Students’ interactional strategies for resolving lexical issues in computer-assisted collaborative EFL writing

In the last decade interactional studies have been addressing the strategies of teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) to teach impromptu vocabulary items. However, there is still a dearth of interactional studies that focus on students’ own strategies to resolve lexical issues. Since the Swedish syllabus for English calls for students to be able to use different strategies when their language is lacking, we need to know more about what skills they use and whether there are ways in which their skills can be improved. The current study thus examines students’ interactional strategies for resolving lexical gaps and other lexical issues in their collaborative writing, sometimes with recourse to digital lexical resources. It also explores the learning potentials of both collaboration and digital tools. The collection of students’ lexical strategies comes from 31 hours of video-recorded data from collaborative computer-assisted writing tasks in the EFL classroom of four Swedish upper secondary schools. The findings reveal five principal interactional strategies, three of which are unique to collaboration. Moreover, one strategy involves using digital resources by looking up lexical items in an online translation tool (e.g. Google Translate). Both collaboration and digital tools can create opportunities for learning lexis by extending access beyond individual knowledge resources. This is particularly so when it comes to students’ lexical gaps. Moreover, training students to develop different strategies when using online translation tools should be particularly beneficial for both collaborative and individual writing.