| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立屏東教育大學 === 教育科技研究所 === 98 === In Taiwan, most English young learners could hardly have authentic contextual occasions to talk with native or non-native speakers after English class. And this is the obvious difference between ESL(English as Second Language) and EFL(English as Foreign Language). In order to create opportunities for the learners to communicate in English after class, this study used skype as a platform and let the subjects, who were a group of 6 students from 11-14 preparing for the GEPT(General English Proficiency Test) in Taiwan, use the target language to chat with each other.
Since teenagers’ growing oral capability is very complicated, it involves not only language ability but also cognitive development. Close related study on this issue was hardly found yet. But from “English teaching methods”, ”Second language acquisition”, “e-learning”, and “Scaffolding theory”, we could easily find scattering supports for using online conversation as an positive approach to language learners.
The first purpose for the study was to develop a new path to implement an online English conversation. Anyone who is interested in this method could easily follow or modify the track according to his/her teaching objectives and students’ language competence.
The researcher’s second purpose is to improve the subjects’ oral fluency and the oral fluency was defined as follows: a. the total number of words a subject spoke in that 10-minute conversation. b. the total number of words a subject used in the conversation. c. the longest turn in the conversation. d. the sentence in the conversation. e. the average words per turn in the conversation. f. the average words per sentence in the conversation. Since the oral fluency is so complicated that only the total number of words in the first few months showed significant and further and more controlled study should be continued.
While exploring this new approach, it motivated the researcher a lot. Trying these computer programs like “spype”, “cool edit”, “excel”, and “antword”, also helped to improve the researcher’s “Information Literacy”. In addition, using scaffolding theory to provide feedback to both interlocutors, the researcher could easily identify his own weakness in his own English proficiency. All these researcher’s reflections could be the same to most English teachers in Taiwan.
In the future, online conversation could be marketing by the language promoters. Teachers who are willing to spend some time and to improve their students’ speaking could undertake this method and develop different scaffolding strategies according the students’ need. Furthermore, many possible, related and deeper researches which the study disclosed might attract some teachers and researchers in the field for follow-up explorations.
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