Negotiating Sociocultural and Institutional Contexts: The Case of Spanish-American Telecoilaboration Robert O'Dowd Departamento de Filotogfa Moderna, Facuttad de Filosoffa y Letras, Universidad de Leon, Campus de Vegazana, Leon, Spain This paper reports on a telecollaborative exchange between university language learners in Spain and the USA and analyses the effects of the different institutional and sociocultural contexts on its development. While the socioinstitutional dimen- sion of German-American exchanges has already benefited from extensive study in the literature, this paper focuses on the particular issues and problems which arise in the Spanish-American context and illustrates the strategies available to teachers in these countries to overcome these constraints. The outcomes of the research carried out here illustrate the need for telecollaboratiive models of exchange to be adaptable to different contexts of use. Furthermore, the research also underlines the necessity for online exchanges to offer learners the op]jortunity to explore with their partners the stereotypes and prejudices which each group may hold about the target culture. Este articulo presenta los resultados de un intercambio 'online' entre estudiantes universitarios de idiomas en Espafia y los Estados Unidos. Analiza, ademas, los efectos del contexto sociocultural e institucional en su desarrollo. Mientras la dimension socio-institucional de los intercambios Germano-Americanos se ha beneficiado ya de profundos estudios y dispone de una amplia bibliografia, este articulo se centra en los problemas concretes que surgen en el contexto Hispano- Americano e ilustra las estrategias que los profesores de estos paises tienen a su alcance para solucionar esas dificultades. Los resultados de la investigacion muestran la necesidad de que los modelos de intercambio 'online' se adapten a diferentes contextos de uso. Ademas, el estudio incide en la necesidad de que este tipo de intercambios ofrezca a los alumnois la oportunidad de explorar con sus compafieros en la otra universidad los esterecitipos y prejuicios que cada grupo tiene hacia la otra cultura. Introduction Perhaps or\e of the most significant developments in foreign language classroom research in recent years has been the growing awareness that teachers and learners are working within a complex range of historical, institutional and sociocultural contexts and that these have an important influence on the language learning process (Candlin & Mercer, 2001; Richards, 2001; Salomon & Perkins, 1998). One of the areas which has paid most attention to the influence of the sociocultural context has been network-based language teaching (NBLT), which refers to language teaching involving the use of computers in either local or global networks (Warschauer & Kern, 2000). In this paper, the influence of the different sociocultural and institutional contexts on the development of a Spanish-American telecollaborative 1470-8477/05/01 040-17 $20.00/0 © 2005 R. O'Dowd Language and Intercultural Communication Vol. 5, No. 1, 2005 40