Effects Of Group Interaction With Proficiency Difference In SCMC On Students' Language Errors

Computer and network play an important role in all aspects of one's life,which also makes many scholars begin to pay attention to the effects of computer-mediated communication(CMC)on language learning.Scholars have carried out relevant studies on CMC and achieved a lot.However,few studies investigate how to carry out the text-based synchronous computer-mediated communication(SCMC)which can promote learner's language competence,especially the studies at home.With the guidance of input hypothesis,output hypothesis,interaction hypothesis and sociocultural theory,this study investigates the effects of proficiency differences on the total number of errors and the number of different degree errors of different groups in text-based SCMC.There are 48 participants majoring engineering mechanics in this study who are from Yanshan University in Hebei province.The participants are divided into three groups: high-high groups(H-H groups),high-low groups(H-L groups)and low-low groups(L-L groups).The students in different groups discuss with their partners once a week in QQ groups.The errors in the records of students' discussion are divided into first-degree errors(1DE),second-degree errors(2DE)and third-degree errors(3DE)according to the criteria of Qin and Wen,and the number of errors is also counted.Besides,the results of students' interview and students' performance of pretest and post-test are all presented as the supplement.The results show that: there are no significant differences among different groups in the mean of total number of errors and the number of different degree errors according to mean differences of the number of errors;the students in groups with similar proficiency outperform students in H-L groups in the reducing of total number of errors,and the number of three degree errors in groups with similar proficiency all decreases,but only the number of 3DE in H-L groups decreases;high-level students perform better in reducing the number of errors according to the results of pretest and post-test,but the post-test scores of students in groups with similar proficiency and the low-level students in H-L groups all increase.Although there are some limitations in this study,the results still can offer references for the implementation of SCMC.The results show that grouping the students with similar proficiency is helpful for reducing the number of language errors and increasing the accuracy of language.