In "Negotiation of meaning and codeswitching in online tandems" by Kotter (2003), it was stated that during research students from the US were asked to interact with students from Germany on MOO. They communicated in both German and English and responded to a questionaire which evaluated their actions during their interaction, such as when they failed to understand their partners during the communication on MOO.
When students failed to understand the meaning of their partners, German students tend to ask for a reiteration of the sentence or a paraphrase in which they try to discern the meaning. American students on the other hand, tend to ask for a translation, and often times ignore the sentences they do not understand. By trying to guess the meaning or ignoring the sentence, it shows that the American students' proficiency is not up to par with their partners in this online discourse. However, since these students are learning German as a second language the lack in proficiency is inherent.
Since the research is done in a controlled enviornment, there are many variables which are eliminated and thus the online chat between the German and American students cannot represent the online chat of people from different parts of the world. The students negotiate meaning because they are conscious of the activity in which they are participating. This causes them to have a goal, or aim. Unlike the chats which occur more often in the online gaming community, which often times the participants have no particularly strong incentive to learn and negotiate meaning in a second language, requests for repetition and paraphrase becomes less common while the American students' approach of ignoring the sentence and changing the subjects become more common.
A common reaction by individuals to others speaking a foreign language is to ignore them completely, and therefore there exists no negotiation of meaning. Therefore the results from the research in negotiation of meaning is limited to only parts of the online community and cannot be applied to all instances of online chatting.
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Definitely! People chat online for different reasons so that they may have varied responses to non-understanding. Negotiate of meanings appear more often under circumstances of language learning than regular social chit chatting. As a nearly native speaker, can you express why you don’t like to negotiate or explain to nonnative speakers online? Does it end up obstructing the rolling of the conversation without negotiation of meaning?
In addition to different online environments, what else might limit the opportunities for NOM?
It depends on the situation but sometimes when I meet individuals who speak almost no English, I would have to explain to him what i mean, yet by not having a firm command... adequate command of English, an explanation often leads to more explanations. It is not something i want to do when I go online to enjoy time off. As for obstructions it will also depend on the individuals i speak with.
Aside from different environments, I believe age plays an important role in negotiation of meaning. As people of different ages have different understandings and interpretations of what you say. An individual's fluency in a language can also have an effect on NOM.
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