The Role of Meta-Awareness and Task Type on the Use of Determiners during Internet Chat

Abstract

The present study examined whether Internet chat could be a useful tool for developing EFL/ESL students' understandings of English determiners. In chat conversations, frequent omissions of grammatical features of low communicative value (i.e. function words) are prevalent in order to save time effort. Despite this nature of chat, however, the written and synchronous, interactive nature of chat may provide potential for learning second-language (L2) function words. The present study compared the performance in chat conversations of 32 Korean university students for 4 weeks according to their meta-awareness and task type. For data analyses, all obligatory occasions for the use of core-determiners in the chat transcripts were identified and classified. Results showed that although meta-awareness during chat helped students significantly decrease the ratio of deletion of determiners, deletions of determiners were still prevalent throughout chat. Based on these results, it seems to be hard, in the chat mode, to ask students to focus on and use determiners, particularly articles.