영어 쓰기 수업에서의 의미협상: 실시간 CMC 활용 쓰기 과업을 중심으로

Abstract

With the popularity of the interactionist and socioconstructivist approaches, it is widely held that communicative interaction facilitates L2 acquisition. Social interaction has been propelled by the proliferation of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Particularly, the nature of synchronous CMC promotes meaning negotiation (Levy & Stockwell, 2006). The discourse of CMC, which is tantamount to conversing in slow motion (Beauvios, 1992), exhibits features of face-to-face communication. This similarity between FFC and CMC makes us ponder how learners of English negotiate meaning in CMC. This study aims to examine if and to what extent EFL students negotiate meaning in the synchronous CMC environment while carrying out pre-writing tasks. The study analyzed the content of chat scripts students have produced in reaction to two topics: increasing the number of TEE classes at college settings and revealing gender information of unborn babies. The analysis followed Varonis and Gass' (1985) negotiation routine and Smith' (2003) subcategories of negotiation routine. The findings indicate that the students' meaning negotiation differed according to topic, and that they negotiated more about content than about lexical items.