Spanish Chat

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Students Engage in Spanish Chat

Former Spanish instructor Anne Lambright first suggested a real-time computer chat session for introductory Spanish classes. Students in last spring's chat session enthusiastically engaged in typing their responses to the assigned tasks. The experiment was so successful that Elementary Spanish co-directors Lourdes Sabe and Sybil Alexandrov decided to make chat a feature of their curriculum.

First-year language students are rarely expected to converse orally in groups for an entire class; however, because students these days feel at ease with computers, they are able to stay on task, manage lengthy conversations and really enjoy language learning in this context. Students who are typically hesitant to participate in class become active in the chat rooms; they gain confidence using this format.

"One of the obvious benefits is the lack of inhibition the students feel communicating via computer, another is that it provides the instructor with a unique opportunity to actively (and silently)participate in the writing process of an entire class," say Sabe and Alexandrov. "We have also found that the sentences exchanged by the students are ideal for pinpointing common grammatical mistakes and can be used at a later date for both peer editing and grammar review exercises."

Chats facilitate sustained discourse in Spanish. Students receive two or three topics about which to 'converse' for a fifty-minute period. Small groups allow instructors to require that each student participate a given number of times. This changes the dynamics of the class as everyone is fully engaged in a way that is not possible in a traditional classroom setting.

In the Phelps Gate computer classroom, students are assigned the number of their electronic chat group. Members of each chat group are scattered around the room so that they have to communicate in writing.

Instructors can monitor all the chat groups and interject comments whenever appropriate. They can also save the transcripts of the chat sessions to use in class the next day. Part of the Chat was printed out and handed to the students, who were then asked to make corrections and discuss it in class.

Student response to the chatrooms has been overwhelmingly positive. They enjoy the break from the regular routine and are truly surprised by the amount and variety of language they are able to produce.

This innovative way of encouraging students to write in a foreign language is one of many possible uses of Classes. It's a versatile and effective tool for use in any class in which the instructor wants to encourage discussions in small groups. An added bonus is that it can be saved and used as the basis for future discussions.

For more information about the use of the chat feature, please visit http://www.yale.edu/instruct/web/spanchat. Instructors interested in using the classes server for their teaching should email classes@yale.edu or call Gloria Hardman at 2-8903.