There is no doubt that using chat in the ESL teaching classrooms is a key to providing opportunity to promote the use of written language to communicate in an authentic way. I am referring to synchronous communication we had during our last class. I don’t have much experience of using chat for my personal communication; nor have I integrated it into my teaching.
My experience during the last class, made me think that there are some advantages and disadvantages of using chat rooms during the ESL teaching/learning .
In the beginning, I was excited to be able to communicate with someone, on the other side, and having the same class with a different instructor. Anyway, it was very interesting to get to meet in the chat room other people. Unfortunately, I became frustrated very soon because I wasn’t able to hold the discussion. By the time I contributed a line, people would be talking about something else.
I knew that I had to contribute to the discussion and typing fast was a challenge for me. Trying to type faster, I made some spelling mistakes which made me even more nervous. On the other hand, there was only one person chatting with my class mates, so we all kept asking her questions and that limited my chances to communicate.
From my point of view, if the central question of discussion was brought to the classroom, where you can actually see the participants of the discussion and listen to their comments, I would have been able to get something out of that discussion and at the same time, share my thoughts and get feedback.
In the ESL classrooms, it is very obvious you will have students with limited experiences of using technology, which may create negative attitudes towards their learning experiences.
Now, if we were able to look at the recording s of our chat, my contribution to the discussion wouldn’t show much interaction on the subject matter.
Hi, Zura. I have the same feeling as you do during the in-class chatting. I contributed more than the first time we chatted with Penns. I assume this is because I have other 3 classmates in my group, which makes feel more comfortable. During the first time, I was the only one from U of A. I felt a kind of lost duirng the conversation in that other three interlocutors were more familiar with the topic and concept that they were talking about. I feel that my thinking speed counldn't catch up with others'
ReplyDeleteHello. I agree that chatting with more than 2 or 3 people gets to be a little nuts, although I can see the potential given a smaller number of participants (or a way to delegate turns), a task, and the use of an L2 to make it more interesting and useful.
ReplyDeleteI think we need to be careful when we apply chatting into our class. As you said, people with limited experience in this kind of communication would get frustrated.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, if our students are used to chatting on line, chatting can be used to re-allocate conversation utterances. Remember that in a chatting room those who seldom speak in class get more chance to "speak" and no one can dominate the conversation as long as no one is typing significantly faster than others.