I am thinking of trying a chat experience with a group of young adult intermediate learners next week. I have created a dedicated chatroom for this purpose using Chatzy: http://www.chatzy.com/.
The reason I want to do this is I have a couple of very shy Japanese female learners in the class and 1 very dominant male Chinese. Speaking tends to be hard for the 2 female students who lack confidence when speaking 'in public'. After having read so much about how CMC can redress the balance in the papers we have been looking at for the current module, I'd like to see if whether and in what way the dynamics of the class during interaction change.
I'd like to leave the students as free as possible to chat but will either give them a topic to discuss or a task that involves reaching a concensus (which I think might generate more output and ensure that all the students will have to participated in some way). Any ideas?
I will keep you informed as to how I proceed and how it goes.
6 comments:
good luck jane ... having taught in japan for 7 years and prior to that in London to many Japanese students ... I'd be interested to hear what happens ... from my experience tho ... in my context reticence in oral conversation can often extend to the written form of chat - fingers crossed tho
Hi Jane
It would be interesting to hear how this goes as some research does make claims for CMC being the great equalizer:-) ie giving opportunities for the usually shy to participate. I do think group dynamics continues to play its part. But giving scope for students to work 'quietly' in pairs/small groups online may give you some interesting results.
I think setting a task that has a specific outcome may support your learners and there is some research to suggest these tasks (what we call convergent) may set conditions for negotiation of meaning. Although quite traditional, (and you may want to set something more authentic), jigsaw tasks are reported as productive in the literature. This paper may give you some stimulus. Noticing and text based chat
and also maybe this one - examples from Spanish as L2 but links to a few tasks that could perhaps be adapted?
CMC and interlanguage
Look forward to hearing how it goes. If you do try it and want to have a go at some text analysis from this, could make for a nice assignment topic, by the way;-)
agree with diane that setting specific tasks is key ... text analysis is also an interesting idea ... forwarded the link to all my colleagues today and suggested as much in the email ...
Those are useful articles, Diane. I'm not completely convinced about the equalising aspect of CMC, though. Maybe it depends on whether we're talking about email, forum, blog, chat or any one of a number of possibilities. I can understand that some people may be just as shy about being published in a blog or making typos in a chat session as talking in a F2F class discussion - though not necessarily the same people.
Has anyone here ever sustained chat or forum with bigger groups? In my relatively limited experience, if I have a small class, most class members tend to contribute to the CMC. In larger classes participation in CMC is reduced to just a few class members.
Just another thought on the aspect of equality in CMC. Quite a lot of the articles I've read talk about the democratising influence that CMC can have on a class through anonymity. So race, gender or handicap tend to play less of a role in class dynamics in CMC. But surely anonymity doesn't usually play much of a role since in most language classes in CMC people are encouraged to introduce themselves, upload pictures and talk about themselves as part of the communication process. Also, I find that students usually give their own names, thus indicating gender and often race. But maybe others have different experiences here.
Dear All,
Thanks for your comments. The actual experience went like this: I allowed 30 minutes for this activity. The task was to ask and answer questions and guess each other's aliases. 9 learners participated. The reticent speakers I had hoped would be drawn into the activity were absent that day (sod's law). I couldn't reschedule as we had the IT suite booked. In retrospect I don't think the task was specific enough as the first phase of the chat mainly consisted in people directly asking each other who they were, despite my instructions to the contrary. Also, two of the learners began a 'game' of changign their aliases every 5 minutes (which I suppose I should have realised was possible on the Chatzy platform and chosen a different task). In the end this was causing frustration among other partipants so I joined the chat myself under alias and the task then became 'guess who the teacher is'. I was sure they would twig as to my id immediately due to the nature of my own questions and the possibility that stucturally my 'utterances' were perhaps more accurate (actually my typing skills at speed are such that at times, my words came out as gobbledegook!). Instead, as I made an observation about something making reference to Italian, all the students assumed I was one of the 2 Italian students taking part. An indication that the learners are more focussed on meaning and real communication than form perhaps???
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