This article aims at showing the way students use the text chat whilst engaged in a collaborative task with peer students as part of a master degree program in online language education. It focuses on the way participants develop interactional and instrumental skills by creating schemas of use with this communication tool for training purposes. This study belongs to the field of computer mediated pedagogical communication. The analysis of the verbal interactions between students dwells on analytic tools grounded in the pragmatic and interactionist frameworks.