Evaluating Tandem Language Learning in the MOO: Discourse Repair Strategies in a Bilingual Internet Project

Abstract Over the past years, the Internet has developed communication tools as well as information resources. Text-based tools have been established as valuable modular environments for education. One of them, the MOO virtual environment, has maintained its appeal, not least through initiatives such as the CALLMOO project, which developed an educational database with a Java-based interface and undertook systematic research on educational uses of MOOs (Aarseth & Jopp, 1998). In this paper, we will give a short overview of the concepts of learners autonomy and tandem learning. We will then look at repair strategies as represented in two types of data, questionnaires and transcripts, from a bilateral tandem MOO project between Information and Communication Technology (ICT) students from Trinity College Dublin and the Fachhochschule Rhein-Sieg near St. Augustin, Germany. By triangulating the data, we will show how repair strategies, in particular translation and paraphrase are distributed, and how learners' intentions of their use (as evidenced by the questionnaire) and their actual realisations (in transcripts) work towards regulating native speaker/non-native speaker discourse, thereby supporting students in becoming more autonomous.