Online language teaching is gaining momentum worldwide and an expanding body of research analyses online pedagogical interactions. However, few studies have explored experienced online teachers’ practices in videoconferencing particularly while giving instructions, which are key to success in task-based language teaching (Markee, 2015). Adopting multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2004, 2019) to investigate the multimodal construction of instructions in a single case study, we examine instruction-giving as a social practice demonstrated in a specific site of engagement (a synchronous online lesson recorded for research purposes). Drawing on the higher-level actions (instruction-giving fragments) we have identified elsewhere (Satar & Wigham, 2020), in this paper we analyse the lower-level actions (modes) that comprise these higher-level actions, specifically focusing on the print mode (task resource sheets, URLs, text chat, and online collaborative writing spaces) wherein certain higher-level actions become frozen. Our findings are unique in depicting the modal complexity of sharing task resources in synchronous online teaching due to semiotic misalignment and semiotic lag that precludes the establishment of a completely shared interactional space. We observe gaze shifts as the sole indicator for learners that the teacher is multitasking between different higher-level actions. Further research is needed to fully understand the interactional features of online language teaching via videoconferencing to inform teacher training policy and practice.

Higher education institutions are increasingly interested in offering more flexible teaching and learning delivery methods that are often independent of place. Where foreign language learning is concerned, telecollaboration is gaining ground. This paper focuses on synchronous webconferencing-supported teaching and examines how different semiotic resources are used during lexical explanation sequences. The context is a telecollaborative exchange between Business students learning French and trainee teachers on a Master’s programme in Teaching French as a Foreign Language. Using multimodal transcriptions of interaction data from two sessions, the sequential analysis provides access to different combinations of semiotic resources. These include using the visual mode to project active listening strategies and the complementary role of the text chat to secure common ground concerning the target item. The analysis sheds light on a ‘thinking break’ strategy employed by the trainees. Descriptive examples demonstrate how verbal explanations were accompanied, firstly, by deictic and iconic gestures and, secondly, by metaphoric gestures used to help forefront different properties of the target item. Finally, changes in gaze and proximity were observed as playing a role in interaction management and in signalling which verbal modality was forefronted. The study illustrates emerging pedagogical and multimodal communication strategies for ‘doing vocabulary teaching’.

Supplementary material: doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2017.09.002International audienceThis paper focuses on instruction-giving practices, a crucial but under-researched aspect of online language tutorials. The context for this qualitative study is a telecollaborative exchange focussing on French as a foreign language. We investigate trainee teachers' instructions for a role-play rehearsal task during webconferencing-supported language teaching sessions. Multimodal (inter)action analysis (Jewitt, Bezemer, & O'Halloran, 2016; Norris, 2004) of the data from three sessions reveals how the trainees mark different stages in the instructions using gaze and webcam proximity, allocate roles helped by the use of gaze (Satar, 2013) and gestures (Guichon & Wigham, 2016; McNeill, 1992), and introduce key vocabulary using word-stress, gaze and text chat strategies. The paper sheds light on the need to demonstrate clear boundaries between instructions and beginning of the task and the need, in future online teacher training programmes, to prepare trainees to direct learners' attention to the resources needed for task accomplishment, explain how the task will be accomplished using the online resources and harness the potential of semiotic resources during this teaching phase

Although there is a move toward open data, with research funding bodies more frequently requiring data management plans and dissemination strategies, the data management challenges inherently linked to virtual exchange research are understudied. Data collection is often reported upon in papers addressing interaction analysis or language development, but little attention has been paid to offering critical discussion of data collection and structuration methods or practical advice to encourage data/corpora dissemination. This paper reports on two phases of the Multimodal Teletandem Corpus project (Aranha & Lopes, 2019) that structured 581 hours of video data from Portuguese-English teletandem sessions, 351 chat logs, 956 written productions exchanged between the partners (original, revised, and corrected versions), 91 initial and 41 final questionnaires, and 666 learning diaries. We describe the data management problems faced that included the organization of data collected, ethical consent, management of a large quantity of data, inclusion of sociolinguistic information, expansion of learning theories, and the solutions found. We then outline data management planning steps that, consequently, are being introduced for future telecollaboration instantiations.

This study on online L2 interactions compares lexical word search between an audioconferencing and a videoconferencing condition. Nine upper-intermediate learners of English describe a previously unseen photograph in either the videoconferencing or the audioconferencing condition. A semantic feature analysis is adopted to compare their interactions. To evaluate the contribution of visual and verbal modes, a quantitative analysis examines the distribution of the referential properties of one target lexical item: tunnel earring. It suggests that pushed output produced in the videoconferencing condition is lexically richer. Then, in view of these results, focusing on two learners, one from the audioconferencing condition and one from the videoconferencing condition, a fine-grained multimodal analysis of the qualitative features of gestures and speech complements the quantitative results. It demonstrates how the videoconferencing condition allows the learner to embody salient physical referential properties of the lexical item, before transferring the referential information to the verbal mode, to produce a semantically rich description. The study will interest researchers working on multimodality and L2 teachers deciding between videoconferencing and audioconferencing as pedagogical options.