A growing body of research shows that cooperation scripts can be beneficial for online learning processes of groups. What we call a learning protocol is an implementation of a special variant of cooperation scripts to support synchronous chat-based learning discourses. Learners are provided with a set of features such as referencing and typing contributions, which can be optionally employed if learners consider it to be advantageous. Theoretically, these functionalities can be regarded as grounding activities which participants apply to ground the ongoing discourse. Motivational focus and type of task were experimentally examined with respect to their impact on the use of such grounding activities. A process model of these cognitive processes leading to grounding activities is proposed. Results show that, as hypothesized, a motivational focus on the group increases the likelihood of grounding activities, but, unexpectedly, the task of problem solving decreases grounding activities.