Resumen de What Does Metalinguistic Activity in Learners' Interaction During a Collaborative L2 Writing Task Look Like?
This article examines the metalinguistic activity that arose in the interaction of 7 groups of bilingual learners writing collaboratively in their second language (L2), English. A microanalysis of this interaction reveals that metalinguistic activity comprises 3 types of oral production: comments, speech actions, and text reformulations. Text reformulations were the most frequent type of oral production in 4 of the 7 groups, whereas in the remaining 3 groups, comments were the most frequent. Moreover, the analysis shows that comments always constituted explicit metalinguistic activity, that speech actions always comprised implicit metalinguistic activity, and that text reformulations could contain either explicit or implicit metalinguistic activity. All groups in the study exhibited implicit metalinguistic activity more frequently than explicit metalinguistic activity. Based on these findings, this article shows the importance of implicit metalinguistic activity in collaborative interaction and argues that it is a significant component of attention to language that has largely been ignored in the literature. It also argues that implicit metalinguistic activity needs to be examined further to determine the language representations underlying this activity. The article concludes by outlining a working hypothesis about the nature of these representations.
