Exue Service - Chatting Room

Exue's "Spoken English" community provides a chatting room (both text and voice) for members to practice spoken English (one to one or many to many) with a dictionary tool. Most of real online learning happens in this chatting room. Members are allowed to chat in English only, either publicly (many to many) or privately (one to one). The idea of a community of learners is based on the premise that learning occurs as people participate in shared endeavors with others, with all playing active but often asymmetrical roles in sociocultural activity. However, there is evidence that more experienced members seems not willing to chat with less experienced ones. One member said that: "good English speakers usually do not want to speak with us less competent speakers." There is another problem associated with the chatting room. Base on my observation, the learning happened in the chatting room is not effective. The common scenarios are that two members meet and start chatting; then two minutes later they stop. The part of the reason is that, in most cases, they are not pedagogically trained, therefore do not know how to effectively teach and learn from each other.