A Case Study of the Diachronic Development of Second Language Grammatical Competence Based on Computer-mediated Negotiated Interaction

Abstract

The emergence of computer-mediated real-time communication platform provides second language learners with the opportunity to communicate with the target language through the network. This empirical study is based on the English text-based data of online store learners in four periods of real-time online communication platform to explore the grammatical development of interlanguage of middle-level English learners in computer-mediated real-time interactive negotiation. Corpus analysis shows that learners' accuracy of L2 grammatical forms has been improved, with obvious changes in the first and second periods, but no significant changes in their grammatical competence in the later periods. The frequency of using compound sentences is low, and it shows a downward trend in the later stages. The research shows that computer-mediated real-time communication promotes learners' second language acquisition to a certain extent, but the communicative context and purpose affect its further improvement of interlanguage grammar.