Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi,

I am a grad student interested in doing a discourse analysis of ESL students in a chat setting for my thesis project. As I do not have easy access to an ESL classroom that is computer-friendly at this time, I am looking for someone who is currently using chatrooms as part of their curriculum that would be willing to share data. Basically, all I am looking for is logs of real-time chat sessions, either NS-NNS or NNS-NNS (or both). Please let me know if you can help.

Thanks a million,
Michelle

Hi Michelle

Could be tricky.

The reason is that even those classrooms that are computer enabled often - indeed usually - block chat servers by default.

More constructively, have you heard that there are software tools that analyse social interaction between chatroom users? All they do is tot up the amount of time each user spends communicating wiht any other, but that kind of quantitative information might map nicely onto language features.

An example (for Shakespeare's plays, oddly enough) can be found here http://lister.linux-srv.anlx.net/shakespeare/. Interesting stuff, whatever.

All the best, Al

I am just wondering if you ever got your info for the thesis, it may be to late so I will keep this short.