New Literacies and language learning

57 thoughts on “CMC and Second Language Use”

1. I once used an APP called English Radio. There are many chatrooms in its speaking section like Free Chatroom where you can both speak and write and Voice Chatroom in which you are only allowed to record your voice. Conversations in the chatroom are real and spotaneous. You are totally free to express yourself and it is often easy to find somebody from different countries to talk to. But the problem is that there are too many people talking in the same chatroom and it waste a lot of to wait for the response from the guy you are talking to. In addition, I found most people joining in this chatroom are beginners with poor pronunciation and the worst grammar. Anyway, I totally agree that this approach is not quite good for those wanting to foster their English for academic purpose.

   • This Chatroom sounds new to me, since I never tried before. Recently, I was helping me friend to improve his Oral English via QQ, which is a good way for telecommunication. I guess the main problem is that the network sometimes is too poor and the other couldn’t follow you.

2. My BA major was English Translation, and there was an compulsory course named Consecutive Interpreting which needed CMC for both teaching and learning; mostly, we were required to do the drill for interpreting immediately after the speaker, and our voices would be recorded and teachers then shared our production to all of the class; it was quite embarrassed. The good point is that we were all very nervous when doing the drills in class, which forced us to train ourselves out of class a lot more. And during the training process, we all made great progress in Oral pronunciation and quick responses as well how to deal with long conversations, besides, we also exercised with many “odd accents” in order to be familiar with World Englishes.

   • I think your experience is quite interesting! I also believe that with the use of CMC in language classrooms, some teaching and learning practices become more effective than usual. But I think if your teachers chose volunteers to share their recordings rather than randomly played one of them without students’ willingness, it would be better.

   • Sunnie, if I were you, I would have been under great pressure too. Yet, this type of training somehow can let students know they can also work under high pressure!:) These “odd accents” are reflecting the reality of English varieties! Do students need to know how to distinguish the varieties of English in order to master the language well?

   • I had the same experience as yours in the simultaneous interpreting course during my undergraduate time. The course was actually a complete challenge for me, and also for most students in our class I guess. Because it was very easy to miss some sentences when doing listening and interpreting at the same time and also required us to have fast reaction and deliver in an appropriate pace. But I do agree with you that the CMC used here does help L2 learners a lot, especially for those advanced learners.

3. I found users in Busuu can not add or change the target language they would like to learn if they do not want to register one more time unless they pay extra money, which seems not so convenient. The same pattern of learning may easily lose learners’ interests and technical problems could be one of the barriers for those small invest websites. I once learned English through a mobile app which can download from http://www.qupeiyin.cn/. It is interesting to learn through dubbing different movie or speech episode, but I still can not persist in doing this. So I believe that whatever method we use to assist learning, the most important quality is insistence.

   • Yes. I agree with you that learning needs insistence and stimuli. I found a popular app for learning words called “Scallops”. It will remind users everyday to review the old words and learn some new words. More importantly, one of the functions of this app is that it can calculate the number of word you learnt so far and post the result on the social network. In this way, all friends in your social network can ‘monitor’ your learning and ‘witness’ your progress so that learners are always motivated in learning words everyday.

4. I once e-mailed to Amy, a native American girl living in LA when I was in Senior 1 in the Middle School. At that time, I had just finished learning an article related to American youth life, and she happened to be responsible for a program aimed at Chinese culture. In order to exchange information, we wrote to each other frequently and because she could not speak Chinese, the only effective communicative language between us was English. By chatting with her, I not only knew more about American peers but also learned some American idioms unconsciously. I really liked that experience and the help she offered me.

   • Susan, did you manage to chat with Amy for a long time? I wish I had such an experience too. I think chatting with an email-pal requires perseverance and seriously we need to maintain the friendship.

   • Wow, I wish I could have an e-pal as you as well. Sometimes, we might think of our e-pal as a way to improve our language skills, in this case we will not pay much attention to maintain our friendship. Therefore, the relationship becomes fragile and we may lose connection with each other at any time.

5. In the first year of my undergraduate study, I frequnetly wrote emails to my brother-in-law, who is an Englishman. I told him my school life and he shared good movies, books with me. This information exchange really inspired me since I was using English for meaning-making and he could understand what I said. To great extent it motivated me to learn more about the language. In this sense, I think the merit of CMC is that it increase your desire to become a good language user, not only it offers the platform for language practice, but also it strengthens your motivation, which is a vital element in learning a language.

   • I think this kind of authentic language use is what we would like all of our learners to experience. CMC makes it much easier to offer (or perhaps better: find) those kinds of opportunities, I guess.

6. Other approaches using CMC in teaching I know are blog making, on-line discussion, Email writing, etc. For language learning, the key point is to contact with whom are high proficient in target language or native speakers. And methods vary in terms of the language level of learners, which needs detailed exploration. I have had the experience of learning an L2. It is not a permanent keypad, just some native people I know on line. It was social networking website such as instagram and Facebook, and communicating with L2 native people and discussing something about the celebrity we all liked. I can learn a lot of very native languages like slangs , but most of the sentences and expressions are simple and short, so it is not very useful for advanced learners in this way.

   • I have similar experience with you in using Instagram. I follow some people including some celebrities, and i could learn some popular sentences, abbreviations, slangs and other native use of language from them.

7. When I was in F.6, my school launched an exchange programme with a Singapore high school. I was assigned a pal called Chong Lian. During the exchange week, he and his classmates came to my school and attended class with us. When he returned to Singapore, we used MSN (this is a very common online chat room in my high school era but the company has been closed down) to chat. Chong Lian’s parents were born in China but they migrated to Singapore, so he knew how to speak Chinese. Yet, he could speak very standard British accent and his written English is very proficient. He normally used Singlish when chatting with his friends. He preferred using standard English but in an informal manner in our conversation. I still remember we talked about the differences between Hong Kong and Singapore cultures. It was a nice exchange. He really made me used English more often and I would not use any literal translation to avoid misunderstanding.

   • I do feel like sharing own culture with the foreigners is the best way to make conversation. I also had a similar experience when I had an internship in USA two years ago. My roommate was an American and we often talked about our own culture in hometown. Throughout our conversation, I got a much better understanding about conversational American English. For example, when I watched World Cup with my roommate, I realized that soccer and football were two different things in USA. Football is indeed similar to rugby.

8. I used a app called Funny English Dubbing. (I translate it into English and not sure about the accuracy.) The main purpose of this app is to let learners to dub a 3 to 4 mins of video themselves and your work could be commented by other people through CMC. Also, there are lots of learning group to join. In the chat room of the group, learners could comment with each other in L2 and share their dub to others. It not only practice the speaking, but also reading and writing. And this app have 2 kind of target people, kids and adults. They prepared different kind of video for different target learners. It’s useful in learning I think.

   • I have been using this app till now!! It can not only improve your speaking skills for you must listen to the original one every time you record your own work. It is imitation in some ways. And also you can participate in different groups which are ranked by the level of learners and share you work with others. They can also visit your homepage and comment with it. You can share it to various social networks like Wechat, Facebook etc to let more people hear your voice. Learning channel has been expanded and comments increased!

   • Yes, I saw my friends’ sharing their dubbing work in wechat too. I agree with you that using this app can foster speaking since it practice users’ articulation, intonation and word stress by means of imitating the English lines. I think teachers can employ this idea into the classroom to teach speaking.

9. The most important aspect for online chatting is that you do not have to worry about the strangeness when you are making a grammar or pronunciation mistake. Moreover, online partners can become really good friends offline if it possible! That means a lot more opportunities to chat when you two are getting closely. Nowadays, many apps have the function of making an appointment with online tutors, which can be adjustable with you own time, and also the salary paid depends on the effect of learning. One more thing to mention is that chatting with people through digital literacies can be helpful for learning slangs which go in and out fashion quickly, especially cyberspeak.

   • I agree that online communication is good for people make connection, but in term of language learning, I am curious about its efficiency.

   • I agree that online chatting can be a good motivation for people to learn a L2. Although it may not be able to help a student with his learning of formal language use, it is definitely a good confidence booster and helps the student to see the real life application of the language. I remember always having wordreference.com opened in a tab when chatting with someone on the other tab. That was one of my ways to learn new words.

   • Despite the efficiency problem, I am thinking of the accuracy and Internet safety. if we do not mind the mistakes made in the communication, we may make them for the second time. how can we improve our grammatical accuracy. in terms of the safety, we may come across some bad ones on the internet. thus we need to learn how to evaluate or distinguish wether the on-line friend is worth of contacting.

   • Efficiency and accuracy seem to be concerns here. Don’t forget that language instruction is often divided into tasks that have different kinds of foci though – e.g. a focus on accuracy, a focus on fluency, a focus on language input and so on. It may be that some kinds of CMC activities help us to build fluency. It also seems that they can frequently be meaningful and motivational, an important consideration for language learning. I like the way that Betty combines a kind of fluency practice, with a focus on form by keeping wordreference.com open in another tab.

10. Using CMC in language teaching could be realized in project-based learning approach. I remember in the last semester, each group was assigned to design activities and questions for teaching a short fiction, and post them on a blog platform, called “wix” introduced by Jeff in the literature class. After this group project, we not only learn how to design a class for teaching and learning literature in the second language, but also improve our new literacies abilities by using wix including changing the layout of the page as well as inserting hyperlinks and buttons. Therefore, I think this kind of blog writing in group for a specific project could be a good choice for involving CMC in language teaching and learning.

    • yes I really enjoy that assignment about showing our presentation and project in an website. It helps me to learn a lot about the webpage design and how to organize the content, also visual and multi-modal discourse.

    • I’m pretty agree that Wix is an interesting blog platform, but the thing that I am keep concerning is whether this platform could be used in mainland China due to the network control. Otherwise, it would be a wast of time to learn how to function it as we could not make use of it or introduce it to our students in the future after our graduation. Google doc is definitely could not be used in mainland China.

    • This problem of network restrictions in China is always going to be an issue. There will be different platforms in China and in Hong Kong and, unfortunately, the platforms that we prefer here may not be available on the mainland. Nevertheless, if one considers the affordances of the platforms (e.g. collaborative authorship in Google Docs) then I believe it ought to be possible to find similar tools. As you learn tools in this context, it is therefore necessary to pay attention to the general affordances and develop your ideas about the most effective ways of using those tools. You would then have to find substitute tools in China and learn how to use them. I don’t see this so much as a waste of time, as of dealing with an unfortunate situation to the best of one’s ability.

11. I really like I how these teachers were able to arrange learning projects for their students with students from other countries. Many of us here would probably love to have been able to participate in activities similar to this when we were younger.

    The intercultural communications is definitely worthwhile, and discourse markers that the students can pick up will give them increased fluency and mastery of the language.

    I am lucky enough to some Spanish and Latino friends to practice Spanish with through the internet. Although I have obtained certain proficiency of the language through classes, these authentic communications allowed me to have a better understanding of the language use. For example, I would learn that some of my grammatically correct expressions might not be what the natives use, or that people use different vocabulary depending on their place of origin. These are things which one could only attain through interactions with real people (taking advantage of current technology).

    As current/future teachers, it is definitely worth bearing in mind the benefits found by these studies, and we could possibly provide our students with this kind of authentic yet controlled learning environment as we continue to expand our own professional networks beyond China.

    • You have good experience on learning foreign languages. In Hong Kong, there are more opportunities for students to interact with people from other countries or with other kinds of cultures. Making conversations with people about their country’s cultures can better motivate learners’ enthusiasm on foreign language and improve their language skills in less time.

12. I once used this website called “Omegle: Talk to strangers!” It’s an webpage which will generate an instant conversation between you and a foreigner and help you practice english through the conversation. In the beginning, i mainly will say something about introducing myself and my life. After a while, i made some real friends and we exchange our facebook account, then we would discuss some topics like culture and history, which really helped my grammar and vocabulary.

13. It seems that CMC really play a great role in almost every aspects of society. People with different career or in different status can come to interact with others online. I think nowadays more ACMC are existed than SCMC because sometimes communicating with people who are not familiar with is limited by time. People would like to interact and place comments on others’ opinions, or share with others on the internet. Commenting and giving feedback can not only let people participate themselves into the activity or topic they are interested in, but also practice their language skills at the same time. Nowadays, wechat and weiblog is popular way for people to communicate. Language learners can use their L2 to write and give others feedback.

14. CMC provides a good platform for real communication with native speakers. In this way, it is great. But if you two (the native friend of you and yourself) do not set rules firstly, topics or the original aim (like focusing on writing or speaking skill of the target language) would change and things will not be controllable. And if you just want to practice communication skills, your grammatical accuracy would somehow be ignored for meaning making is essential in communication.

    • I am in line with your opinion. The grammatical accuracy will be ignored when people pay more attention to their communication skills. Therefore, I think that the combination of the traditional language teaching and the use of CMC outside the classrooms can have a better outcome for students’ language learning.

15. I agree that CMC approach is only useful for elementary level language learners. Most of the sentences in online chatting are conversational. Some of the native speakers may even adjust their choice of language so as to make their speech more comprehensible for the non-native web users. Therefore, it is hard to acquire advanced or academic language level by CMC approach.

    If the class would like to adapt CMC approach for language teaching, teachers would avoid using a local and in-school forum. Teachers would indeed use an international forum and make sure each student must chat with at least one native L2 user online. Only by doing so, students can make successive progress in their L2 acquisition.

16. I also agree that CMC works comparatively useful for real communication with native speakers, especially for us Chinese students, most of who learn English as a foreign language without natural English-speaking environment, where both input and output of English often being limited, particularly to formal classroom settings.
    However, it is really hard to find a right chat room and a right native speaker to communicate with. There are several times that I have involved in a chat room which was fully occupied by Chinese people and although sometimes I could met native speakers, they just kept talking about odd things that I was the least interested in.

    • I agree! Theoretically, chatting with native speakers via online forum is the best way for L2 learners to practise their writing skills. However, it is very hard to execute in real environment. If the learners have really low proficiency in their L2, native speakers may not even comprehend their speech, let alone have the patience to make casual chat with them.

    • Having same worries with you. We prefer to use simple sentences and the person we are talking to will not always give effective feedback to us. It is important for us to find out our weakness during the L2 learning process.
      But, through talking to native speakers we can learn more about real situational conversation and the background culture.

    • I absolutely agree with you that chatting room is somewhat ideal and it is not so applicable.

17. My experience of adapting CMC approach in my English learning might be that I usually catch up with my friends in UK (native speakers) by whatsapp. Although CMC approach is regarded as a way only useful for beginners, it still benefits me a bit in terms of language proficiency cuz at least the replies I got from my friends of native speakers are all correct language feedbacks. Also whatsapp allows you to chat in both SCMC and ACMC, which you can send a voice message or a video chatting too.
    Some drawbacks of this approach might be that some of my mistakes won’t be corrected during chatting. Sometimes in order to avoid interrupting and keep the conversation going well, my friends won’t point out my mistakes as long as my utterance is understandable. So I may not notice my mistakes at all and keep making the same errors again.

    • Yes. It is nice to chat with native speakers as we may learn some authentic language like idioms and slang. One can seldom learn idioms or slang from books. Admittedly, we may come across these items in foreign films. We may not understand them thoroughly. If we chat with native speakers, we may seek clarification immediately.

      As for the drawback of this approach, I have the same thought as you. One’s grammatical mistakes won’t be corrected at once every time as long as the utterances are understood.

18. When I was doing my undergraduate degree, I have tried to collaborate with students in the US twice. The first time took placw when I was doing a course related to languages, cultures and communication. We were assigned a partner from the US and had to response to our partner’ essay using Google document. This is regarded as an asynchronous CMC, which communication takes place with a gap in time.

    Another time of online collaboration happened when I did a fashion course. Every group was pair up wit ha group in the US. We frequently exchange information for our final project (asynchronous CMC). At the end of the semester, however, every group was required to present using “Blackboard collaboration”. We need to upload our presentation PowerPoint to “Blackboard collaboration” and we took turns to use the microphone to present. This resembles traditional presentation very much, just that we didn’t need to face the audience. This is regarded as a synchronous CMC which communication takes place at the same time. The US students would even ask questions after our presentation.

    These experiences have certainly enriched my learning experience. I am particularly impressed by the second experience as oral presentation become less stressful. On top of that, the location of presenting has become more flexible as well. One of my group mates was on vacation and she presented our work in a cafe in Korea.

19. Recently, I encountered a good app for English reading. The app is called “Seed”. It is an app that provides you score of news that covering a large field from various authoritative English sites, such as the Economist. It also has the translated version of the news that selected, which can assist the English learning. Users can subscribe to the field that they are interested in and get the latest push everyday. This app can be used to foster students’ reading in language learning, for the resources from this app is selected from the original English site.

    • I think the app you are using is great. It not only provide reading in the target langauge but also provide a tralation version. This is convenient and helpful for language learning. I would like to try it out and might recommend it to my students.

20. CMC are now frequently involved in language teaching. I think the most recent development is that language learners can easily learn a language on their digital devices, like mobile phone or iPad. For example, some of students learn new vocabulary on the mobile phone, using a app called “ShanBei”. By using this application, students can store new words and review them later. It is more convenient, compared to the traditional way (e.g. printed dictionary and using pen to note on paper). Students can even do test practice on their mobile phone. However, I think the use of CMC in language learning require one’s self-discipline. Learning on a mobile phone, a learner is likely to distract since they might be attracted by games or chats on their mobile phones. Thus, although CMC facilitate language learning, it requires learners’ autonomy.

    I have not had a keypal experience with a native English speaker, but I would like to make some comments on your cons part. I think even for an advanced language learner, there are still chances for him or her to improve the language competence. For example, when the language learner communicate with a speaker in the target language, he or she can encounter some native use of vocabulary or grammatical structure, which he or she may later imitate the use in his or her own writing or speaking. That is also a kind of improvement.

    • Yes, I agree with you that language learning via CMC requires autonomy. When I use the mobile dictionary to consult the meaning of words after class, I am often attracted by the interesting news and pictures advertised in the dicionary. I may read the news for a while and then continue with my study.

21. Key pal have its strength. When I was a senior school students, my best friend wen to America to get his undergraduate degree.Then we become key pal and this really help us maintain our friendship and improve my English proficiency (His English level is really advanced). Sometimes I feel really anxious to complete writing tasks on the lesson, and I think this way of CMC can reduce my level of anxiety. However, sometimes some grammatical errors are not found by our key pal,s because they are not professional teachers in this field. This is the weakness of this way of CMC.

22. There also some problems in the CMC activities, if we as teachers want to apply them into future teaching, we should cope with these problems. Firstly, the key for designing effective CMC activities is respecting the social nature of relevant media. The question is how to recreate their authentic, interpersonal and social purposes in pedagogically sound ways based on incorporation with L2 instruction. Secondly, how to facilitate intercultural communication while minimizing interactional misunderstandings through CMC projects. Thirdly, there is a rich area of questions about the impacts on noninstitutional L2 development.

23. Does CMC refer to computer-mediated communication?

    I hope I could have some of CMC or keypal experience like you guys did. I think my English could be better and I could have a broader horizon through interacting with people from other cultures.

    I am teaching primary school students and it is difficult to carry out CMC activity.
    First the facilities of a local primary school are dated.
    Second there are not enough technical assistance offered by other staff.
    Third students have difficulty in using the computer and various softwares.
    Fourth it is difficult to monitor students’ work during the class time, as some of them just play computer games while they think you are not watching them.
    Last around 10-20% students cannot use the computer at home. Their parents may not allow them to use the computer alone or their computers just broken down.
    There are numerous reasons you cannot imagine.

    So maybe CMC is not suitable for young learners in a large class?

    • Yes, CMC refers to computer-mediated communication. I agree with you that CMC may have difficulty in implementing due to its many restraints. However, if the condition is allowed, I still think it is a good way for language learners to foster language skills and it’s way interesting than traditional face-to-face interactions.

    • yeah, I agree with your point. Actually I do not support children using high technological devices in an early age. Problems like unhealthy habits, technical obstacle, time consuming and heathy issues such as poor eyesight and cervical vertebra disease are really good reasons to agaist this approach.

24. I once used this website called “Omegle: Talk to strangers!” It’s an webpage which will generate an instant conversation between you and a foreigner and help you practice english through the conversation. In the beginning, i mainly will say something about introducing myself and my life. After a while, i made some real friends and we exchange our facebook account, then we would discuss some topics like culture and history, which really helped my grammar and vocabulary.

25. Similar to Busuu, Hujiang website offers many materials for language learners. It has many tests to evaluate English language learners’ grasp of vocabulary such as TEM4 vocabulary test. In order to do the test, you also need others’ participation. After there are more than 2 people in the online waiting room, the vocabulary test can be started and participants are scored and the one who gets the highest score will be the winner of the test. So I think it helps to motivate the learners to recognize and know meaning of words. I think it is good for initial language learners.

    When I was in senior high school, I logged on a game called Penguin Club. In the game, I added a foreign friend and tried to chat with her. However, I didn’t quite understand what she wanted to express. Maybe she just used some abbreviation which caused difficulty for understanding.

26. Several years ago, I met a foreign friend on an online forum. We became familiar with each other very quickly since we both like the same pop star. Later, we chatted regularly online, and I found that I became more motivated to learn English for better communication. However, actually I did not improve a lot in the language skills since my friend was also not a native speaker of English. We might not be aware of our mistakes because we focused more on meaning during the communication. But it was still a good experience to practice English through CMC.
    As for other language learning approaches that use CMC, I think blogs, discussion boards, and mobile apps are very common and popular. I once used an app called Duolingo to learn French, on which I could set my everyday goals and it would monitor my progress. There were different types of exercises, which made the learning process more diverse and interesting.

    • Learning second language through CMC can trigger the intrinsic motivation of learners. I also have a similar language learning experience like you. Since secondary school, I have been using CMC tools to share recent lives with foreign friends. Although this kind of chatting focuses more on the meaning rather than grammar, it allows me to be exposed in an English speaking environment. Getting immersed in this English environment gradually improved my skills.:)

27. I have the experience of learning writing via chatrooms. My teacher at that time encouraged students to practice the target language structures through communicating with classmates online. I found this approach exciting and motivating.

    I also used CMC in my current teaching. I deigned language tasks for my students and asked them to scan the QR codes so as to obtain the instructions and hints which help them complete the tasks.

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