| Summary: | In this study, individually written essays are compared with interactively written chat texts with the aim to investigate, describe and to some extent explain what happens to the language and the writing during a chat session. Students in a Swedish upper secondary school studying Spanish A2 completed two jigsaw tasks through writing and the texts were analyzed from a descriptive grammatical and stylistic perspective through variable analysis. In the results, the essays tended to be more complex syntactically whereas the chat texts showed more variation and accuracy regarding verb conjugation. As to fluency (text length), number of clauses and verbal forms there were no major differences. Chatting in school environment seemed to become semiformal in this study, with many incomplete sentences and interjections, but with few extra-linguistic signs and only some decline in the usage of accents. A challenging feature of the chat practice is that the interactivity makes the final text result an inseparable entity of two individual texts both regarding content and language. At the same time the interactivity could be the reason for the higher variation and accuracy of the verb conjugation in the chat texts of this study.
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