Incidental pragmatics learning in telecollaborative exchanges: A case study on criticism and suggestion

This paper aims to explore the outcomes of incidental pragmatics learning in the context of a telecollaboration programme, with a focus on the speech acts of criticising and suggesting. The programme involved Italian learners of English and American learners of Italian. It was organised around weekly Zoom video calls over an academic semester. Every second virtual encounter was devoted to providing and discussing feedback on written texts produced by the partner in the target language. The discussion was held in the feedback provider’s L2. For this study, we focused on three intermediate-to-advanced learners of English whose data were analysed longitudinally. English native speakers’ data, collected during a previous round of the telecollaboration programme, were analysed as a reference baseline. Signs of development in the linguistic behaviour of the three learners were observed with regard to the pragmatic strategies they used to comment on their partners’ errors, but not in the distribution of internal modifiers and supportive moves.