Online Plurilingual Interaction in the Development of Language Awareness

This paper is situated in interaction on the Internet and presents an analysis of chat conversations in Romance languages – French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish – be-tween 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 con-sidering political and critical linguistic education. doi: 10.2167/la356.