Using Native Speakers in Chat

SLA research indicates that negotiation promotes interlanguage development and that learners are most likely to negotiate if opportunities for oral interaction are provided.In the case of campusbased students, learners' progress is supported and monitored mainly through classroom interactions.If students do not attend classes on campus, how do they gain the reported benefits of oral interaction?Recent studies indicate that chatting provides opportunities for the negotiation of meaning, as occurs in oral interaction.However, most of these have been conducted on interactions between learners, with teacher supervision, often in task-based instructional settings.This study considers implications for distance language learning of negotiations by a group of intermediate learners of Italian interacting in dyads on a Web based Italian native speaker (NS) chat program.The research specifically explores (a) whether live chat with native speakers offers opportunities for negotiation of meaning in open ended tasks carried out in single session interactions with unfamiliar NS without teacher supervision, (b) the principal triggers for negotiation and modification of interlanguage in these interactions, and (c) whether public NS chat rooms are likely to offer an optimal environment for SLA, even for learners studying at a distance who need to chat without supervision.Chat logs indicate that learners do in fact negotiate for meaning and modify their interlanguage when engaged in open ended conversational tasks with unfamiliar interlocutors, with lexical and structural difficulties triggering most negotiations.Though further research needs to probe whether these negotiations and modifications lead to acquisition in the longer term, they would be particularly valuable for distance learners who need opportunities to negotiate within authentic target language contexts.