The use of chat rooms in an ESL setting

Abstract

This article explores the combination of on-line chat rooms with regular classroom interactions in a personalized English program and its potentials to enhance second language development. Two non-native English speaking university professionals participated in a one-hour on-line chatting session each week with me for 10 weeks in addition to weekly classroom meetings. Printouts of the chat sessions were used in subsequent classroom discussions and were analysed for the present study. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the data show that the participants sometimes noticed the errors they made in their on-line chatting and initiated repairs on them. Such noticing of linguistic forms has positive effects on learners and is necessary for language acquisition to occur. These results suggest that the face-to-face interactions may have highlighted the participants' language problems and enhanced their awareness of such problems whereas the on-line chatting provided the participants a unique opportunity to put their grammatical knowledge to practice through meaningful communication. © 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.