Chat research
An overview of chat research has pointed out that things haven't changed that much in ten years or so, in spite of the fact that the world has evolved, and more people have integrated chat into their everyday lives.
Of course businesses noticed that if they put a little chat window on their website, and monitored it 24/7, or at least eight hours a day, this was good for their business and gave a little personal dimension to a personal relationship that they would have loved to have had, when you walked in the door, if you did. Now, during the pandemic, this little chat window is all they've got, since people are not walking in doors. And the personal dimension of it is huge, in business, anyone can tell you that. If you've been polite, and welcoming, and provided information, that's half the battle. More than half.
But here's my question, related to language development. I have been struggling to put this in words or at least state the questions that I could possibly research, so forgive me with struggling with it here in front of you while I gather up my thinking. Way back in the early days of Krashen (I taught ESL for thirty years) I thought his philosophy was best put into words by a guy who was once explaining it to me. They were totally absorbed in the oral realm for the entire first year or two of a language learner's experience, and didn't even approach the alphabet or the hand on the pen until maybe the second year. And he said, "Look, it all starts with basic confidence in oral interaction, the 'hello/how are you' stage. You have to have that basic ability to form a sentence spontaneously, to just say you're fine, how's the weather, that kind of stuff, until you can make longer sentences that really get into what you're thinking. So we spend the first year doing that until they can 'live' in English. The traditional model of giving them a writing class and 'writing paragraphs' just doesn't make sense until they have that basic confidence."
Now you may see where I'm going with this. This was well before the age of chat, when you could do hello/how are you all on your phone before you even said a word. The assumption then was that writing was all higher-level thinking, all based on speaking that had already been developed. Now another belief that came from that era was, "if their listening is good, their writing will be correspondingly good," as if their ability to parse longer strings of language translated directly into their ability to produce them, on paper, with reasonably solid construction. So writing then was all a higher-level, longer-sentence experience in which you'd ask your students to sit and just produce the best paragraph or essay that they could, as soon as they were possibly ready.
I set about having my writing classes on a chat network. It was called Edmodo and it was basically small class-based twitter-like chat networks where only we could see what we were chatting and we could always print it out later and analyze what happened. Their attitude was, "am I required to do this" and "how much do I have to do?" but still they were somewhat fascinated. These same people often froze at a computer at test time, struggling with the confidence required to produce an "essay" or whatever we required. Yet I'd see them at their phones, or even at their computers, chatting like wildfire in Ascii-Arabic, or what I called "3-5-7-9 chat", a language that used English letters and numbers but orally came out like their own Arabic dialect. They spoke freely with me about it - most of them who had minimal exposure to English letters could get started, as the numbers involved closely resembled easily recognizable Arabic letters. And they had plenty of confidence in this Ascii-Arabic - they used it enough to be quite good at it.
I had varying success in getting them to start producing chat on the class level in the edmodo network or anywhere else. I would occasionally get them on there and ask them more hello/how are you questions. Going to the social event tonight? How's your family? I figured that if I got their confidence up on this very basic level it would have some influence on their higher-level production of such things as essays, which of course required you to organize at the same time you wrote, but above all required that you have basic, solid sentence structure skills that would enable your readers to always know what you meant. I didn't really have time to prove that it was a viable method, or even to tweak the method and make it so that doing low-level chatting could improve one's confidence, or have some influence on one's higher level skills. My reception at TESOL's was lukewarm, as if I were introducing gaming as a method of language learning (I had friends who did this as well, and friends who used Second Life).
But I can give you some insight from those years. First, assume that every student under the age of about thirty has a phone and has been using it actively for as many years as they've been able to; this would include texting in their own language as well as probably Messenger, What's App or whatever other active chat servers are out there, that they could be using to stay in touch. Second, present writing as a medium that has all the complexity that speaking does, where you might have to do plenty of hello/how are you in it, and negotiate, and confirm meaning, and all that interactional stuff, as part of mastering the skill of actively typing in real time. Third, maintain that you can and should start from the bottom up with writing, so that you don't learn to write entire essays before you're good at hello/how are you, or so that you recognize the value of both, if not work on both independently. Fourth, and stress this, the major difference between writing and oral communication is that writing last forever - it's clearly recorded, it goes in the record books - we can dredge it up and prove that you wrote this, they wrote that, etc. etc. It's for keeps. In an electronic manner of speaking, of course.
Of course businesses noticed that if they put a little chat window on their website, and monitored it 24/7, or at least eight hours a day, this was good for their business and gave a little personal dimension to a personal relationship that they would have loved to have had, when you walked in the door, if you did. Now, during the pandemic, this little chat window is all they've got, since people are not walking in doors. And the personal dimension of it is huge, in business, anyone can tell you that. If you've been polite, and welcoming, and provided information, that's half the battle. More than half.
But here's my question, related to language development. I have been struggling to put this in words or at least state the questions that I could possibly research, so forgive me with struggling with it here in front of you while I gather up my thinking. Way back in the early days of Krashen (I taught ESL for thirty years) I thought his philosophy was best put into words by a guy who was once explaining it to me. They were totally absorbed in the oral realm for the entire first year or two of a language learner's experience, and didn't even approach the alphabet or the hand on the pen until maybe the second year. And he said, "Look, it all starts with basic confidence in oral interaction, the 'hello/how are you' stage. You have to have that basic ability to form a sentence spontaneously, to just say you're fine, how's the weather, that kind of stuff, until you can make longer sentences that really get into what you're thinking. So we spend the first year doing that until they can 'live' in English. The traditional model of giving them a writing class and 'writing paragraphs' just doesn't make sense until they have that basic confidence."
Now you may see where I'm going with this. This was well before the age of chat, when you could do hello/how are you all on your phone before you even said a word. The assumption then was that writing was all higher-level thinking, all based on speaking that had already been developed. Now another belief that came from that era was, "if their listening is good, their writing will be correspondingly good," as if their ability to parse longer strings of language translated directly into their ability to produce them, on paper, with reasonably solid construction. So writing then was all a higher-level, longer-sentence experience in which you'd ask your students to sit and just produce the best paragraph or essay that they could, as soon as they were possibly ready.
I set about having my writing classes on a chat network. It was called Edmodo and it was basically small class-based twitter-like chat networks where only we could see what we were chatting and we could always print it out later and analyze what happened. Their attitude was, "am I required to do this" and "how much do I have to do?" but still they were somewhat fascinated. These same people often froze at a computer at test time, struggling with the confidence required to produce an "essay" or whatever we required. Yet I'd see them at their phones, or even at their computers, chatting like wildfire in Ascii-Arabic, or what I called "3-5-7-9 chat", a language that used English letters and numbers but orally came out like their own Arabic dialect. They spoke freely with me about it - most of them who had minimal exposure to English letters could get started, as the numbers involved closely resembled easily recognizable Arabic letters. And they had plenty of confidence in this Ascii-Arabic - they used it enough to be quite good at it.
I had varying success in getting them to start producing chat on the class level in the edmodo network or anywhere else. I would occasionally get them on there and ask them more hello/how are you questions. Going to the social event tonight? How's your family? I figured that if I got their confidence up on this very basic level it would have some influence on their higher-level production of such things as essays, which of course required you to organize at the same time you wrote, but above all required that you have basic, solid sentence structure skills that would enable your readers to always know what you meant. I didn't really have time to prove that it was a viable method, or even to tweak the method and make it so that doing low-level chatting could improve one's confidence, or have some influence on one's higher level skills. My reception at TESOL's was lukewarm, as if I were introducing gaming as a method of language learning (I had friends who did this as well, and friends who used Second Life).
But I can give you some insight from those years. First, assume that every student under the age of about thirty has a phone and has been using it actively for as many years as they've been able to; this would include texting in their own language as well as probably Messenger, What's App or whatever other active chat servers are out there, that they could be using to stay in touch. Second, present writing as a medium that has all the complexity that speaking does, where you might have to do plenty of hello/how are you in it, and negotiate, and confirm meaning, and all that interactional stuff, as part of mastering the skill of actively typing in real time. Third, maintain that you can and should start from the bottom up with writing, so that you don't learn to write entire essays before you're good at hello/how are you, or so that you recognize the value of both, if not work on both independently. Fourth, and stress this, the major difference between writing and oral communication is that writing last forever - it's clearly recorded, it goes in the record books - we can dredge it up and prove that you wrote this, they wrote that, etc. etc. It's for keeps. In an electronic manner of speaking, of course.
posted by tom at 9:35 AM
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