This presentation reports on the interactional practices within a telecollaborative project between pre-service teachers of English studying in their respective institutions in Israel and Germany. Drawing on Conversation Analysis, we will take a close reading of how students deploy their interactional resources to complete online tasks in Computer-Mediated Interaction (CMC).
This presentation reports on the interactional practices within a telecollaborative project which has taken place since 2015 between pre-service teachers of English studying in their respective institutions in Israel and Germany. Drawing on Conversation Analysis, we will take a close reading of how students deploy their interactional resources to complete online tasks in Computer-Mediated Interaction (CMC). The data collection is based on thoroughly transcribed (GAT 2) screen recordings of small group activities over a period of one semester, i.e. 12 weeks. Both partners in this collaboration come from countries where the need for a culturally relevant pedagogy is acutely felt as linguistic and ethnic diversity are a daily challenge for school teachers. Thus, the aim of the telecollaboration is to provide experiential learning for the future language teachers to enhancing their Intercultural Communicative Competences (ICC) while fostering digital-pedagogical knowledge and skills. As working on a common pedagogical product, participants use an array of asynchronous and synchronous tools and meet once a week for 45 min to work collaboratively on their product. In a first study we looked at the outcomes of the project and how ICC among participants developed using questionnaires and written feedback (Waldman, Harel, Schwab 2016, 2019). In a next step we analysed the very conversations among the students as they were recorded during the project in order to see how interactional resources were used in the “technology-mediated task environment” (Balaman, Sert 2017, p. 601) of a Virtual Exchange. Among others, the emphasis here is on (a) participation structure, (b) topic shift, (c) linguistic and intercultural misunderstandings as well as (d) dealing with technical problems and (e) code-switching. The presentation will conclude with implications for future research in the merging fields of Conversation Analysis and Virtual Exchange.
