COMPUTER MEDIATED COMMUNICATION: A WINDOW ON L2 SPANISH INTERLANGUAGE
The Interaction Hypothesis states that the conditions for SLA are crucially enhanced by having L2 learners negotiate meaning (i.e. resolve their miscommunications) with other speakers, native or otherwise (Long Robinson, 1998, p. 22) This study demonstrates that incidental negotiations commonly occurred in networked learner/learner discussions as well, especially with respect to their lexical confusions. Fifty intermediate L2 Spanish learners were asked to carry out networked discussions in pairs during their lab time using a synchronous chat program, Remote Technical Assistance (RTA) which records all textual entries. Each dyad carried out a series of online tasks that can be described as jigsaw, information gap, or decision making. The results show that jigsaw tasks appear to lead the way in promoting negotiations, as Pica, Kanagy, and Falodun (1993) had previously predicated, but that information gap tasks were not nearly as productive as a stimulus. The findings suggest that computer mediated communication (CMC) can provide many of the alleged benefits ascribed to the Interaction Hypothesis, but with greatly increased possibilities for access outside of the classroom environment. Nevertheless, the predominance of incidental lexical negotiations, in contrast to the paucity of syntactic negotiations, leaves unanswered or unsatisfactorily addressed the issue of grammatical development. The study demonstrates, however, the value of synchronous chat records as a window for investigating interlanguage. BACKGROUND AND GOALS From the L2 students' point of view, there exists a relatively long period in which they struggle to communicate in the target language via their own interlanguage, an emerging linguistic system (Gass Selinker, 1994, p. 11) In order to move toward the target language, SLA research suggests that students must first focus on their own linguistic deficiencies vis a vis the target language what some researchers have described as "noticing the gap" or apperception (Gass, 1997, p. 4) In other words, L2 learners must develop their own metalinguistic awareness in order to stimulate a change in their interlanguage (Schmidt, 1990; Schmidt Frota, 1986, pp. 306 319) One way of provoking students to develop this sense of what still needs to be learned consists in having them attempt communication tasks that require them to negotiate the meaning of the message in order to succeed at exchanging information. When working in pairs to solve real communication tasks, students typically encounter linguistic problems, be they lexical, grammatical, phonological, semantic, or pragmatic in nature. At the point that one partner notices a gap or suffers some confusion, the pair will suspend the normal flow of the conversation or "push down," as it were, from the discourse of the task itself in order to resolve their miscommunication (Gass, Mackey, Pica, 1998, p. 301; Varonis Gass, 1985; Gass, 1997) In Gass' words (1997, p. 107) "Negotiation here refers to communication in which participants' attention is focused on resolving a communication problem as opposed to communication in which there is a free flowing exchange of information." These negotiations often result in the correction of specific mistakes and promote the evolution of the L2 learner's interlanguage toward the target. Robert Blake Computer Mediated Communication: Language Learning Technology 112 In particular, Pica, Kanagy, and Falodun (1993) have predicted that jigsaw and information gap tasks will promote more of these negotiations than other task stimuli. When working in dyads, jigsaw tasks provide each partner with only half of the information needed to solve the communication task; the partners must share their respective parts equally (i.e. two way task) and then try to converge on a single outcome. Information gap tasks assume only one person holds the pertinent information, which the other partner must solicit (i.e. this constitutes a one way task, but the task can be repeated with the roles reversed to form a two way task) whether or not a unique outcome is predictable. Long and Robinson (1998, p. 22) have subsumed this process of negotiation of meaning under the Interaction Hypothesis, which states that the conditions for SLA are crucially enhanced by having L2 learners negotiate meaning with other speakers, native or otherwise. Among the benefits cited, these negotiations tend to increase input comprehensibility through language modifications such as simplifications, elaborations, confirmation and comprehension checks, clarifications requests, or recasts which end up providing the L2 learner with the type of negative evidence deemed necessary by some SLA theories for continued language development (Gass, 1997, p. 143; Long, 1996; White, 1991) This type of negotiation is also described in the literature as Focus on Form, and is defined by Long (1991, pp. 45 46) as follows: Focus on form overtly draws students' attention to linguistic elements as they arise incidentally [italics added] in lessons whose overriding focus is on meaning or communication. This is not to say that the Interaction Hypothesis can claim that these types of negotiations in and of themselves cause SLA, but rather that tasks which promote negotiations of meaning create a fertile environment for SLA to occur. According to Gass (1997, p. 131) "negotiation is a means of drawing attention to linguistic form, making it salient and thereby creating a readiness for learning." Actually proving that the negotiation of meaning also promotes the restructuring of the learner's linguistic system is a far more elusive proposition, not only for the proponents of the Interaction Hypothesis, but for all theories of SLA as well. Output, especially delayed and linguistically productive output, certainly constitutes strong evidence, but not necessarily conclusive proof, that the learner's internal system has, in fact, been restructured. Tracing output back to a single recorded learning moment would seem exceedingly difficult for any SLA theory. Notwithstanding these research obstacles, the study of what learners do with their miscommunications has brought to light many interesting observations concerning the SLA process. The present study offers additional observations within this interactionist framework by presenting data from computer mediated communication (CMC) among L2 learners of Spanish. As briefly mentioned above, the benefits of negotiations of meaning were first demonstrated for learner/native speaker oral exchanges (Hatch, 1978; Holliday, 1995; Long, 1981) but further investigations have shown that these benefits hold true for learner/learner oral discussions as well (Gass Varonis, 1994) Within the context of the Interaction Hypothesis, then, the goals of this study were threefold: (a) to document that networked learner/leaner discussions in Spanish would also produce language modifications such as those reported in the oral based interactionist literature; (b) to characterize linguistically those modifications; and (c) to test whether Pica, Kanagy, and Falodun's predictions concerning the superiority of jigsaw and information gap tasks also held for students involved in CMC. While it might seem obvious to some that L2 learners will negotiate meaning if engaged by the appropriate tasks, few studies have documented how students do this on line (for one notable exception, see Pellettieri, 1999) Above all, this study seeks to show how chat programs can provide the SLA field with a convenient window through which to observe L2 interlanguage as it is unfolding. TOOLS FOR COMPUTER MEDIATED COMMUNCIATION Robert Blake Computer Mediated Communication: Language Learning Technology 113 To address these three goals, 50 students from two intermediate Spanish classes at UC Davis were asked to chat in pairs for one hour a week in the language lab using a synchronous chat program, Remote Technical Assistance (RTA) developed at UC Davis. RTA tool differs from other chat programs such as Daedalus Interchange, IRC, or WebCT chat in the following ways: RTA allows users to record and forward digitized sound *NOTE* on the fly. Students can share text in two ways: through a chat window that supports random exchanges and through a collaborative writing window or "Textpad" Window that requires the participants to follow a turn taking protocol. Students can create shared whiteboards using either screen capture or blank, white backgrounds. This chat program also lets each user remotely manipulate his or her partner's Web browser. Finally, RTA permits both point to point and multipoint/group chat, whereas other chat programs often only facilitate one or the other mode. Most importantly, the RTA chat program records all written interactions entered in both a chat window and the collaborative writing window (Textpad) which provide researchers with an instantaneous transcript of all user exchanges that can be conveniently retrieved from a Web based management page. Fortunately, for the purposes of research, telling students that their responses would be logged by the computer for further examination did not seem to diminish their level of participation or their sense that the computer afforded them a relatively anonymous, or at least protected, environment for their discussions, as evidenced by the confidential nature of some of their exchanges with their partners. While these special RTA features were fully employed in order to deliver and facilitate the students' online completion of the tasks, the experiments described below could also have been carried out by any other chat programs that supports pair work, if supplemented by written instructions, illustrations, and pre recorded materials. Demonstrating the superiority of RTA vis a vis other chat programs was not the focus of this study. Rather, this study assumed certain advantages common to all comp