“Awesome job!” – um estudo do feedback interativo na era digital / “Awesome job!” – a study on the interactive feedback in the digital age

This article reports a netnographic study which aims at investigating the interactional role of feedback in instructor-learner interaction in one of the largest communities of practice for FL teaching and learning: Livemocha. Offering courses on 35 different languages to more than 9 million members in about 195 countries worldwide, Livemocha intends to promote FL learning by means of the provision of multimedia pedagogic material and the collaboration among its members, who act both as learners and instructors. The feedback offered by community instructors, therefore, leads community learners in their learning process, guiding them towards the perception of their errors and the improvement of their interlanguage. In this research, we analize occurrences of interactional feedback, describing the instructors’ interactive moves which aim at establishing and maintaining their social images - their faces. In order to do that, we count on politeness theories supported by Goffman’s (1967) and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) works. The analysis carried out reveals that the instances of feedback focused on are geared to the establishment of positive politeness interactions. Promoting closeness and cooperation as well as claiming common ground, community instructors seem to try to appear sympathetic, turning the feedback into a communicative event as agreeable as they can.