Form-focused social repertoires in an online language learning partnership

This study explores how mutual language learning partners, a native speaker (NS) and learner of Italian as a foreign language, use conversational repair as an authentic resource for out-of-class social interaction and focus-on-form during online text chat sessions. Specifically, it analyses the sequential organization of prototypical form-focused exposed correction sequences where the NS both initiates and completes repair of the learner's non-target grammar in the same turn, also known as recast. Findings indicate that despite the face-threatening nature of exposed correction within an unequal speech exchange system, participants maintain social solidarity by orienting to expert-novice roles and integrating recasts into phatic action-accepting and appreciation routines to bring form-focused trajectories to a polite conclusion prior to returning to topical talk. The learner's role as interaction manager is evident in her regular transformation of NS-initiated pedagogical actions-in-progress into social ones. Comparison of these form-focused pedagogical-social trajectories with a prototypical teacher-fronted instructional repertoire, the Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) sequence, reveals previously unidentified differences in how participants manage their interactions, especially exposed correction, in a formal-pedagogical and an informal social-pedagogical environment. While IRF is only one of many instructional repertoires in which correction activity is nested, fundamental structural differences suggest that online dyadic chat within language learning partnerships provides a potentially empowering and spontaneous alternative to classroom-based instructional repertoires, in preparation for real-life interaction in the target language.

► Provides microanalytic view of online text chat's reported equality of participation.
► Prototypical IRF and online recast sequence are vastly different interactionally.
► Language learners maintain face and social solidarity using L1 routines.
► Online text chat is empowering alternative to traditional classroom interaction.