Negotiation of Meaning in Nonnative Speaker-Nonnative Speaker Synchronous Discussions

Research on negotiation has thus far focused on oral conversations/ interactions. This study expands on this line of research by investigating whether learners engage in negotiation when exchanging ideas in synchronous computer-mediated interaction. Four groups of learners of Spanish discussed a number of content questions about a reading assignment using an Open Transport (OT) Chat. The analyses of the transcripts of the interactions showed that instances of negotiation as operationalized in Varonis and Gass (1985b) do occur in the electronic medium. A limited repertoire of types of primes reoccurred, due in part to the nature of the medium and the academic context of foreign language learning in which the interactions took place. Of special concern was the tendency to use the native language in the response of the majority of the routines since this tendency does not result in target language modified output, which is claimed to be fundamental for second language acquisition (SLA) (Swain, 1985).