Emergence of divergent L2 feelings through the co-adapted social context of online chat

•In online L2 text chat, participants co-construct the context for their connected feelings.•L2 chatters’ feelings emerge over time through the sense that they make of their communicative interactions.•This sense-making is always also relationally connected with other aspects of chatters’ ongoing psychologies.•Social comparisons can have a largely detrimental impact on ongoing feeling trajectories.•Teachers need to provide support such as focusing students on their own linguistic goals, and discussing their affective experiences connected to online chat. While past research has provided valuable insights into the nature and impact of second language (L2) learners’ feelings, it has frequently stopped short of doing justice to learning as a dynamic undertaking conducted in particular contexts. Empirical work has also predominantly focused on classroom settings. The current research was instead carried out with undergraduate students from Japan and Australia in the unique context of an online L2 text chat exchange. The study collected longitudinal introspective and dialogical data in order to explore dynamic perceptions of feelings connected with communicative interactions during seven chat sessions. In the article, we use a narrative approach to highlight the story of one chat dyad. Basing our interpretations on a complexity perspective (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008), the study illuminates the heavily contextualized social psychodynamic emergence of these learners’ divergent L2 feeling trajectories. Participants’ feelings emerged over time through the sense that they made of their communicative interactions in the text chat, yet always also relationally connected with other aspects of their ongoing psychologies. As such, the article suggests the value of more situated, dynamic and socially-aware research into the complexity of L2 study feelings.