Abstract
Recently computer and Internet technology has been widely applied to enhance educational effectiveness. In language learning, CMC (Computer-Mediated Communication) now plays a more important role than before. As a medium of CMC, MOO (Multiple-user domain Object Oriented) has been applied in classroom practice in various countries. Yet most teachers or students in Taiwan hardly know about MOOs. The only related study conducted in Taiwan was an observation of college EFL students’ English learning experience in the text-based SchoMOOze. Thus, this study aimed to probe how senior high school students communicate in English, construct objects, and collaborate in this virtual environment as well as to investigate MOO as an English learning environment from the viewpoints of students, school English teachers and a teacher-researcher. The participants in this study were 22 students from a senior high school in Taipei City. They had a 100-minute course every Friday afternoon during the fall semester of 2001. ForMOOsa, a local MOO in Taiwan, was used as the MOOing environment with nine on-line sessions observed closely for this study. The participants learned basic MOO commands, worked on self-description, corresponded with their key pals, communicated with their classmates in the chatroom, constructed MOO objects, and collaborated to accomplish the assigned tasks. The data sources included students’ responses from a background questionnaire and an evaluation questionnaire, responses of a classroom observation questionnaire from three school English teachers, transcripts of participants’ communication, participants’ writing products, interviews with the participants and the school teachers, and the teacher-researcher’s journals. Through the analyses of the results, the following findings could be drawn. First, the students learned from each other and helped each other in terms of both English and computer skills. Second, most of the senior high school students were still in the stage of absorbing English input and they had difficulties in expressing themselves in English within a short response time of the on-line chat. Third, senior high school students needed longer hours to adapt themselves to the environment due to their English level and typing speed. Fourth, most students enjoyed learning in MOOs if there were no network connection problems. Fifth, individual difference accounted for the different classroom performance and the diversified attitudes towards MOOing activities. The school English teachers considered MOO having the potentials for student’s English learning, especially in reading, writing and thinking in English. Nevertheless, they indicated that technical support from a computer teacher is a must in the computer room. As far as the teacher-researcher was concerned, successful communication and collaboration required more efforts devoted to the design of the lesson plan for each session. It was also found difficult to conduct a self-sufficient peer review on-line with the current interface of ForMOOsa. It would be better to have both on-line and off-line sessions as complimentary pairs. It was indeed rewarding to see that most feedback from the participants was positive ones and that the participants did take the initial to learn and enjoy learning English during the process. They not only helped each other but also learned from each other. This study was not designed to compare learning in the MOO environment with learning in the traditional classroom. It is therefore suggested that further research can be conducted to compare the two environments over a longer period of time. In addition, future studies can probe the potentials to improve English speaking and listening when more multimedia resources can be integrated into MOOs. Moreover, it is worthwhile to further investigate various ways of evaluation in terms of the design, method, effectiveness, and practicability.