THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING VOICE CHAT TO DEVELOP STUDENTS IN ONLINE DISCUSSION

Tarina Dashela (0203517094)

tarinadashelaa@gmail.com

Semarang State University, Indonesia

Learning by using Internet is no longer considered as something new nowadays. The term of online learning is now growing popular to the students in many countries. Holmes and Gardner (2006:14) say that e-learning offers new occasion for students to enrich their learning experiences through virtual environments. A virtual environment allows the students to communicate with other participants like students-to-students or teachers-to-students and to engage with resource in work groups. It can help the students to get their knowledge improved easily by having online discussion.

One of the most common ways to discuss in online is by using smartphone. Many students use smartphone to communicate and discuss about certain knowledge or lesson. Most of students have social media which has voice chat like Whatsapp, Blackberry Messenger, We-chat and Kakao-talk in their mobile phone. In concern with this, Tsui (2001) suggests that CMC (Computer Mediated Communication), including text and voice chat is a useful tool to create a community in which the learners can share feelings, thoughts, and opinions with intercultural chat partners. Thus, the students can use voice chat to discuss with the other students in online discussion forum through their mobile phone as the media.

In the conventional classroom, the students have limited time to share their opinions and argumentations. By using of additional web component, the students can deliver their arguments in any condition and they can speak as long as they want without worry about the time. When a class which meets on campus, has an additional Web component, and this type of class is called a “hybrid”. According to Littlejohn and Pegler (2007:2) blended learning can be defined as the students attend a class taught by a teacher in a conventional classroom setting while also independently completing online components of the outside of the classroom.

In blended learning, the students will have an additional meeting outside of the classroom, and they need media to support them in online discussion. It means that the students are expected to have the media to support this model of learning. In this research, the smartphone can be utilized as modern media because of its features which provide many applications that can help the students discuss their ideas online through Whatsapp group. It can help the students to deliver many arguments easier through their smartphones.