One of the main findings of computer-mediated communication study in recent years is that it has anequalizing effect among student participation in class. Face-to-face discussions tend to be relatively unbalanced,with the teacher or a few participants dominating the floor; however, computer-mediated communicationfeatures more balanced participation, with participants sharing the floor more equally. According to somestudies, second and foreign language teachers have also claimed that electronic communication has been provedto be an equalizer in their classrooms. Besides, some researches find that the formality and complexity oflanguage in electronic discussion might be an excellent medium for prewriting work since it could serve as abridge from spoken interaction to written composition. This study aims to prove these claims throughcomparing the performances of student participation in the traditional face-to-face prewriting small groupdiscussions and those in the synchronous computer-mediated communication mode. The findings show out atendency toward more equal participation in computer-mediated communication mode. The study alsodiscovers that the language students used in the electronic prewriting discussion and in the first drafts composedafter the discussion is more formal and complex lexically and syntactically than the language they used in face-to-face mode. The comparison of the first drafts which were finished separately after the two modes ofdiscussion by individual student demonstrate, however, there is not obvious differences among the twocategories of first drafts concerning the content of writing.
