Online peer feedback between colombian and New Zealand FL beginners: a comparison and lessons learned

We report on an exploratory study comparing the performance as online tutors of two groups of beginner eleven-year-old students of English in Colombia and Spanish in New Zealand. The native speaker students of the foreign language the others were learning corrected paragraphs written by their peers. The feedback provided by each group of tutors was analyzed for (1) language corrected, (2) input on errors, and (3) types of feedback provided. We found that both Colombian and New Zealand tutors willingly provided corrections to their peers and used other feedback strategies to foster attention to linguistic form. The Colombian tutors identified a higher number of errors, but the New Zealanders provided more detailed comments. We draw lessons from the exploration.