License to Chat - Using Chat Rooms in EFL Teaching

Chat rooms or "chats" are one of the most interactive areas on the Internet and they are regularly visited by children and teenagers. Putting it plainly and simply, a chat room is a place on the Internet where people meet to talk about various subjects. Conversation is simultaneous,synchronous and written. A user writes a message onto the computer and the message is immediately displayed on another computer. From a teacher's point of view, chat rooms may turn out to be one of the best places to engage our students in real and meaningful language practice. From a student's point of view, chats are an exciting means of communication and an enriching opportunity to communicate with native or non-native speakers in English.


Generally speaking, chat rooms provide students with a stress-free and uninhibited language practice but most importantly they foment linguistic interaction. Much has already been said and written about the utter importance of interaction in the learning and acquisition of a second language. It has already been proved that the more the student (meaningfully) interacts, the more opportunities he/she will have to learn language and the more language the student learns, more input can he/she can solicit in order to learn more language

So, in order to increase students's interaction in the English language, we can include chat rooms in our lessons. Students's active participation will allow them to experience and experiment language as a real thing. This type of interaction, although written and not face-to-face, will prove more authentic than a conversation with the teacher, especially because in a chat room language is no longer a goal but an instrument to pursue other (real) goals

Precautions However, despite the inherent advantages of using chat rooms for educational purposes, one must be conscious of some dangers:

* Students often have a difficult time using computers, which might endanger the activity. A good solution is to provide students with the basic computer skills (using the keyboard, reading from the screen)

* Chat rooms users often use acronyms and slang that students may fail to understand. A good way to solve this problem is to introduce students to those particular expressions (for instance, prepare a lesson based on Netiquette, which includes specific vocabulary items used on the Internet).

* Students may be confronted with harassment situations and/or verbal confrontations. This is why it is of utter importance to develop your activities in a moderated chat room and to create your own chat room.

* A chat room for educational purposes should have published a list of main topics and subjects currently under discussion.

Activities

As an activity, the use of chat rooms has to be considered fluency work; thus, the teacher should only intervene if the students' mistakes jeopardise communication. It is also necessary to keep in mind that the teacher should only act (during the activity) as a prompter and a resource, in order to allow real interaction.

Activity 1: Who's who? Objectives: By the end of the lesson, students should have:

* acquired the necessary knowledge about the basic functioning of a chat room (log in, write and read a message, log out);

* used the English language in a communicative way;

* demonstrated the necessary skills to make and answer questions;

* demonstrated their understanding of the dialogue;

* reflected on their use of the English language.

Procedure:

* Students will be told that they will dialog with their classmates in a chat room and that they will play a game called "Who's who?". Each student will have a nickname, e.g., a fake identity, and that the objective of the game is to guess the true identity behind the nick. Students must also be instructed to keep their nicknames secret.

* Students will then be told the address of the chat room they'll be accessing and, individually, their nicknames. The teacher should help students to log in and make sure everyone is able to send, read and write messages.

* Students should then approach their colleagues and try to find out who is behind the nicknames.

* In the end, students will be asked to come to the blackboard and write down the names behind the nicks.

* It is also very interesting to print and hand out the transcript of one or two dialogues and lead a brief reflection on how students used the English language.