Why Use Chat with Students?

Pros/advantages

Cons/pitfalls/disadvantages

• Interaction with real audiences (those who listen in order to get the message and not its form).

• Receive input and produce output.

• Immediate feedback from interlocutors.

• No restrictions regarding location.

• Opportunity for negotiation of meaning.

• Collaborative learning toward knowledge construction.

• Opportunity for intake (what the language learner retains from the input received) through “language noticing” (A hypothesis of second language acquisition which states that for language to take place, students should be aware of what they learn, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, etc.).

• Chatlogs (written transcription of chat) and audio-recordings allow for further analysis of conversation and in the case of chatlogs they add coherence to the different threads of the conversation.

• Promotion of learner autonomy (turn taking, leadership distribution).

(Gonzalez, 2004)

• Students seem to prefer the immediacy of chat to asynchronous tools, wich then, is a plus in motivational terms.

• If students’ keyboarding skills are slow, they may miss part of the conversation taking place.

• Slow readers may find difficult to follow the sometimes fast scrolling screen.

• Chat lingo may result incomprehensible for newbies (people new to the use of web tools or Internet).

• Culturally-specific issues may result in misunderstandings arising.

(Mynard, 2002)

• If chats do not have a set purpose, students may get lost and get nothing out of it.