Negotiation of Meaning and Codeswitching in Online Tandems

This paper analyses negotiation of meaning and codeswitching in discourse between 29 language students from classes at a German and a North American university, who teamed up with their peers to collaborate on projects whose results they had to present to the other groups in the MOO during the final weeks of the project. From October to December 1998, these learners, who formed a total of eight groups, met twice a week for 75 minutes in MOOssiggang MOO, a textbased environment that can be compared to chatrooms, but which also differs from these in several important respects. The prime objective of the study was to give those students who participated in the online exchanges a chance to meet with native speakers of their target language in real time and to investigate if the concept of tandem learning as promoted by initiatives like the International Tandem Network could be successfully transferred from e-mail-based discourse to a format in which the learners could interact with each other in real time over a computer network. An analysis of electronic transcripts from eight successive meetings between the teams suggests that online tandem does indeed work even if the learners have to respond more quickly to each other than if they had communicated with their partners via electronic mail. Yet a comparison of the data (184,000 running words) with findings from research on the negotiation of meaning in face-to-face discourse also revealed that there was a marked difference between conversational repair in spoken interactions and in the MOO-based exchanges. This paper discusses potential reasons for these differences, investigates the learners' exploitation of the bilingual format of their exchange, and thereby attempts to demonstrate how online tandems can contribute to successful second language acquisition (SLA) and the development of learners' metalinguistic abilities.