Development of Interactional Competence in a Virtual Exchange Setting: Focus on Diversification of Participatory Actions

OpenAlex İngilizce

Virtual exchange (VE) projects create environments providing VE participants with L2 development opportunities. This study examines the affordances of VEs with a particular emphasis on how participants find opportunities for developing their interactional competences in video-mediated environments. The data comes from a VE Project organized among three universities based in Germany, Türkiye and Sweden. During the project timeline, the participants worked in teams through weekly meetings. The data comprises screen-recordings of video-mediated team exchange meetings and written final reflection papers. The screen-recorded data was analyzed via longitudinal Conversation Analysis (CA), while the reflection papers were examined to identify potential developmental phenomena. That is, one student claiming to have improved her interactional competence in the final reflection paper was identified as the focal participant. Retrospective tracking of this student’s entire video-mediated interactional history with her team-members during the VE project (8 hours across 3 months) revealed a diversification of her participatory actions over time manifested through changes in her involvement (i.e., becoming increasingly active) in the team interaction. Initially, she participated minimally with embodied or short responses solicited by the others, and remained mostly silent. However, in subsequent team exchanges, she not only displayed unsolicited contributions by elaborating and topic-shifting but also took an active role in the VE team meetings by opening tasks/conversations, sharing her stance towards various task-related proposals, and using mitigated disagreement practices for problem-solving about the collaborative team-product. Using longitudinal CA, this study brings evidence for a VE participant’s interactional competence development in terms of participatory actions during turn-entry moments in video-mediated interaction, through which she became a more active participant in the teamwork. By providing instances to document this change in her participatory actions, the study discusses to what extent VE settings can contribute to a participant’s L2 interactional competence.