Possible Research Topic and Questions

I am leaning towards a topic related to how CMC and network environments can aid the development of reading skills for English as a Second Language (ESL) students. Specifically, what got me started thinking about this topic was working with ESL students who either have a gap between their production skills (speaking and writing) or those who have a gap between their comprehension skills (listening and reading). It seems, at least intuitively, that using CMC and using the internet for extensive reading could be a way to motive such students to connect their speaking to writing (since chatting has been viewed as more of a conversation than a writing assignment in several of the articles that we have read). Also, it seems that CMC would be a good way for students to focus on form while receiving a written message on the computer. This could both help students to connect form to meaning and give them practice integrating the words on the page into a comprehensible message in a real-time and real-life context.

All of that being said, what does the research say? I have been finding some (not a lot) of articles that specifically focus on CMC and reading. I have posted two of them onto citeulike and have ordered several from ILL. There is one chapter in a book that focuses on how chatting can help students develop low-level reading skills such as word recognition and a better understanding of grapheme-to-phoneme processes. I am very interested in this idea since I believe that low-level and high level skills are necessary for becoming a fluent and skilled reader and that usually one form of instruction is used in exclusion to the other (but chatting could maybe help bring those two levels of reading together by integrating form and meaning).

So, two possible research questions are:

1) Can synchronous computer communication aid the development of low-level and high-level reading skills for English as a Second Language (ESL) students?

2) In what ways can synchronous computer communication and internet-based activities lead to increased reading automaticity for ESL learners? (I am specifically thinking about reduced anxiety leading to more comprehension, increased word recognition skills, and vocabulary acquisition with the uses of such tools as glosses)

I welcome any suggestions and thoughts...