Browsing by Subject "chat"

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    Structure and Engagement in Teacher-Student Chats in ESL Writing
    (2024) Ene, Estela; Upton, Thomas A.; English, School of Liberal Arts
    Teacher-moderated online chats are a common option for conducting writing conferences with students. The efficacy of chat sessions is impacted by the expectations for and structure of these sessions. This corpus-based study used a move analysis to determine the purposes and organization of 129 chats between 3 experienced teachers and 106 students of primarily Chinese and Arabic origin in 9 freshman ESL writing courses. Chats occurred after a draft of an essay assignment had been returned with written teacher feedback in order to provide opportunities for students to receive individualized input. Findings show that chats are structured to serve three functions: opening and closing social moves (greetings, conversational pleasantries) meant to establish rapport; management moves that serve to structure and orient the chat; and instructional moves in which the teachers and students confer and additional feedback is provided. However, chats were not as effective at engaging participants as they could be due to a lack of intentionality and reciprocity. With prior research showing chats are a useful addition to other forms of teacher electronic feedback, we offer suggestions for improving the use of instructional chats in freshman ESL writing classes in order to better engage students.
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    Teacher Participation Styles in Foreign Language Chats and Their Effect on Student Behavior
    (2005) Ene, Estela; Görtler, Senta E; McBride, Kara
    This paper investigates the impact that a teacher's virtual presence--or lack thereof--has on students' chat behavior with regard to error correction, uptake, target language use, and on-task behavior. The data come from beginning German students engaged in pair and small-group chatting activities at a major American university. Transcripts from chat sessions in a first-semester German class and a second-semester German class were analyzed. The data were triangulated with student surveys and teacher interviews. Results suggest that the teachers' participation styles had a greater influence on learners' chat behavior than simply whether or not the teachers were present and that the form-focused participation style of one of the teachers had an apparently inhibitory effect on learner participation.