This case study focuses on how two learners position themselves as partners in a collaborative writing activity in a Spanish Writing course. I utilize a micro-discourse analytic approach (Eskildsen & Markee, 2018; van Compernolle, 2015, 2018) to highlight the situated nature of collaboration and the dynamicity of the collaborative writing process as it unfolds turn-by-turn during their interactions. This type of analysis permits researchers to explore how learners orient to their partners and to the language they are producing, and what learners do with their talk (Markee, 2000), so that researchers can observe their competence-in-action (Pekarek Doehler, 2013). The discursive practices of the pair suggested that they viewed collaboration as a way to trade off the role of being expert based on whether their attention was focused on content or language.