Focus-on-form through peer feedback in a Spanish–American telecollaborative exchange
Abstract
Using a reactive approach to focus-on-form, this study explored the types of feedback and strategies that L2 learners used to draw attention to linguistic problems in a Spanish–American telecollaborative exchange. Data from the readily available transcripts of online postings were utilised and analysed to report the findings. The results showed that the American students produced a much higher rate of lexical and morphosyntactic feedback than did the students from Spain, while the latter used a much greater percentage of affective feedback than their US partners. The Spanish students tended to use reformulations as a quick way to provide target-like forms, whereas the US students offered metalinguistic explanations to help their partners understand sophisticated lexical items and grammatical structures. Despite the fact that both groups received valuable linguistic feedback from their native speaker partners, most of the students did not make error corrections. The study concludes that error correction in a message board might not be a good format for meaningful feedback. Furthermore, specific instructions of how to effectively attend to feedback in conjunction with appropriate training should have been made available for L2 learners.
Department
Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Publication Date
12-7-2011
Journal Title
Language Awareness
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Lee, Lina. Focus on form through peer feedback in a Spanish-American telecollaborative exchange. Language Awareness, 20(4), 343-357, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2011.592589