Reflection: Synchronous CMC

Synchronous CMC can provide a lot of opportunities in language learning.  From a very practical perspective, CMC can allow real-time spoken or written communication with native (or highly proficient) speakers of the target language.  I've had this experience with sites like LiveMocha, which has a text chat function that you can use with friends who are learning your language (and vice-versa).  Another interesting avenue for SCMC is computer games.  Although many of them aren't very suitable for language teaching, I think lots of games have great potential for extensive conversing.  In games that have international servers, there is often a mix of languages present but during overlapping prime playtimes, English often emerges as lingua franca.  In my younger, nerdier, more enjoyable years, I remember playing cooperative games with players from Brazil, Costa Rica, Germany, and Japan.

As far as using CMC in a traditional classroom setting, I think a lot of careful considerations need to be made.  Choosing to use a text based SCMC over simply putting students in groups for f2f interaction should be a conscious, principled decision.  If you are aiming to develop fluency in CMC, which could be useful for students who might take an online course in university or work in tech support, then SCMC tasks would probably be appropriate in a traditional classroom, for example.  Text SCMC has also been shown to lead to more balanced output, so that may be another reason to occasionally use it- give your less outgoing or less confident students a chance to be heard.

One issue that came up during our in-class experiments with CMC is ease of use.  Some applications were very intuitive and weren't much trouble to get up and running.  Blackboard Collaborate and the suite of Google apps that offer CMC (chat, hangouts, drive) worked really well, and they are part of established, accessible suites of apps.  Tokbox, on the other hand, required fairly complicated embedding processes to get up and running.  Other sites like oovoo, while functioning well, still represent another app to register for and install.  I'm beginning to think that an important key for successfully using Web 2.0 tech and CALL tools in general is having a sort of base of operations- one main portal or hub that ties together most of the tools you use in your teaching setting.  If your students all have institutional Google mail accounts, it's incredibly easy to use a variety of Google apps that can function in a variety of learning tasks just about as well as an eclectic set of more specialized apps, and the former only requires one login and zero downloads/installs.