Negotiating collaborative and inclusive practices in university students’ group-to-group videoconferencing sessions

Abstract

In group-to-group videoconferencing (VC), social actions are coordinated between participants in the physical and online environment, which raises the practical problem of how to manage the interactional space in a collaborative and inclusive manner. This can be particularly challenging for less experienced (i.e., novice) users of VC. The present study uses multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to investigate how university students, who speak English as a foreign language, organise their conduct in the moment-by-moment unfolding of VC. It focuses on moments that make additional interactional work to include the remote party salient, namely transitions regarding next-speaker selection and topic change. The analysis illustrates the reflexive use of different constellations of talk and screen-oriented behaviours as key for coordinating actions in the VC environment. The study has implications for educational research and practice, since it helps understand the interactional competence learners need to develop to succeed in environments of online collaborative work.