Reflection-in-Action Practices of Pre-service Language Teachers in a Trilateral Virtual Exchange Setting

Abstract

Virtual Exchange projects in initial teacher education provide various professional development opportunities for the pre-service teachers. This study explores the reflection-in-action practices of the pre-service teachers in transnational teams while creating collaborative lesson plans in a trilateral Virtual Exchange project. By exclusively focusing on the screen-recordings of the video-mediated interactions of the pre-service teachers using multimodal Conversation Analysis as the research methodology, we display how the pre-service teachers engage in reflection-in-action over a pedagogical tool (i.e., Moodle) provided in the Virtual Exchange Project. We then show how they also use the interactional space afforded by reflection-in-action as a source for proposing a pedagogical design idea for their own collaborative lesson plans in situ. In doing so, the pre-service teachers benefit from the reflective environment provided by the Virtual Exchange to reach collaborative pedagogical decisions as a surface manifestation of their professional development and experiential teacher learning opportunities in-and-through video-mediated interactions.