Chat Rooms for Language Teaching and Learning

This chapter presents an overview of synchronous computer mediated communication (SCMC) platforms and identifies their hardware requirements. SurveyMonkey, an online survey tool, is featured as an example of how access to international communities of language teachers can be tapped to appraise the merits of chat tools for teaching and learning. Their review finds that Messengers are most widely used and popular because of their usefulness and friendly interface. Since most students are now using chat rooms, teachers must develop a better understanding of how to best utilize these systems in language teaching. Pedagogical methods are uncovered in order to ensure that best practices in the use of SCMC for language acquisition prevail. Trends in using online chat for teaching and learning are highlighted as advances in intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) contributes to what is becoming ICMC (intelligent computer mediated communication).