II. Looking for the best roommate

You discussed personal characteristics with your ESL students in your face-to-face class. You may tie this discussion to the online chat activities in the computer class. This activity may be used as a continuation of activity I.

Assignment:

You and your current roommate are looking for a third roommate to share the three bedroom apartment you just rented. Think of five qualities that the future roommate should have and share them with your chat partner. Your chat partner will do the same, and together you will have to do the following:

2. Discuss each of the qualities you shared with each other.

You will have to come up with a list of at least six qualities of your future roommate.

3. Decide which one of these qualities is the most important for you and explain why you think this is the most important one. Share it with your partner.

4. If you and your partner named two different most important qualities, decide which one of them will be the first to consider.

Rank the rest on the qualities as #2, 3, 4, etc. Make sure to discuss why

Each one of the qualities is important.

(Average time on task: 20 minutes)

III. “Our roommate is not that good after all”

This activity might be used as a continuation of activities I and II. You will need to provide images to your students for this task to support their communication and decisions.

Assignment:

Your friend and you discussed very carefully what are the characteristics of the best roommate but… alas… you ended up with the worst roommate you have ever had. This roommate is so horrible that you don’t even want to talk with him/her, so you decided to send him/her an email asking him/her to find another apartment but you feel like you need to explain why you are asking him/her to leave. Both of you have caught this roommate doing different things that really upset you (these things are presented on the pictures your instructor gave you). Each one of you has caught the roommate doing different things.

Describe to your partner what the roommate was doing wrong.

Read your partner’s complaints about the roommate.

Together decide which ones you would both agree with to include in your email to the roommate.

Compose an email to your roommate explaining that you would like to ask him/her to move out including at least three of the reasons you discussed.

Send the email to your instructor.

(Average time on task: 30 minutes)

IV. The mysterious stranger  -  a competition game

For this activity you will need to find at least one ‘assistant’ who is a native speaker of English or an ESL learner of a higher proficiency level than your students. You may consider using another instructor that teaches your class or a higher-level ESL student. Ask your assistant to log-in anonymously to the chat forum. He/she will be communicating with your students. Your students may work in dyads on one computer or each one of them can be on a different computer. One ‘assistant’ may chat with two or three dyads.

Assignment:

Your partner and you will chat with the Mysterious Stranger. Within the next 15 minutes, your goal is to find as much as possible about this person.

Together with your partner you will need to develop a personality profile of this person and write a summary about him/her. Note that another group will be chatting with the same person and you want your profile to be more detailed than the profile of the competitive dyad.

Print your summary and hand it to the instructor at the end of the class. She will decide which one of the pairs who chatted with the same Mystery Person is the winner.

(Average time on task: 35 minutes)

V. ‘Guess what is my password!’ – a competition game

You will need to provide the student with a list of words to be used in the game, they should be related to the new vocabulary discussed recently in class. Each student will have a different set of words. They will have to guess each other’s passwords. 

Assignment:

Your instructor gave you a list of words. Choose one word as your ‘password’.

Your partner will ask you questions to try to determine what is your password.

After he/she guesses the password, you will switch and you will have to guess his/her password.

You can switch three times each time choosing a new password. The winner of the game is the one who used the least number of questions to guess the passwords.

(Average time on task: 35 minutes)

Following are some of the Internet resources about using chat in ESL and EFL classroom:

Almeida d'Eça, T., The Use of Chat in EFL/ESL. Available at http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej25/int.html

Almeida d'Eça, T.(2002). To Chat or Not to Chat in the EFL Classroom, That is the question. Language – Communication – Culture. International Conference, University of Évora. Available at: http://www.malhatlantica.pt/teresadeca/papers/evora2002/chat-and-efl.htm

Backer J., Using a Modular Approach to schMOOze with ESL/EFL Students, Available at: http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Backer-SchMOOze.html

CALL and CMC. http://alphaplus.ca/lincdoc/Software/CALL%20and%20CMC.pdf

Mynard, J. (2002). Introducing EFL students to Chat Rooms. The Internet TESL Journal, Vol. VIII(2) Available at: http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Mynard-Chat.html

Mynard, J. (2002). Making Chat Activities with Native Speakers Meaningful for EFL Learners. The Internet TESL Journal, Vol. VIII(3). Available at: http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Mynard-Chat2/

Paulsen, M. F. (1995). The Online Report on Pedagogical Techniques for Computer-Mediated Communication. Moderator. Available at: http://www.emoderators.com/moderators/cmcped.html