Mini-Project #2

Mini-Project #2:
My CMC activity is designed for beginning learners of German who should be able to give and ask for basic information about people, their personality, what they like to do and their family.
The project is intended to improve the students’ basic communicative competence through a fictional online roommate interview situation in a synchronous chat environment. Payne and Ross(2005) have shown that a synchronous CMC environment can not only be beneficial for development in writing, but the increased L2 output also has positive effects on oral communicative competence. A main reason for this increased L2 output is the positive attitude a SCMC environment creates among students as opposed to face-to-face classroom interaction. The project, then, is not only beneficial to the students’ abilities in writing and speaking German, but may also reduce their affective filter for future L2 communicative situations.
The activity is designed for one lesson in which the students will only communicate with themselves in pairs of two. Each student has to have a computer with a chat program (like MSN) installed.
To activate a meaningful schema, the teacher will tell the students at the beginning of class that they are in a one-to-one chat situation with a possible roommate for their apartment. This is a situation the students might well encounter in real-life when planning to study abroad and looking for suitable housing opportunities in Germany.
Before chatting, the class can brainstorm/ collect questions they would ask a roommate in this situation together. The teacher has to make clear that they should address several topics. (Personality, hobbies, family background).
Each student is assigned an anonymous mail-account or screen-name that the teacher will give them on a flashcard together with the name of the student they have to invite to a chatroom. The anonymous name makes sure that they have to find out via chat with whom they are communicating. (Students might also prefer not to use their real instant messenger accounts for privacy. MSN, the microsoft instant messenger, allows for an easy setup of chat accounts with email addresses.) During the chat, they are only allowed to use L2.
After the chat the students are supposed to submit a chat protocol to the teacher.
As a follow up, each pair will share their results with the class, that is each student introduces to class what he/she has found out about the partner. In order to give the other students a reason to listen, the class can then decide if the two would get along living together. To make the evaluation of that follow-up easier, the teacher should record (video or audio) the student’s presentations to compare them with the chat protocols later.
The final evaluation is based on four equally weighed criteria; Contribution, Content, Style and Follow Up. Here is a link to my grading rubric.