Who Owns the Floor?

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of unequal power relations on participation in a group of student teachers and invited professionals in two collaborative workshops in Second Life. The data includes recordings, group reflections, and individual questionnaires. Participation was examined from the aspects of floor space, turn length, and utterance functions and complemented with student reflections. The results show that at a general level, the differences of floor space and turn length between the invited professionals and the students were small. Moreover, the invited professionals did more conversational management than the students, while the students performed more supportive speech acts. There were, however, individual variations.