An e-mail tandem learning project involving ESL and FSL secondary school students : a sociocultural perspective

This study examined project-based, e-mail tandem exchanges between ESL and FSL secondary school students. Drawing on a sociocultural perspective (Lantolf, 2000; Parks, 2000; Wells, 1999), it sought to investigate (a) the strategies employed by secondary ESL and FSL students to provide scaffolding to their e-mail tandem partners, (b) the resources used by students when composing their e-mails, (c) the use of the feedback provided by their e-mail tandem partners when revising their reports, (d) the usefulness of the notion of motive, as defined by sociocultural theory, to explain the differences in the way the tandem partners oriented to the exchanges (i.e., how they engaged and invested themselves in the e-mail exchanges), and (e) the teachers' perceptions of the use of tandem e-mail as a language learning tool. One group of 30 intermediate-level Frenchspeaking ESL students in a secondary school (Secondary 4) in Québec was paired up with two groups of intermediate-level English-speaking FSL students (total 30) in a secondary school (Grade 11 ) in Ontario. The joint reading of articles taken from newspapers and magazines of interest to teenagers formed the basis for the e-mail discussions. Data, collected over an 18-week period during the 2004-2005 academic year, were obtained from four main sources: written documents, observations, questionnaires, and interviews. The main findings were the following: (1) Using a taxonomy adapted from Villamil and De Guerrero's (1996) taxonomy of substrategies for providing scaffolding, analysis of e-mails showed that both ESL and FSL students provided scaffolding to one another by resorting to various strategies. In both groups, giving explicit feedback was the most salient strategy employed by the students when functioning as the NS tutor. (2) Findings from various sources of data collection methods showed that during the composing of their e-mails, both groups drew on a variety of resources. (3) An analysis of first and second drafts revealed that ESL students incorporated 91 % of the corrections provided by their tandem partners, while the FSL students incorporated 74 %. (4) Although the findings showed that the majority of the students participating in the e-mail tandem project had minimally completed the basic course requirements, the analysis of eight case study participants revealed individual differences in the way the latter oriented to the tasks and subsequently carried them out. These results were linked to the notion of motive, as defined by sociocultural theory. (5) Although the teachers reported that their students had benefited from the authentic communication with native speakers and from the feedback they received from them, data also revealed that they had been confronted with a number of challenges. In contrast to previous research that has focused on adult L2 learners (e.g., Appel, 1997; Appel & Gilabert, 2002; Belz, 2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2003; Belz & Kinginger, 2002, 2003; Lee, 2004; Liaw & Johnson, 2001; Muller-Hartmann, 2000; O'Dowd, 2003), this study sheds light on the degree to which L2 secondary school students are capable of giving each other feedback.

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