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Recognising that active involvement with thetarget language is important in learning a second language,this research compared the participation style of the lan-guage learners in different discussion settings; online andface-to-face. The personality (extroversion and introver-sion) and language proficiency (high-intermediate and low-intermediate) of the 48 participants were looked into.Qualitative data were obtained through observation, surveyand online feedback session to substantiate the main datagathered from the quasi-experiment. The findings revealedthat the use of synchronous online setting helps elicit morecontribution of words and balance the participation of ESLlearners especially among the introverts and the less pro-ficient learners. The findings also implied that languageinstructors can capitalise on this setting to elicit moreparticipation from selected group of students and encour-age more balanced participation in the language classroom.In addition, the findings of this study showed that themedium played a role in influencing the messages pro-duced by certain group of learners more than the others.