Writer visibility and agreement / disagreement strategies in online asynchronous interaction: A learner corpus study

This paper investigates the language used by a group of Italian advanced EFL learners participating in a private online discussion forum with a group of American university students: using corpus analysis tools, all the contributions to the online debate were investigated to explore which linguistic patterns and pragmatic strategies were used by both groups to express personal visibility in the discussion, as well as to show agreement and disagreement. The Italian learners’ misused interlanguage patterns were then further analysed against the reference model to explore whether mother-tongue habits had influenced their production. The results of corpus observation were finally used to design corpus-based exercises to be used with L2 students to bring their output closer to idiomatic use.