6. How to use chat Chat has enermous potential to link students around the world, in real time. It is a technology that many learners will often be familiar with and will use in their social lives, so it is worth exploiting in the classroom where possible. When we talking about chat, weneed to distinguish between text and audio chat, and between public and privat chat, all of which can take place one-to-one or between groups of users. Chat users are able to see status/ availability of other chat users, such as wether the user is online, away, busy, and so on. There is a view that online text chat is the virtual equivalent to mobile phone texting, in which abbreviated forms, for example, CU L8r for see you later, are the norm. We would recomended that students generally use standard written English convention in the text chat and email. They are more likely to be interacting with other non-native speakers and writers, and abbreviated forms can be confusing. Using chat in ...