Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
ICOP-L2: Interactional Competences and Practices in a Second Language, Kolding, Danimarka, 5 - 07 Haziran 2024, ss.1, (Özet Bildiri)
Video-mediated interaction is now a ubiquitous form of communication that also covers virtual exchanges (VE) (also known as online intercultural exchange/telecollaboration) as a particularly intricate facet, requiring in-depth exploration. This study explores a specific and inherently challenging part of video-mediated VE interactions that occur during the very first encounter of tertiary level students, namely lapses. The VE project was conducted with a partnership of three universities – one each from Germany, Türkiye, and Sweden. All participants worked in transnational teams and experienced VE for the first time within the scope of this partnership. The video-mediated interactions of the participants during the VE project were screen-recorded, and the data was analyzed using the robust methodological tools of Multimodal Conversation Analysis. An initial examination of the dataset showed that the first meetings featured extended episodes of silences/lapses possibly due to the lack of a shared interactional 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 post lapses (see Hoey, 2018 for face-to-face interaction) effectively using different interactional practices by (i.) deploying elaborations and expansions to continue the prior talk, (ii.) asking questions to clarify a topic, 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.) using their embodied resources to end the lapses. The findings bring new insights into the interactional dynamics of VE settings and help better understand the human sociality shaped around the first encounters in video-mediated interactions.