Conversación en WhatsApp: aprendizaje y colaboración en lengua franca

This case study analyzes a WhatsApp (WA) conversation between two graduate students, enrolled in the same course, who use English as a lingua franca. With the intention of observing how roles are established in a collaborative work process via Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM), we approach the data from a social constructivist perspective, and use Conversational Analysis (CA) to describe the roles of two students with disparate profiles in terms of language ability and course content knowledge. In addition, we observe how during this interaction process new skills are developed. This project demonstrates the potential benefit of using mobile messaging systems in the development of subject knowledge and linguistic competencies outside the classroom