Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
2nd INGED International ELT Conference, Bolu, Türkiye, 24 - 27 Nisan 2025, ss.83, (Özet Bildiri)
Virtual Exchange (VE) projects are becoming a predominant practice in language learning and teacher education. However, their context-specific characteristics remain underexplored. This study focuses on a particularly challenging aspect of VE process: the first encounter among tertiary-level students, specifically examining lapses—moments of awkward silence—that occur during these interactions. The VE project was conducted with a partnership of three universities – one each from Germany, Türkiye, and Sweden. All participants worked weekly in transnational teams. The video-mediated interactions of the participants during VE project were screen-recorded, and this data was analyzed using the tools of Multimodal Conversation Analysis. An initial examination of dataset showed that the first meetings featured extended episodes of silences/lapses possibly due to the lack of a shared history among the participants, which put the progressivity of talk constantly at risk. With this in mind, this study aims to present how the VE participants maintain the progressivity of the talk in a video-mediated setting and resolve momentary lapses. The findings show that they manage the lapses effectively using different interactional practices by (i.) deploying elaborations to continue the prior talk, (ii.) asking questions to clarify a topic, to elicit team mate contributions on a topic or to open up a new topic, (iii.) creating a context-specific turn-taking mechanism and a potential next-speaker selection mechanism, and (iv.) silence filling to end the lapses. The findings provide new insights into the interactional dynamics of VE settings, offering valuable contributions to VE researchers, practitioners, and participants.