Transcending the boundaries of mode in online language teaching: A translanguaging perspective on ESL teachers’ synchronous small group online tutorials

Abstract

The employment of virtual conference tools has created new possibilities for language teaching and learning. Amid the suspension of face-to-face classes at every level of education in most countries globally due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of teachers and students have to make the transition from classroom-based teaching to synchronous online teaching. The virtual environment is significantly different from the physical classroom; consequently, teachers need to bring with them resources from the classroom context and adapt them to the online teaching context in order to promote effective and real-time interactions with students. This virtual ethnographic study investigates how online English teachers create a translanguaging space by transcending the boundaries of modes from a physical face-to-face teaching context to small group online tutorials in order to mediate students' English language learning. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is employed to analyse the online tutorial data and the analysis is triangulated with the video-stimulated-recall-interviews that are analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The findings illustrate that the multimodal resources which are typically used in traditional classroom settings by the teachers transcend the boundaries of mode in a social semiotic sense since they are re-enacted in the online tutorial for enhancing the process of online teaching. I argue that such re-enactment highlights online English teachers’ fluid and flexible use of multiple multimodal resources to achieve different pedagogical functions. This study will offer some pedagogical implications to inform the development of a translanguaging pedagogy in an online teaching context.