledge construction, this study adopted content analysis method, selected the teaching video in Bilibili barrage network to analyze, and coded posts in forum and barrage respectively according to the Gunawardena interactive analysis model revised by Chen. The results showed that the level of knowledge construction of learners was low in both forum and barrage. In addition, the results also showed that the level of knowledge construction in the forum was slightly higher than that in the barrage. The results of this study demonstrated that the knowledge construction of forum and barrage had their own characteristics, and both of them were necessary for online learning in the future.