Student Negotiation of Collaborative Dialogues: The Roles and Resources Used in Unsupervised Conversations

Responding to Donato and Brooks's (2004) call for undergraduate students to have more opportunities to engage in discourse at the advanced proficiency level, collaborative dialogues provide students with a situation conducive to language production and learning (Swain, 1997). As most of the research on collaborative dialogues has focused on the accuracy of language in a classroom environment, this article explores the various ways learners work together collaboratively to make meaning while discussing course content in the target language in dialogues taking place outside of class. Four student dyads with mixed proficiency levels completed weekly collaborative dialogues in an advanced undergraduate German literature course, and the dialogues were analyzed for patterns in role-taking and resource usage with an emphasis on how the students negotiated the task to complete it and make meaning. The students stayed on task during the dialogues and assumed the collaborative, expert, novice, dominant, and passive roles described by Storch (2002) during their discussion. They also relied almost solely on each other as linguistic resources.