The paper aims to present the potential, for foreign language students, of the exolingual interactions online in public and open forums. For the analysis of students’ commentaries, I apply the observation categories that were first elaborated for the analysis of posts published in press sites. I focus on narrative commentaries in which web users organize phenomena and events discussed in public discourse and try to give them their individual interpretation. I consider this kind of interaction on press sites as contrib-uting to the civic debates: I argue that they can be also integrated in observation categories used to describe and analyze exchanges between students discussing social issues in reference to foreign lan-guage media information. In the paper I present two kinds of commentaries: those written by native speakers in public forums and those written by FL students in response to public commentaries.