Week 7
Synchronous CMC

Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication can be helpful in language teaching in various ways. They encourage learners to participate in the lesson and they have been shown to decrease the use of L1 (Warschauer, 1996).

There are many different tools to incorporate for SCMC such as chat rooms that can be accessed through a website, various chat programs like Instant Messenger and video conferencing like Skype. When using these tools, I believe it is important to have clear and meaningful tasks. Students should have certain objectives to achieve once they start the activity. Simply asking them to 'chat' may not be as effective as more structured activities.

Creating some tasks to be completed individually or in pairs/groups can be some of the ways to incorporate CMC to language teaching. Students can work and collaborate on a document. Or, they can be assigned some tasks to complete after the CMC session.

Google Hangout is an effective CMC tool (Click here to go to Google Hangout) that provides a variety of features. You can invite your friends to 'hangout' with you or you can hangout with strangers. You can simply type or have a video chat. The great thing is up to 9 people can have video chat at the same time which is usually a paid service in many other CMC tools.

There are so many possibilities of how you can adapt CMC tools into teaching. Exploring the options available and collaborating with other teachers can be a good start.