Focusing on meaning and form through online news forums

This article aims to explore how online forums may constitute the basis for both meaning-focused and form-focused language learning activities. It will describe experiences with students on university language-degree courses where computer-mediated communication (CMC) provided a means for discussion on topics of interest to the learners. As a follow-up to the online debates, learners were given the opportunity to investigate the language of authentic discussion forums by means of corpus-based tasks. The creation of a learner corpus of the students’ own forum contributions then allowed teachers to discover which grammatical and lexical forms were over or under-used by their students and to produce pedagogical interventions on the basis of these findings. Thus the learners progressed from a task in which they were required to interact spontaneously with their peers to one in which they were encouraged to “notice the gap” between their output and that of participants in a public internet forum.