| Development and popularization of network technologies make language learning,especially oral language learning, become easy and flexible. Compared with the traditionaltext online chatting community, oral online chatting community is a communication platformbased on oral chatting. This kind of community brings an oral English learning environmentand facilitates oral language learning.Based on Gibson’s affordance theory, this study did research about CCTalk onlinechatting community, which aimed to find that, as an oral learning community, what kinds ofaffordances that CCTalk can provide, and how did these affordances influence communityparticipants’ oral learning. The author, after registered into the online chatting community,contacted and recruited60CCTalk online chatting community participants as the researchsubjects. Observation and participant survey methods were used in this study.In this research, the author mainly wants to solve the following two questions:1.What affordances are there of online chatting community for the oral Englishautonomous learning?2. How are these affordances related to their oral English autonomous learning?By a combined qualitative and quantitative approach, this study concluded that:1）CCTalk online chatting community can provide six affordances;2) all the six affordances arepositively related to the oral language learning; and linguistic affordance, organizationalaffordance, immediacy affordance and media affordance are the most influential affordances.3) all these six affordances can support different learning activity to promote oral Englishlearning; while some physical and social factors may also become constraints to inhibit oralEnglish learning.The results of this study could make theoretical, empirical, and practical contributions tothe future research and practices: to develop second language learning theory, to make thelanguage teaching more flexible and to facilitate language learners’ language learning. |
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