Abstract

This paper presents the results of a study that examined learner scaffolding in e-mail tandem exchanges between secondary ESL and FSL students. A group of French-speaking ESL students in a secondary school in Quebec communicated by e-mail with a group of English-speaking FSL students in a secondary school in Ontario. This study was carried out following the principles of online tandem learning (Brammerts, 1996; Little et al., 1999), a form of computer-mediated communication in which two native speakers of different languages communicate with one another for the purpose of learning the other’s native language. In this type of exchange, students are asked to use the L1 and L2 in equal proportion and to correct each other’s mistakes. Drawing on a sociocultural perspective (Lantolf, 2000), this study sought to answer the following question: What strategies are employed by secondary ESL and FSL students to provide scaffolding to their e-mail tandem partners? E-mails were coded using a taxonomy adapted from Villamil and Guerrero’s (1996) taxonomy of “substrategies for providing scaffolding”. Findings showed that both ESL and FSL students provided scaffolding to one another by resorting to a variety of strategies.