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Moderation Matters:Measuring Conversational Moderation Impact in English as a Second Language Group Discussion

Rena Gao, Ming-Bin Chen, Lea Frermann, Jey Han Lau

TL;DR

This paper addresses the lack of quantitative assessment for moderation in multi-party ESL group discussions by introducing a moderated ESL corpus of 17 sessions (16.5 hours, 9,843 sentences) and a pipeline that combines automatic ESL dialogue evaluation with domain-specific moderation analysis. Building on the WHoW framework, the authors derive ten ESL-specific moderation strategies (ESLMOD) using GPT-4o annotations and BERTopic clustering, and evaluate dialogue quality with micro- and macro-level metrics adapted from Gao et al. The study shows that moderator presence improves topic management and openings/closings, with active acknowledgment and encouragement (Echoing/Backchanneling) being the most effective strategies, while excessive information or opinion sharing can hamper dialogue quality. These findings advance automated analysis of ESL group discussions and offer practical guidance for moderator design in non-native conversation settings, though the study is limited by a relatively homogenous participant pool and a small number of moderators.

Abstract

English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers often struggle to engage in group discussions due to language barriers. While moderators can facilitate participation, few studies assess conversational engagement and evaluate moderation effectiveness. To address this gap, we develop a dataset comprising 17 sessions from an online ESL conversation club, which includes both moderated and non-moderated discussions. We then introduce an approach that integrates automatic ESL dialogue assessment and a framework that categorizes moderation strategies. Our findings indicate that moderators help improve the flow of topics and start/end a conversation. Interestingly, we find active acknowledgement and encouragement to be the most effective moderation strategy, while excessive information and opinion sharing by moderators has a negative impact. Ultimately, our study paves the way for analyzing ESL group discussions and the role of moderators in non-native conversation settings.

Moderation Matters:Measuring Conversational Moderation Impact in English as a Second Language Group Discussion

TL;DR

This paper addresses the lack of quantitative assessment for moderation in multi-party ESL group discussions by introducing a moderated ESL corpus of 17 sessions (16.5 hours, 9,843 sentences) and a pipeline that combines automatic ESL dialogue evaluation with domain-specific moderation analysis. Building on the WHoW framework, the authors derive ten ESL-specific moderation strategies (ESLMOD) using GPT-4o annotations and BERTopic clustering, and evaluate dialogue quality with micro- and macro-level metrics adapted from Gao et al. The study shows that moderator presence improves topic management and openings/closings, with active acknowledgment and encouragement (Echoing/Backchanneling) being the most effective strategies, while excessive information or opinion sharing can hamper dialogue quality. These findings advance automated analysis of ESL group discussions and offer practical guidance for moderator design in non-native conversation settings, though the study is limited by a relatively homogenous participant pool and a small number of moderators.

Abstract

English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers often struggle to engage in group discussions due to language barriers. While moderators can facilitate participation, few studies assess conversational engagement and evaluate moderation effectiveness. To address this gap, we develop a dataset comprising 17 sessions from an online ESL conversation club, which includes both moderated and non-moderated discussions. We then introduce an approach that integrates automatic ESL dialogue assessment and a framework that categorizes moderation strategies. Our findings indicate that moderators help improve the flow of topics and start/end a conversation. Interestingly, we find active acknowledgement and encouragement to be the most effective moderation strategy, while excessive information and opinion sharing by moderators has a negative impact. Ultimately, our study paves the way for analyzing ESL group discussions and the role of moderators in non-native conversation settings.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 28 sections, 2 equations, 1 figure, 21 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related work
  3. Barriers to participation in group discussions for ESL speakers
  4. Dialogue quality evaluation
  5. Moderation in ESL group discussions
  6. Dataset Development
  7. ESL Conversation Session
  8. Data Collection
  9. Method
  10. Discovery of ESL Moderation Strategies
  11. ESL Multi-party Dialogue Evaluation
  12. Analysis and Results
  13. Characterizing Conversational Moderation in ESL Group Discussion
  14. Comparative Dialogue Quality Evaluation
  15. ESLMOD Strategies Comparison
  16. ...and 13 more sections

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: Example of a moderated conversation involving ESL Asian speakers. Highlighted dialogue bubbles represent moderator interventions, while underlined text indicates the tags of the moderation strategies.