Is corrective feedback during telecollaboration beneficial? The effects of peer and teacher corrections on L2 writing proficiency

This study investigated the effectiveness of peer and teacher feedback during telecollaboration, specifically, a semester-long email exchange. Participants included 38 students from three sections of a second-semester German course at a US university. They were paired with 40 students of English at a high school in Germany. Of the three second-semester German sections, one group was assigned to a peer feedback condition (N = 15), one to a teacher feedback condition (N = 10), and one to a telecollaboration-only condition (N = 13). Over the course of the semester, each learner sent one German and one English email per week to their email partner. The peer feedback group received corrective feedback on their German emails from their email partners whereas the teacher feedback group received corrections from their instructor. The telecollaboration-only group did not receive corrections. Results from the DIALANG writing test for German, administered at the beginning and the end of the semester, showed that the peer feedback group improved the most on measures of L2 writing, the teacher feedback group made some improvement, and the telecollaboration-only group did not improve. Additional data from tailor-made posttests mirrored these results. Pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed.