ABSTRACT

Learning to speak and to write effectively and appropriately starts when we are very young. We pick up or are taught appropriate phrases and ways of talking for use in different situations. At school we read and later write different types of text, eventually receiving feedback from teachers on the success of our writing. Recently, a new mode of communication has become common in educational settings, computer-mediated communication (CMC), and this chapter uses the tools of grammatical analysis to explore some of its features and how students and teachers in higher education are learning to use it.