This inquiy explores the conversational styles of two dyads who engaged in a semester-long, video-mediated telecollaboration between Japan and America. While one dyad expressed the greatest satisfaction and developed the autonomy to continue the project beyond the curricular requirement, the other dyad expressed the greatest frustration, requiring a pedagogical intervention. To explore how the two dyads’ different experiences could be attributed to turn negotiation patterns, the English portion of the second interaction session was explored. The results displayed that for the unsuccessful dyad, silence, which was employed by the Japanese EFL learner as a contextualization cue, triggered the American student’s hyperexplanation to get the Japanese partner involved in conversation. However, such a high-involvement strategy, only ended in generating fewer opportunities for the Japanese partner to contribute to the conversation (i.e. vicious cycle). In contrast, successful turn negotiation of the other dyad permitted them to share knowledge schema, better recipient design, and adjust their speech accordingly. Such personalized speech, in turn, led to the co-construction of conversation (i.e. virtuous cycle). Based on these observations, it is concluded that ‘missed communication’ may set attribution of negative personal traits unless fit scaffolding/intervention is supplied.