Resumen de Focus-on-form through peer feedback in a Spanish–American telecollaborative exchange

Lina Lee

• 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.