Student's and teacher's attitudes towards the use of CMC

Getting learners in an EFL environment to speak meaningfully in a foreign language is notoriously difficult. Innovations in educational technology enable teachers and students to facilitate teaching and learning speaking skills. This study reports on a descriptive study of attitudes of students and teachers, who have no chat-experience, about the potential use of CMC (via text &voice-based chat) as an instructional resource to facilitate their speaking ability. The study also tries to explore some similarities and differences between student and teacher computer use and opinions of students and teachers towards the use of voice &text-based chat with intercultural partners in language instruction. It also reports experienced chat-use teachers' perceptions in respect to advantages and disadvantages of using CMC tools. Findings revealed that both sets of EFL teachers and students were positive in support of use of CMC in support of speaking instruction, although teacher responses indicated anticipation of some problems in implementing classroom CMC. The study involved three groups of respondents: students, teachers without experience in CMC, international teachers experienced in CMC.