Using multimodal conversation analysis, this study describes the interactional organization of task enhanced collaborative writing on Google Docs via Skype. The findings bring insights into the complex ecology of geographically dispersed participants’ video-mediated interactions in an L2 and contribute to research on conversation analysis, CALL, and second language writing.
Video-mediated interactions require participants’ moment-by-moment coordination between private activities in individual screens and publicly available social interactional practices on videoconferencing software. The management of the multitude of resources available in such settings becomes even more challenging during collaborative writing activities mainly because the shared writing area brings an additional set of digital and social-interactional complexity. Previous research on collaborative writing, however, largely focused on side-by-side participants’ social interactions for co-production of texts, and geographically dispersed participants’ video-mediated interactional practices for collaborative writing in digital spaces remained a research gap. Within the scope of a telecollaborative language teacher education project, the data was collected during the implementation of a collaborative L2 writing task by a peer participating from two different countries. Against this backdrop, the current study uses multimodal conversation analysis for the examination of screen recordings data and sets out to explore the interactional organization of collaborative writing on Google Docs via Skype. More specifically, the study focuses on the procedural and interactional unfolding of a text. The close analysis of the data shows that repair organization is central to the practice of collaborative writing and the participants move the text forward largely in an environment of repair sequences. This brings further insights into the complex ecology of geographically dispersed participants’ video-mediated interactions in an L2 by providing evidence for the successful management of the coordination between screen-based activities and talk-in-interaction. All in all, this study describes the discursive aspect of computer-mediated collaborative writing and contributes to research on the interface of conversation analysis, CALL, and second language writing with “emergent orchestration in technology-mediated learning settings” in mind.
