Making Chat Activities with Native Speakers Meaningful for EFL Learners

Before reading the text “Making chat activities with native speakers meaningful for EFL Learners” by Jo Mynard as we know our current world, plenty of technologies and inventions are being invented all the time. It is comfortable to live in this modern age. These technologies were invented in order to facilitate our life, especially in communication. Also, teaching and learning English now are quite influenced by technologies. English can be learnt from many mediums, such as CDs, cassettes, and especially, the Internet. In my opinion, the Internet is one of the most genius inventions; with just one click it gives us a great deal of information. There are other benefits of the Internet as well, for example, we can now communicate instantly with people from the other side of the world by making chat.

In my opinion, the author tries to convince readers of learners’ communicative skills will be improved by making chat activities with native speakers. Although some learners may have used chat room before, they may never interact with native speakers in the target language. Also, we learn English only some lessons in the book or class. If we chat with native speakers, we will have more opportunity to use various vocabulary; not only limited in the lessons. In addition, from my real experience, my friends who have plenty of foreign friends from making chat are quite good at English. They always mentioned that making chat with native speakers helps them improve English better than studying in the class. There is no teacher interrupting them as well as correcting their errors. Personally, I agree with them in this point. Not only students will practice interviewing the guests, they can also be interviewed. Using cha...

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...peakers will improve learners’ communication skill, but this kind of activity also helps learners explore the world more widely without going abroad. The learners can learn another culture which makes them understand differences in each country. The most importantly, whatever learning should come from insight, making chat will increase the learners’ confidence to be able to communicate in actual conversation later. By the way, there are some points which contradict this text. Making chat might not practice learners’ pronunciation. The learners will not understand any accents because they just type the messages and there is no chance to hear the native speakers’ voice. In short, making chat is a good kind of activity to use in English class, but the teacher should add other activities which practice learners’ pronunciation in order to make learning more efficiently.