Facilitating
EFL Students to be More Active in Communicating through Online Chat
Endang Lestari
This chapter is a report of research on the
effectiveness of online chatting in facilitating EFL students to become
initiative and active during speech interaction. Undertaken in a written form
of spoken language, online chatting gives its benefits to the chatters to
perform language like when they do face-to-face communication. In addition,
online chatting requires chatters to produce appropriate language in some
variations of speech function. Students of Medical Faculty of Sultan Agung Islamic University who were taking General English
Course were asked to chat with English native speakers. Students’ chats were analyzed using discourse structure analysis of casual
conversation. Speech functions and roles during chatting were examined to
obtain information on whether the students could take the values of their turns
and whether the online chatting was effective in facilitating them to become
initiative and active participants. The results show that most of the students
took their role as chat initiators and directors and the rest played their role
as supporters. This study suggests that EFL students are likely to get benefits
from being chat initiators and that online chatting effectively facilitates
them to become initiative and active participants. e
mastery of life skills.
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Lestari, E. (2004). Facilitating EFL students to be more active in communicating
through online chat. In B. Y. Cahyono & U.
Widiati (Eds.), The
tapestry of English language teaching and learning in
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