The Effect of Task Type on Negotiation of Meaning in Synchronous Chatting

초록

communication, various forms of communicational tools have emerged as a new learning environment and are being used increasingly in second and foreign language learning environments these days. In particular, synchronous or real-time communication, commonly called chatting, has advantage that messages are sent and received instantaneously, and due to these dynamic exchanges of message between the participants in chatting, some researchers in second and foreign language learning regard chatting as a promising tool for language learning (Blake, 2000; Pelletieri, 2000; Toyoda & Harrison, 2002). The potential benefits of chatting in language learning enlisted by previous research include increase in learners' opportunities to use the target language (Toyoda & Harrison, 2002), collaborative construction of knowledge by learners (Warschauer, 1996, 1997), improvement of the quality of written discourse (Sostillo, 2000), etc. In addition to these benefits, inducing learners' negotiation of meaning has recently emerged as another possible advantage that chatting can bring to language learning; Empirical evidences show that chatting can facilitate the learners' negotiation of meaning in a similar fashion to face-to-face negotiations (Blake, 2000; Pellettieri, 2000; Warschauer, 1998). In spite of the general agreement among previous studies that chatting can induce negotiation of meaning as in face-to-face communication, the effects of task types on the quantity and quality of negotiation has not been comprehensively explored. The purpose of this study is to see how meaning is negotiated in two different types of interactions, a relatively unstructured conversational activity and an information gap activity, and examine negotiation exchanges in detail.