Online Discussion: Self-repair Enhancement of EFL Learners

With the rapid development of technologies, on-line learning has gained an increasingly important role in foreign language learning and teaching in recent years. While many studies (e.g., Herring, 1999; Greenfield, 1984) have examined the effects of on-line chatting on students' learning, few have looked into self-repair of the produced utterances by students in on-line chatting. This study investigated the difference between the interactions in on-line chat rooms and regular classroom discussions, with regard to self-repair, to figure out chatting potentials in enhancing foreign language development. Forty intermediate female students with the age range of 14-18 participated in this study. They were randomly divided into two groups of on-line chatting treatment and face-to-face class treatment, 20 each. The instruments included in this study were a pre-research questionnaire, the Oxford Placement Test (OPT), a pretest and a posttest, Yahoo Messenger Software, and a voice recorder. The data were collected through a pretest-posttest design, transcription of students' discussions, and printouts of the chat sessions. The comparison of on-line chatting and traditional face-to-face class discussions suggested that using on-line chatting could result in progress of learning a foreign language (i.e., accuracy of their speech) through self-repair. Furthermore, according to the findings of this study, on-line chatting provided the participants with a unique opportunity to put their grammatical knowledge into practice through meaningful communication. Moreover, most of the errors the learners repaired belonged to the category of subject-verb agreement, presumably because such errors might jeopardize the accurate speaking. The results of the study may have significant implications for teaching, testing and materials development.