Online Plurilingual Interaction in the Development of Language Awareness

Abstract

This paper is situated in interaction on the Internet and presents an analysis of chat conversations in Romance languages – French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish – between students from several universities. The Internet is currently a fertile setting for intercultural and plurilingual encounters, and interaction, virtual or real, is seen as a central field of meaning negotiation and mediation. Our aim is to highlight how these communicative situations, particularly when communicative problems have to be collaboratively solved, can raise a chat participant's language awareness (LA). The data analysis allows us to observe how LA is an essential domain in the development of plurilingual and intercultural communicative competences, particularly when considering political and critical linguistic education.

Keywords:

• plurilingual competence
• intercultural communicative competence
• language awareness
• plurilingual chats
• repair (sequences of)