THE IMPACT OF CHATTING WITH NATIVE SPEAKERS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS ON YOUNG IRANIAN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY STUDENTS' INTRINSIC MOTIVATION TOWARD LEARNING SPEAKING SKILL

The present study investigated the effects of chatting on increasing iranian english students' intrinsic motivation toward learning speaking english. This study also aimed to examine the motivating factors in chatting from participants' point of view and it also investigated the best motivation raising chat topics. To fulfill the objectives of the study, 24 male and female BA english students from azad university, abadan, iran were selected as the participants of the study. Dornyei (2010) english learner questionnaire (part 1) was distributed among them. After filling out the questionnaire, the researcher held an interview with the participants over their motivation in learning english as a whole and speaking english in particular. Afterward, they were asked to spend 3 months chatting with native speakers on what's app. After 3 months chatting with natives, another interview was held to check the participants' motivation and speaking skill. The english learner questionnaire was also distributed among them again and finally, the collected data were analyzed. Paired sample t-test was run to compare the participants' scores before the treatment and after the treatment. The results indicated that chatting was effective to increase participants' intrinsic motivation toward speaking english. The study also followed a qualitative content analysis method to code the data extracted from the interviews; this type of data were categorized based on participants' views. results of qualitative data showed that topics like: improving english achievement, typing skill improvement, self-confidence improvement and familiarizing with target culture were the most motivating factors for the participants to chat. Findings also indicated that male respondents tended to chat with native speakers on topics like football, finding job, business, travelling abroad, and political issues and female participants discussed more on cosmetic surgery, marriage, fashion and make-up.