The present study on politeness is an attempt to examine (dis)agreeing strategies utilized by EFL learners while chatting on the internet. Subjects of the study were forty male and thirty-three female Iranian natives whose internet relay chat (IRC) interactions, composed of 400 excerpts, were collected between December 2007 and September 2008. Data analysis was based on the general taxonomy of politeness strategies suggested by Brown and Levinson (1987) which is the baseline of many politeness studies today. The results indicate that IRC is a mode of communication whose characteristics are typically different from face-to-face and real-life conversational settings. Some common face threatening acts (FTAs) like ‘direct disagreements’ are performed widely in chat channels. Furthermore, gender-oriented differences were found not to be statistically significant on the internet.

The ever-increasing application of computer and internet mandates a longer domain for computer-mediated-communication (CMC). Internet chat as a principal feature of CMC has attracted tremendous attention among the youths in recent years. Thus, this study has focused on the written chats of 100 Iranian university students majoring in different disciplines. We analyzed 400 chat samples (composed of 4000 moves) in terms of Opening and continuing speech functions based on Eggins and Slade’s (1997) model of casual conversation. We also examined humor and paralinguistic features based on taxonomies of Huffaker and Calvert (2005) and Nastri, Pen a, and Hancock (2006). Among the various types of speech functions, nine Opening speech functions, seven continuing speech functions and four humor and paralinguistic features were investigated. The analysis of the data shows that the salient Opening speech function has been‘ statement: opinion’ which provides attitudinal and evaluative information. Additionally, the outstanding types of continuing speech functions are ‘prolong: extend’, ‘prolong: enhance’, and ‘append: elaborate’. Therefore, it is in order for the participants to offer additional or contrasting information to the previous move or qualify it by giving details of time, place, condition, etc. Moreover, in case of interruption by the other chatter, the participants mostly tend to clarify, exemplify or reiterate the previous move. Furthermore, the participants produced irony, as a humorous element, in a great volume which is indicative of their tendency toward being indirect during conversation. The subjects also used many paralinguistic features such as misspellings and repeated punctuations in order to express their emotions and attract their partners’ attention in the absence of verbal communication.

This study aims at explaining informal Internet-based chat format with respect to its genre and writing components and system. The researchers analyzed 53 chat samples which were produced by 53 Iranian students in high intermediate and advanced levels of English in a private institute while chatting with foreigners. Besides the genre analysis, the purposes why people all around the world chat on the Internet were investigated based on these samplesi. Five moves and seven purposes were found. Our data suggest that although purposes of samples are different, they follow the same moves. The results show that informal Internet based chat concerns with different purposes as chatting for improving English language, familiarity with different peoples and countries, friendship, finding a sexual partner or talking about religious or political ideas.

The number of online users has unprecedentedly increased in recent years. The rapid advancement of technology has seen the growth of social media usage and this has made a huge impact on today’ s educational system. However, to what extent has the social media played an important role in the teaching and learning process particularly in the English Language Teaching (ELT) is still unclear. This is due to the fact that in most cases, social media is used for the purpose of entertainment and personal usage. There was an attempt in current study to examine the nature of communications via social media and how they can be used in improving students’ language skills. The participants in this study consisted of fifteen undergraduate students who were into their second year of TESL program. They were involved in completing a grammatical task through the use of Facebook Messenger, an online platform where they engaged in chat activities. The discussion which was moderated by the researchers lasted 45 minutes for each session and five sessions were conducted where sentence combining activities were also done using the Facebook Messenger. Results obtained from the discourse analysis done which examined the participants’ accounts of their experiences as well as the pedagogical features of the online platform clearly shows that this platform can be used as a pedagogical tool in improving language skills.