The objective of this paper is to describe a task-based project in tandem
via e-mail, and to discuss the effects of motivation on task performance. In this project, a group
of Irish students and a group of Spanish students are asked to carry out a series of tasks in
collaboration with their tandem partners via e-mail by means of a web page especially designed for
the project. Half the message is meant to be written in the student’s native language and
half in the target language, and students are also encouraged to correct one another. The goal
behind our research is to discuss the effects of motivation on task performance. We argue that
resource directing (such as reasoning demands) and resource depleting factors (such as prior
knowledge) which belong to task complexity in Robinson’s model (Robinson, 2001) are
closely connected to affective variables which, as is the case with motivation, belong to task
difficulty. Motivational factors like interest in the meanings to be exchanged, involvement in
the decision-making process, students’ expertise in the topic, media and materials used,
and the diffusion of outcomes among others have strong effects on task performance, and should
therefore be considered together with complexity variables.
This paper presents a new teacher interface for the Electronic Tandem Resources
(ETR) site, the student interface described in Appel & Mullen (2000), and a new version of the
site designed specifically for research purposes. The main features of the original site geared
towards the language learner were the creation of a virtual environment for tandem language
learning and the provision of tools and data intended to help foster the development of learner
autonomy. The new teacher interface supports the integration of tandem language learning activities
in the foreign language classroom and addresses the difficult issue of performance assessment and
task evaluation. Computer-mediated communication activities between students in different
countries are notoriously difficult for teachers to monitor. Nevertheless, there is evidence that
in certain situations it is beneficial for the teacher to be able to monitor these activities.
The teacher interface of the ETR site offers a user-friendly interface which requires only basic
computer skills, and gives teachers access to data such as the date of the most recently sent
messages, the number of words sent by students and the percentages of text written by each
student in their respective L1 and L2, without giving teachers access to the content of the
messages, thus preserving students’ privacy. Furthermore, a slightly different version has
also been designed for evaluation of the learning by the researcher investigating second
language learning in an electronic tandem environment. This interface has been designed for
setting up experiments and some of its features allow for control over variables related to
the experiment. The interface records time stamps for sent and received messages.
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