Negotiation of meaning through NBC chatting

The article addresses the similiraties between oral and computer based discource through the use of task-based sychronous NBC such as chatting and the way that NBC mediated interaction can promote and foster the negotiation of meaning. The study presented in this article confirms NBC's potential for promoting the negotiation of meaning in task based interaction. When communication problems arose speakers chose to negotiate and resolve the problems by means of clarification requests, confirmation checks, echo questions or explicit statements of that showed lack of understanding. The results of the study show that learners involved in NBC chats negotiate over all aspects of discourse and pay specific attention to form focused language. The negotiation of meaning through task based NBC interaction also facilitates mutual comprehension and effective communication among learners. The time that the NBC medium provides students to process and manage the interlanguage, the focus on form and negotiation of meaning and the mutual comphrehension that results from this form of interaction show that NBC chatting can play a significant role in the developments of grammatical competence.

The study also shows that factors such as the quantity and type of negotiation should also be taken into consideration. NBC language tasks should be goal oriented and they should provide equal opportunities for all participants to request and obtain infromation in order to succesfully complete a task. Language tasks should also be designed with a level of difficulty that is beyond the grammatical or vocabulary experience of students and provide ideas or concepts that are ouside the experiences students have. A task difficulty level a little above the level of student's familiarity with grammar, vocabulary or ideas will increase the quantitiy of negotiation produced.

This article focuses on using NBC chatting for improving grammatical competence. What about vocabulary though? Do you think NBC chatting would be the same beneficial in promoting vocabulary?