Chatroll is a chat-discussion tool that recently opened. Learners can join or start discussions on any topic.

As I mentioned in my last post, increasing the amount of time learners engage in English is essential for success. Of equal, or I should say related importance, is the need to provide activities where learners can participate in communities of use–places where they can construct identities of themselves as English users. Hanna & de Nooy (2003) asked students learning French to participate in online debate forums at the Le Monde newspaper website. Their students met with mixed success. The ones who wrote simplistic messages asking for help learning French were ignored or met with sarcastic comments. Others who tried hard to actively participate and express their ideas, met with better success. The focus for everyone–the native French users in the forum and the learners–had to remain on the content of the discussion. Hanna and de Nooy say “…the critically important message for this study, framed in the vernacular, is that if you want to communicate with real people, you need to self-present as a real person yourself. From an instructional perspective, encouraging (or requiring) students to participate in noneducationally oriented online communities would involve teaching students how to recognize genres, and subsequently, how to engage in discussion that does not ultimately revolve around the self…as the exotic little foreigner/the other” (pg. 73). That means that using the language and participating as an individual is essential to identity formation and language development.

Which brings us to the big problem of where. Forums for language learners are often too simplistic (“Hi, my name is Hanako and I like music. Do you like music?”) or learners may have been forced to participate and are not likely to participate further (“I’m Ali. I lke pretty girl….aaaaammmmmmmaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!”). Large forums for native speakers (or near-natives) may be out of reach for many or most of our learners, as the Le Monde exercise showed. The answer might be smaller forums on much more specific topics that learners already have expertise in. Lam (2000, 2004) followed the development of a learner who found his voice and his entrance-way into linguistic competence (of a sort, anyway) by participation in blogs related to a Japanese pop singer. On the negative side, the dangers of this type of learning don’t go away so easily. These sites can also just as easily host predators as active learners. Students need a little heads-up training in online community self defense.

A new site and promising site for this kind of participation is Chatroll, where people find chat partners by topic. The name is made from combining chat with blogroll. There are already lots of topics here, but users are free to create their own topics. This latter function is what makes the site really useful, I believe. Learners can more easily get to linguistic competence and an identity as an English user if it develops through their topic identity. But they need to be able to find or create a group that specifically matches that topic. By being part of a group of similarly-interested individuals, the chances of meaningful interaction are greatly increased. The only problem at this point is that there aren’t that many people in the Chatroll system yet. Hopefully that will change. There may be some topics here that instructors are uncomfortable with ( the flirting group comes to mind immediately, and there is probably some more dicey or racy content). I plan to get my students to report on what they do in their blogs so I can monitor as best I can how they participate.