CMC: Classroom and Research

CMC can be motivating for students, beneficial for learning, and adaptable to different classrooms. For these reasons (and more) CMC can be a good investment of time for teachers and students. Many of the articles that we have read this semester indicate that CMC can motivate students since it involves meaningful interaction with real people. Also, it can be very beneficial to learning since students can proceed at their own pace and learn from the interactions that CMC affords. The adaptability of CMC is also one of its strengths because teachers can choose things like emailing, blogging, Blackboard discussions, text chats, or voice chats, depending on the learning objectives and the dynamics of a particular class.

Regarding future research, I am particularly interested in seeing more articles about how CMC can be used in ESL classrooms. For example, is blogging, emailing, or synchronous chat more likely to lead to vocabulary acquisition? I imagine that this is highly context dependant, but it seems that synchronous chat might be more conducive to vocabulary acquisition it involves negotiating of meaning, and input from another person.

Also, I am interested in virtual reality contexts for language learning. I think that ideas like role playing games in other languages could motivate students to learn and help them to improve their language skills. However, I think that these would be the best with voice recognition and it seems like there is still some technological difficulty with perfecting voice recognition software (at least from what I have read so far).