COMPLEXITY OF EXPRESSION IN STUDENTS' ON-LINE CHAT CONTRIBUTIONS

This paper concerns the complexity of language of on-line asynchronous communication. Two corpora of a similar size are compared where students' contributions were collected. They represent two on-line asynchronous forums that supported two courses of the TEFL Programme. Since the discussions had different topics and objectives, the way of communication and language structures also differed. One forum was opened to support students' work on preparing Hot Potatoes exercises and the other to discuss the ELT Curriculum and the educational programme used by the school where students were on their teaching internships. Generally, the length and structure of messages were significantly influenced by the purpose of the forum: sentences within the forum which focused on social interaction tended to be shorter, less complex and similar to face-to-face dialogues, while those in the forum which focused on topic discussion displayed features of partly independent monologues.