MONTREAL — Online chatting may be at the boundary between conversation and writing, but there is a literacy component to the popular phenomenon and it has a place in the elementary classroom, a new Canadian study concludes.

Researchers at Montreal‘s McGill University studied the content of Internet chat sessions between students in Grade 3 and 4 in two Quebec schools during a school year, and found that this “emerging literacy place” has some academic merit.

Despite the “apparent superficiality associated with the medium,” there are more advantages to including it as part of writing activities than there are advantages for its exclusion, Sandrine Turcotte and Alain Breuleux argue in new study presented Monday at the American Educational Research Association conference.

Students in the two elementary classrooms in different rural communities used web-based learning assignments with a chat component to talk to one another in real time as part of learning activities. The initiative is part of a larger project called Remote Networked Schools, funded by Quebec‘s Ministry of Education.

The McGill team acknowledge that “chat is a highly motivating communicative activity for young learners, while it has very low cultural relevance to most adult teachers.”

There is also a stigma attached to the practice. In addition to its association with the growing problem of cyber-bullying, online chatting is often linked to a mangled form of English. The emphasis on speed and brevity sometimes means kids drop proper punctuation and spelling and replace it with short forms, like “HAND” for “have a nice day” and “h2cus” for “hope to see you soon.”

Still, the McGill team found that these young students were capable of using online chat to communicate efficiently with each other — both for task-oriented dialogue during school hours and day-to-day conversation after school.

Turcotte and Breuleux challenge educators to incorporate online chatting into learning activities, but caution them to monitor the exercises closely and provide clear direction.

“Excluding chat presents the risk of marginalizing students and their emerging practices,” they argue.

In a separate study on incorporating online learning in a Grade 9 class, also presented Monday at the conference, Richard Schmid, an education technology specialist at Concordia University, and graduate student Sharon Peters tracked how students took to the blended approach.

They found that while most students enjoyed it, the most academically successful students reported enjoying it the least, while the average and learning-challenged students reported the most enjoyment and desire to use online environments in the future.

VANCOUVER SUN
A brave new language
Online chat and instant messaging have helped spawn an online language comprising mainly acronyms for commonly used phrases and emoticons to help convey nuance.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005