This research aims to find out the different participating processes in two types of groupsituations, namely internal situations which involve three native speakers of Japanese, andcontact situations which involve two native speakers and one non-native speaker of Japanese.The focus of the discussion is placed on the conversational roles of the unaddressed recipient(Goffman 1981) in each group.The data comprises of 20 free-talking sessions, each of which were approximately 20minutes in length and were held among three acquaintances. 12 sessions were conversations incontact situations while 8 were Japanese internal situations, and all were both video and audiorecorded. It was observed that one of the three participants in each group tended to become anunaddressed recipient, and that the conversation was usually developed by two participantsrather than by three. On the discourse level, the findings show that a similar participationstructure was developed as a result in both internal and contact situations but the processesundergone appear to be different. Firstly, in native situations, the roles of both listeners weredifferent while one participant was speaking because of their different degree of sharedknowledge on topics of conversation. In contact situations, however, 1) one non-native listenertended to remain as an unaddressed recipient because of their language inability, such as notunderstanding the contents; 2) one of the two NSs chose to remain as an unaddressed recipientbecause the other NS was taking a supportive role in order to let the non-native participant toparticipate in the conversation by frequently asking questions. In spite of this unbalancedconversational roles among participants, it is found that participants in all recordedconversational sessions evaluated their own participation positively in the process of solvingproblems occurred in the course of conversation.