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- The focus of this lesson is on students who are learning English as non-native speakers (NNES) for academic or life skills purposes.
- Limited English-proficient, or LEP, students may use a variation of standard English or may not use standard American English effectively for academic purposes. Others may or may not have English language variations and have problems such as stuttering that influence their language production.
- Language learning includes interpersonal communication and language used for academic purposes. In classrooms where people from diverse cultures become a community of learners, negotiating meaning is a critical part of language learning.
- The most widely accepted way to teach and test language proficiency is by testing reading comprehension, writing, speaking and listening, and grammar to identify students' skills as low, intermediate or high.
- Network-based language teaching (NBLT) is technology used to help students articulate language structures under specific social conditions controlled by the teacher within the capabilities of the technology.
- There are three dominant types of language instruction based on the value for effective language production. They are the structural (audiolingual) behaviorist approach, the cognitive or constructivist approach, or the sociocognitive approach.
- In NBLT environments, a sociocognitive approach dominates. This means that teachers identify success when students exhibit skills or behaviors that involve negotiation of meaning.
- A teacher can set up the environment so students can create text in real-time or synchronously such as in a chatroom, or asynchronously with a medium such as e-mail.
- Asynchronous communities are formed as students send and receive messages that are not answered immediately, as opposed to synchronous communities.
- Another type of time-independent communication utilized is e-journals or dialogue journals, in which a student or students write to a teacher in a more reflective and, perhaps, directed manner.
- A Listserv allows groups of people to discuss issues, share information, or ask questions related to a specific topic via e-mail.
- Bulletin boards and newsgroups are Internet environments functioning as ongoing exchanges between multiple users.
- Chatlists, chatrooms, and discussion forums all reference a type of virtual environment similar to bulletin boards and newsgroups but with more possibility for teacher control.
- A MOO is an Object Oriented program that creates a text-based synchronous virtual reality environment in which one uses words to navigate a "world" conceptualized through written descriptions.
- IRC (Internet relay chat) allows people all over the Internet to "talk" to each other using a keyboard in real-time.
- Many students expressed confidence in gaining computer competency and saw it as a way to increase their future career possibilities (Warschauer, 2000).
- Students reported feeling more in control of their learning in an Internet or Intranet environment because, among other things, they could control responses, ask for clarification in a "chat" situation, and experiment with language use. Time for reflection, and students actually exhibiting reflection, was more apparent in e-mail, listservs, and computer conferencing settings than in MOOs or chats.
- While most researchers cited increased student participation in any virtual community over time, the type of participation noted was not always clearly defined. Decrease in participation was noted under two circumstances: when topics did not seem relevant to the students and when students became uncooperative because the degree of proficiency varied too much among participants (Schweinhorst, 1999; Warschauer, 2000).
- Research on MOOs showed that students asked partners to paraphrase or translate and that more than half of them felt that corrections from partners were very helpful. More students asked for clarification rather than switch topics. In e-mail and MOOs, research evidence shows students were less inhibited in using the target language.
- In a MOO and Intranet environment, students took on the role of accommodating each other.
- The virtual community created by MOOs and e-mail reportedly enhanced the social presence beyond the classroom, with students relying on their keypals as the authority (Leh, 1999).
- Warschauer's (2000) ethnographic study found that electronic exchanges were longer and students often expressed opinions rather than directly answering questions in their exchanges. In addition, more formal expressions were used in the electronic form.
- A comparative study of online vs. offline writing found that writers exhibited individual preferences as students tended to avoid certain grammatical structures, yet successfully communicated their ideas (González-Beuno, 1998).
- Studies showed that written text in an Internet environment consistently reflected effective use of oral features (Paiva, 1999). In another report, it was found that oral skills improved by using online chatrooms for those with at least an intermediate level of proficiency (Warschauer, 2000).
- Data analyzed in an e-mail exchange between students and a teacher showed increased syntactic complexity, variety and accuracy over time not observed in classroom settings (González-Beuno, 1998).
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