COMMUNITY-MEDIATED DEVELOPMENT OF GRAMMATICAL COMPETENCE IN BILINGUAL DIGITAL INTERACTION

Abstract

Research on bilingual digital interaction has enriched our understanding of identity construction, translanguaging, and intercultural negotiation. However, attention to how micro-level grammatical features, particularly epistemic stance marking, are restructured through digital community participation remains limited. Furthermore, classical models of communicative competence tend to position grammatical competence as a relatively stable structural system before its use in interaction. This study addresses this gap by exploring how the use of stance adverbs in bilingual digital interaction reflects the dynamics of community-mediated grammatical development. Using a longitudinal multi-community digital interaction study design based on a sociocultural mediation framework, this study involved five bilingual digital users (L1 Indonesian, L2 English) active in peer-informal, mentor-guided, and transnational communities. The data consisted of 63 naturally occurring interaction episodes over four months. The analysis integrated qualitative discourse analysis, functional coding, and distributional tests to track changes across time and context. The findings indicate a shift from emphasis-oriented stances to more mitigated, evidential, and layered ones, with the distribution of functions significantly correlated with community type and the level of epistemic asymmetry. Interactional uptake analysis reveals that alignment, challenge, and repair function as interactional feedback loops that mediate the restructuring of grammatical repertoire. This study concludes that grammatical competence in digital bilingual ecology is interactionally adaptive and continuously recalibrated through exposure to community-specific epistemic norms. These findings extend the conceptualization of grammatical development beyond formal learning contexts and position digital community participation as a structural force in shaping grammatical choices.