Communication in the virtual classroom in higher education: Languaging beyond the boundaries of time and space

Abstract

The empirical study presented here focuses upon naturalistic social interaction in online synchronous communities within higher education. Our interests here relate to accounting for the communicative strategies employed by participants who are dealing with a common task, and how these specific tasks are negotiated within the constraints and opportunities accorded in the multimodal multilingual virtual setting. Taking sociocultural theoretical points of departure, we focus on students' languaging and use of tools when they have access to a range of resources inside the online videoconferencing program. The study is based upon screen recordings of both student-only and teacher-lead meetings during one semester in the online course Italian for beginners offered by a Swedish university. The analysis is two-fold: we provide an overview of the interactional patterns at the general lesson level in the data complemented by a micro-interactional analysis of selected slices of everyday life from two meetings. Our findings indicate that students make use of several resources that dialectically shape how they get positioned within the virtual community culture. These identification processes function as ways of enriching and nurturing learning, both of appropriating the target language, as well as enabling ways of being in multimodal, multilingual communities of practices.