Where's the Community?: Bilingual Internet Chat and the "Fifth C" of the National Standards

Situated in the Five Cs of the National Standards framework (Communication, Cultures, Comparisons, Connections, and Communities), this study analyzes chat-room communication during a ten-week collaboration between university-level Spanish L1 learners of English and English L1 learners of Spanish. The study aims to relate this Internet-based community of learners to the Fifth C, the Communities standard, illustrating how learners can become integrated into a bilingual speech community, which can subsume the remaining four Cs of the Standards. Suggestions will be made for updating the Communities Standard.