Research Information System
Thinking, doing, learning: Usage based perspectives on second language learning, Kolding, Denmark, 3 - 05 June 2024, pp.1, (Summary Text)
Virtual exchanges (VE) are highly conducive environments, providing a transnational and interactive setting for participants. This study delves into how VE participants find opportunities for developing their interactional competences in video-mediated interactions. The data comes from a VE Project organized among three universities based in Germany, Türkiye and Sweden. During the project, the participants worked in teams and they met with their team members on a weekly basis. The data comprises screen-recordings of video-mediated team exchange meetings (58 hours) and written reflection papers that they submitted at the end of the VE project. The screen-recorded data was analyzed using Multimodal Conversation Analysis using the reflection papers as the starting point for the analyses. That is, one student who claimed to have improved her interactional competence (i.e., “being able to get along with foreign partners”) in the final reflection paper has been the focal participant for this study. Longitudinal tracking of this student’s all video-mediated interaction with her team-members during the VE project (totally 8 hours) has revealed a diversification of turn design features over time which also led to systematic changes in her participation status (i.e., being increasingly active) in the team interaction. In earlier exchange, she either participated minimally with embodied responses and short responsive turns or remained mostly silent; however, in the following team exchanges, she did not only initiate first-pair-parts of the sequences at talk, but also displayed more competition for turn-taking (e.g., overlaps and signals with embodied resources) and took the lead in the team setting by asking questions, shifting topics, or maintaining the progressivity of the interaction. By providing snapshots of the longitudinal change in her participatory actions in different team exchange meetings, the study shows how VE settings, with its communicative and transnational nature, provide interactional competence development opportunities for participants manifested with diversification of turn design features and participation status.