earticle

영어

Within a sociocultural framework, a growing number of L2 studies claim that learners’ collaborative talk provides opportunities for second language (L2) learning. Despite the increasing interest in such talk, there is little research that presents a holistic analysis and evaluation of interaction patterns embedded in collaborative talk, occurring during joint editing task, as well as the resulting learning outcomes. Recognizing this paucity, the current study examined learners’ interaction doing editing tasks via an in-depth, descriptive analysis. Delayed post-tests were conducted on the specific linguistic items produced during the tasks in order to assess learning outcomes of the collaborative talk. This study presents several new findings and raises issues that the major sociocultural-based research undertaken to date has neglected. A major finding is that, unlike promising findings in the L2 literature in relation to the role of collaborative talk, this study does not show any robust evidence that learners’ collaborative talk promotes L2 learning. Also, it demonstrates that interactional features in the talk were often non-collaborative. This provides a possible explanation for the less positive role of collaborative talk in L2 learning. The study implies that the nature of interaction in learners’ dialogue may not be always collaborative. Therefore, it is important that researchers and teachers have realistic expectation of learners’ dialogue, which may include interaction of an intricate and often complex nature.