Meaning negotiation strategies in Thai English as a foreign language learner's chat

The purposes of this study were to examine meaning negotiation strategies employed by Thai EFL learners while chatting, as well as to find out if text-based Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) in the form of chat helps facilitate English language learning. The participants were twenty Thai EFL undergraduates who used chat applications from a website as a tool to practice English. Out of five chat sessions, one hundred chat scripts were extracted. The extracted chat scripts were used to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze meaning negotiation strategies the participants produced concerning five types of meaning negotiation strategies: clarification requests, confirmation checks, comprehension checks, self-repetition, and other repetition. The chat scripts were also also analyzed to see participants’ signs of learning during English online chat.
The results revealed that chat encouraged Thai EFL learners to contribute various meaning negotiations. With a total of 3500 turns extracted, 342 negotiations were evident during the study. The meaning negotiations included all five meaning negotiation strategy types, and the participants tended to increase the number of negotiations across time. Also, there was evidence for the participants’ signs of learning English. During the chat process, participants contributed numerous meaning negotiations which helped enhance both of their linguistic (forms) and communicative competence and helped facilitate successful communication. Therefore, it is recommended that EFL teachers consider implementing online chat in their language teaching, both inside and outside classroom.