The Interactional Organization of Video‐Mediated Collaborative Writing: Focus on Repair Practices

Abstract

AbstractComputer‐supported collaborative writing in online interactional settings has long been a central research topic in TESOL at the interface of social interaction and writing. Although some studies focused on side‐by‐side participants’ social interactions for the co‐production of texts, geographically dispersed participants’ video‐mediated interactional practices for collaborative writing in digital spaces have largely remained a research gap. Using multimodal conversation analysis for the examination of screen recordings data, the study sets out to explore the interactional organization of collaborative writing in Google Docs via Skype. More specifically, the study limits its focus to the co‐construction of a single sentence within a second language telecollaborative writing task. The close analysis of the procedural unfolding of the writing activity shows that repair organization is central to the practice of collaborative writing and the participants move the text forward largely in an environment of repair sequences. This also brings further insights into the complex ecology of video‐mediated interactions for writing activities in digital spaces. All in all, this study describes the discursive aspect of computer‐supported collaborative writing in English as a foreign language and provides implications for future practices.