O n f e r e n c e

Short paper 
Introduction 
The development of speaking (oral) skills is critical for international students whose 
mother tongue is not English studying in English-medium universities. Without good 
speaking skills, students will find it difficult to ask questions in lectures, to contribute to 
and benefit from seminars, to give oral presentations and to benefit from supervision 
sessions. Yet speaking is one of the most difficult aspects of a second or foreign language 
to acquire as demonstrated by the fact that students’ speaking skills tend to lag behind 
their reading and writing skills (Rosenstiel et al., 2009). Research on effective 
approaches to the teaching speaking skills is therefore of utmost importance. 
Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) is a popular approach to the teaching of speaking. 
TBLT is based on the premise that the best way to acquire a second or foreign language 
is through communication in the target language. To date research on TBLT has 
investigated the impact of pre-task planning, task designs, task conditions and task 
outcomes on the types of interaction (e.g. negotiation of meaning) and the quality (i.e. 
fluency, accuracy and complexity) of the language that that students engage in and 
produce during tasks (Ellis, 2003). 
Chat, i.e. computer programs which allow people to synchronously communicate over the 
Internet, increases the possibilities for offering task-based speaking practice both inside 
and outside the classroom. Three modes of chat are distinguished, text, audio and video 
chat. All three modes of chat enable students to communicate with each other from 
opposite sides of the classroom and therefore permit teachers to place a real information 
gap between students in speaking tasks, which might increase students’ awareness of 
their communication difficulties. Further, text chat, sharing features of both oral and 
written language (Crystal, 2001) and engaging students in nearly all of the processes 
involved in speech production (Blake, 2009), has the potential to provide a bridge 
between learners’ written and oral language skills. Moreover, there i
s some evidence to 
suggest that the written mode of text chat increases students’ focus on form (Smith, 
2004) which might lead to increases in the accuracy and complexity of students’ written 
and oral language. 
The infrastructure (i.e. high-speed internet connections; Cziko and Park, 2003; Levy and 
Stockwell, 2006) and hardware (i.e. laptops equipped with microphones and webcams; 
Yanguas, 2010) which make audio and video chat possible have, however, only recently 
become widely available and research on text-based chat-mediated tasks has tended to 
focus on the types of interaction (e.g. negotiation of meaning) that students engage in 
during tasks (Peterson, 2010). There is, consequently, little research on the impact of 
chat on students’ oral production from
a task-based perspective. Yet most stakeholders 
in the use of technology in language learning are interested in the impact of technology 
on students’ linguistic knowledge and language skills. Previously this interest was 
motivated by a need to justify expenditure on new technologies for education (Donaldson 
& Haggstrom, 2006). Today, on the other hand, it is critical to understand how the use of 
new technologies such as chat impact on students’ linguistic skills in order to help 
teachers identify the most 
appropriate technologies to support students’ linguistic 
development from the increasingly wide range of technologies available to them.
The study reported here is the first in a series of studies designed to investigate the full 
range of possibilities that chat offers. The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of 
text-based chat-
mediated tasks on students’ oral production. Students’ oral production 
naturally cannot be evaluated during text-based chat-mediated tasks, because students 
are communicating through text not speech. Previous research has found that task 
repetition leads to improvements in the quality of students’ oral production (i.e. fluency, 
accuracy and complexity; Bygate, 1996; 2001).

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This study therefore compares the impact of text-based chat-mediated tasks on the 
quality of students’ oral production in follow
-up face-to-face tasks with that of face-to-
face tasks. 
Many students become highly anxious when engaging in speaking tasks in the language 
classroom, a phenomenon referred to as foreign language anxiety (Horwitz et al., 1991). 
Text-based chat-
mediated tasks, it has been observed, can decrease students’ foreign 
language anxiety (Satar & Ozdener, 2008), a result attributed to the slower pace of text 
chat than face-to-face communication. Foreign language anxiety, as conceived by 
Horwitz and colleagues is, however, a trait as opposed to a situation-specific state. It is 
therefore more appropriate to investigate the impact of text-based chat-mediated tasks 
on students’ self
-efficacy, that is their belief in their ability to accomplish particular tasks 
(Bandura, 1997) which is known to be a key determinant of students’ anxiety (ibid.). This 
study therefore also investigates the impact of text-
chat mediated tasks on students’ 
perceived self-efficacy.