Helping the tutor facilitate debate to improve literacy using CMC

Recent research has shown that computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the form of synchronous chat can help students develop their debating skills. However, there are difficulties in learning to use chat to debate. The roles of the tutor in such debates was observed with the aim of designing chat tools that better support the tutor in facilitating students' learning. In particular, a design for a system called CHATTERBOX is proposed which is aimed at providing support: (a) through the use of dynamic graphical displays that monitor student participation, and (b) through the use of sentence openers that not only assist the composition of turns but also help provide feedback on the balance of different kinds of contribution made by students and the tutor during chat.