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Abstract

Virtual exchange (VE) projects create environments providing VE participants with L2 development opportunities. This study examines the affordances of VEs with a particular emphasis on how participants find opportunities for developing their interactional competences in video-mediated environments. The data comes from a VE Project organized among three universities based in Germany, Türkiye and Sweden. During the project timeline, the participants worked in teams through weekly meetings. The data comprises screen-recordings of video-mediated team exchange meetings and written final reflection papers. The screen-recorded data was analyzed via longitudinal Conversation Analysis (CA), while the reflection papers were examined to identify potential developmental phenomena. That is, one student claiming to have improved her interactional competence in the final reflection paper was identified as the focal participant. Retrospective tracking of this student’s entire video-mediated interactional history with her team-members during the VE project (8 hours across 3 months) revealed a diversification of her participatory actions over time manifested through changes in her involvement (i.e., becoming increasingly active) in the team interaction. Initially, she participated minimally with embodied or short responses solicited by the others, and remained mostly silent. However, in subsequent team exchanges, she not only displayed unsolicited contributions by elaborating and topic-shifting but also took an active role in the VE team meetings by opening tasks/conversations, sharing her stance towards various task-related proposals, and using mitigated disagreement practices for problem-solving about the collaborative team-product. Using longitudinal CA, this study brings evidence for a VE participant’s interactional competence development in terms of participatory actions during turn-entry moments in video-mediated interaction, through which she became a more active participant in the teamwork. By providing instances to document this change in her participatory actions, the study discusses to what extent VE settings can contribute to a participant’s L2 interactional competence.

Keywords

virtual exchange development of interactional competence conversation analysis longitudinal L2 learning participatory actions video-mediated interaction

Introduction

Language learners seek for the ways to communicate in the target language through authentic interactions (O’Dowd, 2020). In response to this need, virtual exchange (VE) projects have become increasingly common. VE projects are settings where individuals from geographically dispersed areas come together online for an extended period of time to interact and collaborate under the supervision of mentors or teachers (O’Dowd, 2018). The affordances of VEs have been well-documented from different perspectives. They have been found to contribute to the participants’ L2 use as well as intercultural and pragmatic competences (Akiyama, 2017; Angelova & Zhao, 2016; Belz & Vyatkina, 2005; Lee & Markey, 2014; Lewis & O’Dowd, 2016; Liaw & Bunn-Le Master, 2010; Uzum et al., 2020). However, how this L2 use-related developmental trajectories manifest itself in a VE setting (also in an online setting) from an interactional perspective remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, this study examines how VE participants might potentially develop their interactional competence using a longitudinal conversation analytic perspective and analyzing their social interactional histories in their transnational team settings (Deppermann, 2018; Deppermann & Pekarek Doehler, 2021; Nguyen, 2011a; Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, 2015; Skogmyr Marian & Balaman, 2018). Specifically, the study concentrates on how one focal participant develops her interactional competence by diversifying her participatory actions and engagement during the VE project.

To these ends, the study will firstly define what interactional competence (IC) is and how it develops. Following this, the specific phenomenon “participatory actions” will be introduced. Subsequently, by presenting a detailed overview of the VE project at hand, the study will shed light on how a longitudinal CA perspective can be helpful to understand the interactional mechanisms involved in VE settings. The longitudinal CA approach offers a unique lens through which researchers observe and document the dynamic, evolving nature of interactional competence in real-time, interactive environments. By specifically focusing on participants’ turn-taking and turn-entry moments, the study will contribute to longitudinal CA and VE research to offer methodological insights and a deeper understanding of how VE participants might potentially navigate and develop their interactional competence in a video-mediated transnational team setting.

Background to the Study

Development of Interactional Competence

Understanding how people talk in an L2 and develop their L2 use in situ has increasingly been a research interest for language learning and teaching researchers for decades. L2 speakers’ communicative competence (Hymes, 1972) focusing specifically on the linguistic gains with an interlanguage pragmatics framework was a specific way of understanding L2 use among language learners. However, this approach was criticized later due to overlooking the complexities of L2 talk-in-interaction (Kramsch, 1986) and its failure to convincingly frame L2 development of speakers (Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, 2015). Having rooted in these earlier criticisms of “accuracy-concerned language proficiency movements” (Skogmyr Marian & Balaman, 2018, p.3), L2 interactional competence (hereafter L2 IC) became a prominent research area and was largely recognized as a framework for depicting how people become more competent in L2 use by taking the locally situated and context-sensitive aspect of L2 use into consideration. In L2 IC research, most studies adopted the conversation analysis (CA) methodology to better picture the minute-to-minute details of social interaction to describe the systematicities in “members’ methods” (Garfinkel, 1967) to establish intersubjectivity during L2 use (Hall & Pekarek Doehler, 2011; Hellerman, 2007; Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, 2015). Based on these conceptualizations, interactionally competent speakers are defined as those who can design their talk and turns for a participant in a specific setting (i.e., recipient design) to maintain social interaction recognizably reciprocal for both parties in the conversation (Salaberry & Kunitz, 2019). CA research on L2 IC has also enabled to explore how L2 users become interactionally competent and how they develop interactional competence over time and across interactional spaces.

The development of interactional competence refers to “the progressive diversification of speaker’s methods and an increased ability to tailor the use of these methods” (Skogmyr Marian & Balaman, 2018, p.3) in social interaction. It can be explained by documenting the changes that speakers display progressively over the course of an action. This can lend itself not only in the form of diversification (Nguyen, 2011a, 2019; Skogmyr Marian, 2021, 2023), but also routinization (Pekarek Doehler & Balaman, 2021; Tozlu Kılıç & Balaman, 2023) and increased adaptivity (Pfeiffer & Anna, 2021), flexibility (Konzett-Firth, 2023) or complexity (Skogmyr Marian, 2021). Explicating change in these different forms is utmost important to portray how people develop in terms of their participation, how they adapt the naturally evolving interactional norms and social practices, and accordingly how they become more competent members in social interaction (Wagner et al., 2018). Doing that is methodologically possible with a longitudinal perspective to analyze social interaction and with an in-depth analysis of members’ social interactional histories (Deppermann & Pekarek Doehler, 2021). In this line of research, previous studies documented change longitudinally in members’ methods in social interaction by paying special attention to the most central dynamics of conversation including turn-taking (e.g., Cekaite, 2007; Watanabe, 2017), turn design (e.g., Konzett-Firth, 2023; Nguyen, 2018, 2019), topic management (e.g., Nguyen, 2011a), sequence organization (e.g., Lee & Hellermann, 2014; Skogmyr Marian, 2023), repair (e.g., Hellermann, 2011) and embodied actions (e.g., Eskildsen & Wagner, 2018). All these studies indicate that the development of L2 interactional competence can be identified, tracked, and documented using the longitudinal CA perspective. This approach significantly contributes to our understanding of changing forms of human sociality. Although L2 IC development research has extended its scope to online settings in which the participants change the ways they use the screen and other relevant resources as a mediator during video-mediated interaction (e.g., Balaman, 2018; Balaman & Sert, 2017; Pekarek Doehler & Balaman, 2021), there still remains a scarcity of research focusing on development of L2 IC in online, specifically virtual exchange, settings. Against this background, the present study uses longitudinal conversation analysis and employs a longitudinal perspective to explore how a participant in a VE project diversifies/changes her participatory actions and her methods for active involvement within a transnational team setting. The following section focuses on participatory actions in social interaction and the affordances of the VE projects for the participants.

Participatory Actions in Social Interaction

Social interaction unfolds in a sequentially systematic manner with the turn-taking mechanism, and participants’ ability to manage turn-taking is “the sine qua non for participating in social interaction” (Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, 2015, p.237, italics in original). Therefore, participation in social interaction is mainly displayed through speakers’ turn-taking practices. Participation is defined as “actions demonstrating forms of involvement performed by parties within evolving structures of talk” (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004, p.222, emphasis added by the author). These actions should be recipient designed and coordinated momentarily by the interactants to maintain progressivity in the interaction to continuously secure active and successful participation (Enfield & Sidnell, 2017; Pfänder et al., 2024). Building on this, participatory actions in this study refer to the sets of actions or practices that speakers deploy to participate in multi-party video-mediated interactions. Previous research provided limited evidence for the development of speakers’ participatory actions over time, with only a few studies addressing this issue (Burch, 2019; Cekaite, 2007; Konzett-Firth, 2023; Pallotti, 2001; Young & Miller, 2004; Pfänder et al., 2024; Watanabe, 2017). These studies commonly document how a specific participant in interaction changes their participatory actions over time which can be regarded as a manifestation of L2 interactional competence development, because members in a specific community display more participation and active involvement in situ. To this end, they transition from not-yet competent members to competent members in terms of their L2 IC development (Gudmundsen, 2023; Skogmyr Marian & Balaman, 2018) by using different participatory actions. Cekaite (2007), for instance, documents how a 7-year-old L2 learner changes her participatory actions in a classroom setting from non-participatory (rare verbal contributions, minimal responses) to participatory (competition for turn-taking, context-sensitive timely contributions) in self-selected turns. In another study, Watanabe (2017) demonstrates how a pre-school student changed his methods of participation in terms of different strategies including turn-taking, turn design, sequence and timing, and use of non/linguistic resources resulting in a more increased participation in the classroom interaction. Similarly, Young & Miller, (2004) explores one L2 speaker’s change in his participatory actions during the weekly writing conferences on revision talks with an instructor. They observe that the L2 speaker’s participation was confined to response tokens in the earlier phases during which mostly the instructor talked, gave directives and directed the interaction. However, it changed to a full participation trajectory for the L2 speaker in the later phases, and he made suggestions and wrote revisions without waiting the instructor’s directives. These studies document that L2 speakers’ turn-taking practices and participatory actions may diversify over time, enabling them to better orient to the contingencies and locally-situated nature of social interactions within a specific community of practice. Through this process, they display the developmental trajectory of a particular aspect of their socialization (Nguyen, 2011a; Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, 2015).

Most research focusing on the participatory actions of speakers has been conducted in face-to-face settings, including classrooms (Cekaite, 2007; Konzett-Firth, 2023; Pallotti, 2001; Watanabe, 2017), homes (Burch, 2019; Pfänder et al., 2024), or conferencing sessions (Nguyen, 2011b; Young & Miller, 2004). However, to the best of the author’s knowledge, online settings, specifically virtual exchange settings remain largely unexplored to date in terms of understanding how speakers might change their participatory actions over time.

Virtual Exchange Settings

Virtual exchange and telecollaboration projects are generally framed as the processes in which participants from different cultural or geographical locations come together online for a period of time within an educational program guided by trainers or facilitators (O’Dowd, 2018). Notwithstanding the diversity of terms such as telecollaboration, online intercultural exchange, collaborative online international learning, virtual exchange has been regarded as an umbrella term for establishing a common ground for different cross-curricular understandings (O’Dowd & Dooly, 2022).

The affordances of the virtual exchange (VE) projects are numerous (see Çiftçi & Savaş, 2018; Godwin-Jones, 2019 for a detailed review). Particularly relevant to this study are the contributions of VE projects to L2 use. Earlier studies showed implications of VE for improving reading and writing skills of L2 students (Thorne, 2003). Corrective feedback in VEs was reported to facilitate grammatical development and error reduction (Akiyama, 2017; Angelova & Zhao, 2016). Employing feedback practices during an e-mail exchange setting was offered as notable linguistic benefits (Vinagre & Lera, 2008; Vinagre & Muñoz, 2011). VE studies also documented significant developments in the participants’ use of pragmatic resources, such as improved deployment of address forms (Belz & Kinginger, 2003; Kinginger & Belz, 2005), modal particles (Belz & Vyatkina, 2005), and pronouns (Liaw & Bunn-Le Master, 2010). As outcomes of VE projects, participants’ dialogue openings and closings became more natural (Zhang, 2014), and pragmatic appropriateness in requests improved with enhanced pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge (Cunningham, 2017). Accordingly, VE afforded to enhance participants’ ability to communicate effectively in international settings, thereby fostering their intercultural communicative competence which is defined as “the ability to navigate interactions comfortably with others from different cultural backgrounds” (O’Dowd, 2020, p. 477). Developing this competence, the VE participants were documented to be more skilled at engaging in international conversations by the help of VE projects (Lee & Markey, 2014; Lewis & O’Dowd, 2016; O’Dowd & Dooly, 2020; Uzum et al., 2020).

Despite these numerous studies documenting the various affordances of the VE projects, there still remains an important gap regarding the interactional development opportunities and the use of a convenient research methodology to document these opportunities. That is, most of the aforementioned studies employed qualitative or quantitative methodologies by analyzing the participants’ chat outputs, final products or post-project interviews. However, a perspective to uncover the diverse interactional resources and meaning making mechanisms in situ, that is, methodologically possible through conversation analysis (CA), has only recently gained momentum. For example, Dooly (2017) called for more interactional perspectives on VE settings and advocated the use of CA as a research methodology to examine VE interactions, and the institutional characteristics of VE were described to some extent (e.g., Dooly, 2021; Dooly & Tudini, 2022; Drixler, 2022; Ekin & Balaman, 2024; Tudini & Dooly, 2021; Çimenli et al., 2022; Çolak & Balaman, 2022). Despite the growing interest, another important gap persists in this line of research regarding the employment of a longitudinal CA perspective to explore the developmental trajectories of VE participants. Although there are some examples coming from video-mediated, task-oriented and online settings (i.e., Balaman, 2018; Balaman & Sert, 2017; Gudmundsen, 2023; 2024; Pekarek Doehler & Balaman, 2021), this study sets out to become the first to deal with L2 IC development within the scope of transnational VE projects by exploring how a VE participant diversifies her participatory actions over time.

Methodology

The Virtual Exchange Project

This study is based on a virtual exchange (VE) project organized among universities from Türkiye, Germany and Sweden. The virtual exchange participants (VEPs) were pre-service teachers, and they were taking local courses with convergent objectives connected to the VE project. All participants worked in transnational teams, and there was a total of thirty participants who joined the team exchange meetings throughout the project. Getting the ethical clearance (approved on 04.03.2021 - E-51944218-300–00001480191), the project started with a joint online meeting in which all participants came together over the video-conferencing tool (i.e., Zoom) (see also Figure 1 below). During this meeting, the the project organizers gave information about the project and created break-out rooms for the participants in their allocated teams to meet with each other for the first time. This joint online meeting was followed by team exchange meetings (TEMs). The team exchange meetings were organized using O’Dowd and Ware’s (2009) progressive exchange model including information exchange tasks, comparison and analysis tasks and the productive (collaborative) tasks sequentially. The participants in the transnational teams met with their team members on a weekly basis, and they autonomously organized video-mediated TEMs. The VE project initially included three TEMs for doing information exchange, comparison and analysis tasks. These TEMs were followed by at least four more meetings (the teams were free to do more if they needed) to complete their productive (collaborative) tasks in which the VEPs created lesson plans on a global topic (i.e., the end-product of the VE). The VE project was completed by the submission of each team’s end product and their final reflections about the whole procedure.

Figure 1.

The flow of the virtual exchange project

The transnational teams were instructed to screen record their interaction which comprised the video-mediated data in the study (totally 54 hours) in addition to the written outputs of the VEPs that they submitted at the end of the project timeline (i.e., lesson plans and reflection papers).

Analytic Background to the Study

The screen recordings dataset was examined using longitudinal conversation analysis. Conversation Analysis (CA) is the study of social interaction investigating the sequential organization of the talk by engaging specific socio-analytical tools like turn-taking, turn design, repair, sequence organization, preference organization and embodiment (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 2008; Sacks et al., 1974; Sidnell & Stivers, 2012). CA has two important premises for analyzing the naturally occurring talk-in-interaction; (i) characterizing the interactional systematicity of social encounters and (ii) describing how members establish and maintain intersubjectivity (Seedhouse, 2005). Such examination is possible with a focus on the emic perspective of the participants which entails “stepping inside the shoes of participants to understand their talk and action” (Wong & Waring, 2010, p. 6). The interaction is shaped around the participants’ orientation to each other developing in a conditionally relevant way which is explained by next turn proof procedure (Sacks et al., 1974). This makes understanding the mechanisms of conversation and intersubjectivity among members readily available not only for the interactants but also for the researchers, which ensures the reliability and validity during analysis.

Conversation analysis research has a focus on “similar phenomena and hence a central concern with the stability of a given interactional mechanism” (Deppermann & Pekarek Doehler, 2021, p. 128), and it has different strands evolving day by day, one of which is as a recent and growing body of research, longitudinal CA. This research strand specifically deals with “change”, and the researchers examine the data chronologically, identifying change in member’s methods in social interaction by focusing typically on the same participant/s (Deppermann & Pekarek Doehler, 2021; Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018; Wagner et al., 2018). The change here can be in different social actions contingent upon the interactional dynamics of conversations (e.g., Balaman, 2018; Deppermann, 2018; Nguyen, 2011a; Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, 2015) or the linguistic resources the interactants deploy in the talk-in-interaction (e.g., Pekarek Doehler & Balaman, 2021; Hauser, 2013; Eskildsen, 2015; Skogmyr Marian, 2023). These studies are remnants of change in different aspects, displaying development of the participants in different areas, hence paving the way for documenting learning as a social practice (i.e., learning-in-action, Firth & Wagner, 2007).

Against this analytical background, this study documents how a VE participant changes and diversifies her participatory actions in the team exchange meetings over time. As for the selection of the focal participant for the longitudinal tracking, the VEPs’ reflection papers at the end of the VE project were used. While reviewing these reflection papers, one student’s response to the reflective questions, “What did you learn? What do you take with you?” enabled the identification of a potential research phenomenon (see the student’s response in Figure 2). The student wrote in her reflection “Before these project, I thought that I could not get along with German or Sweden Partner but after I realized that we could understand each other so well that I am still in contact with them” (directly quoted from student’s response). The student explicitly states a change regarding “being able to get along with international peers”, and prefacing “but” in the following part, she signals about a contrast situation, hence reflecting on a change in her epistemic stance (i.e., ‘realized’, see Uyar & Can Daşkın, 2024) in ways linked to her interactional competence (i.e., understanding each other).

Figure 2.

The focal Participant’s reflection*. *Highlighting and underlining was added by the author.

Treating her reflection as the starting point, this study retrospectively tracked the focal participant’s (MEL) entire social interactional history with her team members in the VE project specifically to identify how her claimed change in ‘getting along’ and ‘understanding each other’ with the team members was interactionally manifested across the earlier and later stages longitudinally (i.e., a total of eight team exchange meetings lasting for 6 hours, 47 minutes). While scrutinizing how this change might have occurred in the data, an important phenomenon was realized in the focal participant’s interactional practices as gradually diversifying across each meeting, which were her participatory actions in the team interaction. Over time, she has become more involved and more active in the team interaction during the VE project, hence diversifying her interactional practices, which marks the main focus of this study from a longitudinal conversation analytic perspective. As Deppermann and Pekarek Doehler (2021, p. 133) put, conducting longitudinal conversation analysis faces three important challenges: (i.) how to ensure comparability, (ii.) how to bring evidence on change, and (iii.) how to keep an emic perspective on change. The analysis in this study contributed to the robustness of the results by providing a systematic ground to cope with these three challenges. First, the study ensured comparability by keeping all the parameters in the data within the social-interactional histories of participants with each other in the VE setting. That is, the participants, the speech-exchange system, and sequential environment for the focal participant was the same throughout the exchange (eight team exchange meetings within the VE project) (Deppermann, 2018). Second, the moment-to-moment analytical findings (i.e., six extracts coming from different weeks of the VE project chronologically) will show how the focal participant was getting along with the international peers in the team in terms of her participatory actions with limited resources in the earlier stages (t1) and diversified resources in the later stages (t2, t3, tn), hence bringing evidence for change. Lastly, the analytical findings in this study keep the emic perspective at core by devising arguments only based on the focal participant’s own evaluation about herself getting along with the team members and registering the change herself between the beginning and end of the VE project. Although the co-participants did not orient to such change explicitly, the focal participant did so in her reflection paper, thus supporting arguing for interactional competence development in her participatory actions (Deppermann & Pekarek Doehler, 2021).

The following analytical section will demonstrate the longitudinal change, as claimed by the focal participant in her reflection and operationalized in interaction with others, in a robust, systematic and chronological way by analyzing her interactions throughout their team exchange meetings. To this end, the extracts presented in the following part were selected according to first-time emergence of a participatory action chronologically. The first extract was selected to display the overall participatory actions of the focal participant in the very beginning of the VE project. The following extracts (Extract 2,3,4 and 5) were selected based on the first time emergence of a participatory action during the project timeline. The last extract was selected from the end of the VE project to display how the focal participant uses a combination of diversified participatory actions in situ. The findings, thereby, contributes to the VE research focusing on the affordances for a student’s diversifying participatory actions in transnational team interaction and her interactional competence development.

Analysis and Findings

The analysis section presents extracts coming from different team exchanges of the virtual exchange participants (VEPs).The extracts present that the diversification of participatory actions happens in a linear fashion; that is, when the focal participant uses a participatory action for the first time (Extract 2, 3, 4 and 5), she continuously uses this specific action in the following processes, too. To this end, the analysis starts with the focal participant’s (i.e., MEL) preliminary state in relation to participatory actions in the team interactions and continues with how this participant diversifies her participatory actions over time

The first extract comes from the first team exchange (TEM1) meeting in which the VEPs (DER, MAR, NAZ, MIA and MEL - the focal participant) engage in an icebreaker task with some games. Prior to the extract, they complete “two truths and one lie” task in which one of the participants shares three statements including two truths and one lie, and the others try to guess which one is a lie. Here, DER shared her three statements and opened up the task for the co-participants. In lines 1 and 2, DER tells that she will not tell the answer directly, thus inviting co-participant contributions.

Extract 1: Minimal Participation (Team Exchange Meeting 1 - 15:28 – 16:07)

In line 4, MEL acknowledges DER’s invitation implicative turn with a minimal response token. Subsequently, all the participants, except for the focal participant MEL, deliver candidate answers from lines 6 to 10. Then, DER shares her epistemic status about what the potential answers would be, and prefacing but, she evaluates the co-participants’ answers as true in line 11 during which MEL (the focal participant) displays her listenership by smiling. Following a 0.8s of silence, MIA shares her epistemic status as uncertain ended with a confirmation token in line 13. In the subsequent line, DER elaborates on the true statement that she shared which is followed by 1.2s and 0.3s of silences during which MEL again displays her orientation to DER’s elaboration by raising her eyebrows. Overlapping with MAR’s contrastive marker, DER takes the turn again and shares which statement was a lie (the lie is the first one) and shares a personal wish about this lie statement in lines 17 and 18. During DER’s talk, the focal participant MEL shows her orientations only with embodied actions on the screen by smiling again, raising her eyebrows and laughing. In the remaining part of the extract, MAR requests for clarification (line 23) by explaining her understanding about DER’s true statement (the third one), and DER provides her answers. During this part of the conversation, the focal participant MEL shows her listenership and engagement again only with her embodied actions on the screen (in lines 25 and 28).

This extract shows how the focal participant displays her participation and engagement in the team interaction in the very first team exchange meeting. Although the co-participants (MAR, MIA, and NAZ) are actively engaged in the interaction with verbal and embodied contributions, the focal participant MEL provides minimal response token and shows her listenership by using her embodied actions. During the whole first team exchange meeting, she minimally participated in the interaction, she displayed her engagement in the interaction solely with her embodied actions, and she just provided short answers only when explicitly asked, and when her verbal contributions were solicited by the co-participants. Also note that MEL’s minimal verbal contribution was not due to a trouble in understanding as she acknowledged DER’s invitation turn at the beginning of the extract.

From the next extract onwards, the analysis shows how MEL starts to diversify her participatory actions over time. The next extract comes from the second team exchange meeting (TEM2). Prior to the extract, MAR talked about a presentation that she delivered at school about a Netflix show “Emily in Paris”. At the beginning of the extract, she asks a knowledge checking question to the co-participants about this show in lines 1 to 3.

Extract 2: Elaborating (Team Exchange Meeting 2 / 29:30 – 30:16)

Overlapping with MAR’s turn final production of the show’s name, MIA tells the show’s name while also nodding in line 4. Subsequently, the focal participant MEL delivers a confirmation token ( ye:s ) accompanied with nodding. In lines 6 and 7, DER and NAZ also share their knowledge about the show. In line 8, MEL, for the first time in the team interaction, produces an “elaboration” turn related to the show (i watched +[first+ episode) following her earlier confirmation token (line 5), during which MAR delivered an acknowledgement token in overlap with MEL’s turn expansion. The extract ends with MAR’s suggestion addressed to MEL to watch all episode by also positively evaluating the show aligned by MIA’s in line 11.

This extract shows how the focal participant (MEL) starts to change her participatory actions in the VE team interaction setting. What is noteworthy here is that she does not limit her participation with a short confirmation, but instead sustains the participatory action by elaborating on her contribution unlike her earlier encounters. Although the way MEL’s elaboration started with a solicited manner (the question by MAR in lines 1–3), thus as a responsive action, elaborating is an emergent participatory action that marks the change in her participation and engagement in the shared interactional history of the team, and it helps MEL share more, expand her talk, and thereby participate more actively in interaction.

The focal participant continues to add new participatory actions into her interactional repertoire in the subsequent team exchange meetings. The following extract comes from the third team exchange meeting (TEM3). The VEPs talked about traditional festivals in their countries before the beginning of the extract. The extract starts with MAR’s wish about celebrating one of Turkish festivals (i.e., ashoura) in lines 1 and 2.

Extract 3: Topic Shifting (Team Exchange Meeting 3 / 33:22 – 34:02)

MIA delivers an acknowledgement token in line 4, followed by another acknowledgement token by the focal participant MEL in line 5 (ye:s). In what follows, the focal participant MEL displays a new participatory action for the first time in the team interaction. Overlapping with MIA’s utterance, MEL takes the turn and asks a question to add another layer to the ongoing team interaction by shifting the topic in line 8 (we have er another festival ramadan (.) do you know↑). It is noteworthy that she asks this question to initiate an action in an unsolicited way by displaying initiative to shift the topic to another related aspect of traditional festivals. Subsequently, MAR requests for clarification between the lines 11 and 13. This clarification is provided by MEL and NAZ from lines 14 to 19. Upon acknowledging the clarification in line 20, MAR asks a question about Ramadan in line 26 (for how lo:ng↑). After the extract, the interaction continues with a discussion on eating routines during Ramadan, which shows MEL’s initiating action successfully shifted the topic.

This extract demonstrates another important milestone in MEL’s diversifying participatory actions in the team interaction. By asking a question, MEL shifted the topic to another traditional festival-related aspect (i.e., Ramadan), and the team maintained the progressivity of the talk around this topic during the extract. In the remaining part of the VE project and in the following team exchange meetings, MEL continuously uses questions to shift and diversify the topics that they are discussing on, which shows action initiations such topic shifts are now part of MEL’s interactional repertoire.

The analysis continues with another extract displaying how the focal participant MEL diversifies her participatory actions over time. Extract 4 comes from the very beginning of the fourth team exchange meeting (TEM4). One of the participants MIA starts to share all the tasks that VEPs should do in the chat-box of the videoconferencing tool, which prompts DER’s displaying her evaluative stance in line 1.

Extract 4: Opening task-related conversation (Team Exchange Meeting 4 / 05:24 - 06:34)

Acknowledging DER, synchronously with her screen-based actions, MIA delivers her epistemic stance about a team responsibility with the co-participants including prolonged intra-turn pauses during her turn delivery in lines 3 and 4. Upon completion of sharing the tasks on the chat-box, MIA delivers a transition marker in line 6 potentially signalling the end of her task-relevant contributions in the chat-box. Following a 1.6s of silence, the focal participant MEL asks a confirmation question in line 8. This is responded by MIA, and she also inserts new knowledge about the task procedure. In what follows, the focal participant MEL displays another new participatory action for the first time in the team’s shared interactional history. Following 3.5s of silence during which no team member takes the turn, MEL breaks the prolonged silence, uses a transition marker (oka:y) to change the agenda in the team interaction, and asks a question about the task that MIA shared on the chatbox to start the task-related conversation (what do you think about the goals↑) in line 13. Her initiative to start the task-related conversation is also a sustained representation of her topic shifting action in the team interaction similar to what she did in earlier extract. In the following part, a 4.4s of silence occurs, and MIA provides the site information in line 15. MIA then gives accounts potentially for suspending the talk following MEL’s question and explicitly states that they can start talking about the task-related conversation after her individual action (i'm just looking for my notes (.) and then we can talk).

This extract shows that the focal participant continues to change her participatory actions in the team interaction. Following MIA’s sharing of the tasks and providing information, MEL uses a prolonged silence (line 12) as a transition place to start the task related conversation. Virtual exchanges are predominantly task-based settings (Dooly & O’Dowd, 2012; O’Dowd & Ware, 2009) in which the interactions are shaped by tasks and starting a task related topic or opening a task-oriented conversation is very important to ensure the maintenance of the progressivity in these settings. This is actually what MEL does by asking the question in line 13, she takes the initiative to open task-related conversation, hence becoming more active in the team exchange interaction.

The following extract presents how MEL deploys some other participatory actions in the team exchange 6 (TEM6). Here, they work on their collaborative end-product (i.e., lesson plan on a global topic) and one of the VEPs, MIA, shares screen to show the product document. After delivering a transition marker followed by 2.5s of silence, MIA asks a question to elicit the co-participants’ opinions about ‘scaffolding’ that she did to better manage the document with tables and grids (lines 3–5).

Extract 5: Proposing Alternatives (Team Exchange Meeting 6 / 37:48 – 38:42)

Following 4.6s of silence, MAR asks a clarification question in line 7 (where is it↑). In the following 27 omitted lines, MIA shows how the document has a scaffolding aspect for the collaborative lesson plan. Upon the completion of clarification, the focal participant MEL takes the floor to share her opinion on the scaffolding that MIA asked in lines 3 to 5. She does this by firstly providing a positive assessment with a hesitation marker in line 35. In the subsequent lines, she prefaces contrastive marker “but” to display a disagreement and delivers an alternative proposal to the ongoing product idea (bu:t maybe we can add a: (0.3) guideline). In doing so, MEL deploys a mitigated disagreement for the first time in the team interaction to show her stance regarding an already made lesson plan proposal. She then gives account for the guideline idea by deploying retrospective orientation to how their teacher trainers did in the VE project and shapes the pedagogical decision making process (Can-Daşkın & Hatipoğlu, 2019; Ekin & Balaman, 2024; Jakonen, 2018) between lines 38 and 43. During her talk, MAR provides positive assessment about MEL’s proposal. The extract ends with MAR’s supportive ideas about MEL’s proposal followed by 2.3s of silence and MEL’s acknowledgement token.

This extract shows another important diversification of MEL’s participatory actions in the team interaction. Here, MEL uses ways for mitigating her disagreement (hesitation marker, contrastive marker followed by a positive assessment) to make a new proposal, gives accounts for this disagreement (lines 28–44) and shapes the pedagogical decision making process about the end product of the VE project. She does this for the first time in the team exchange interaction and sustains it in the following team exchanges, hence showing more and more active involvement not only in the team interaction but also in the team product development process.

The final extract comes from the seventh team exchange meeting (TEM7), and this extract demonstrates the level of diversification that MEL reached with her participatory actions in the team interaction. The final extract also portrays how different MEL’s participatory actions get comparing the earlier team exchange meetings (Extract 1) with a later team exchange meeting (Extract 6), and how she is more active in the team interaction than the beginning of the VE project. Before the beginning of the extract, the VEPs discuss their experiences in learning English and how they have learnt English. The extract starts with MAR’s knowledge checking question about the TV series “Friends” in line 1.

Extract 6: Diversification of Participatory Actions (Team Exchange Meeting 7 / 16:21 – 17:09)

MAR’s question is responded by confirmation tokens by MEL and DER. In line 4, MEL, the focal participant, elaborates on her response and does turn expansion (just like she did in Extract 2). MAR complies with MEL’s expansion and delivers an assessment about the TV series. In lines 6 to 11, MAR shares her epistemic stance about the TV series’ contribution on her English learning process by giving accounts. Subsequently, MEL asks a topic expanding question (similar to what she did in Extract 3) about the characters in the series. MAR answers and rolls the ball back (Çimenli et al., 2022) by asking the same question to MEL. In line 14, MEL delivers her response with laughter encompassing her talk (joey heh heh i love joey). In the following lines, MAR also shares her ideas about MEL’s favorite character by doing evaluation in line 15 which is acknowledged by MEL verbally and bodily. Then, MAR shares her epistemic stance which is also acknowledged by MEL verbally and bodily. In line 19, MAR delivers a quote from the character loudly with laughter. In overlap with this quote, MEL, the focal participant elaborates by adding another potential reason why she likes this character with laughter in turn-final position in line 20. Following a 2.7s of silence, MAR elaborates on the TV series again by sharing that she rewatched the show. This is oriented by MEL, and she further expands by stating that she rewatched the series in line 25. This gets a loud laughter from MAR, and she asks a question about the TV series again. This is responded to by DER and MIA with confirmation tokens. Then, MEL shares her epistemic stance about the situation in Turkiye in overlap with MIA’s confirmation token in line 30. What she does in the turn-final construction is also noteworthy here, because she allocates the turn to one of the co-participants by directly addressing her name. This is oriented with a change of state token by MAR, and then, DER shares her acknowledgement in line 32.

This extract shows how MEL, the focal participant, takes turns, responds to turns, expands the turns, elaborates on what she (and others) says, and shares her stance effortlessly in the end of the VE project, hence displaying a combination of diversified participatory actions in the team interactional setting. The combination of diversified participatory actions has definitely not happened suddenly during this meeting. All of the previous extracts have shown that the focal participant was adding different participatory actions to her repertoire gradually, and this last extract is the manifestation of how she takes more active role in the ongoing transnational team setting by deploying those participatory actions in situ. Longitudinal tracking of her actions in the team interaction has paved the way to uncover the diversification and engagement trajectory during the transnational team exchange meetings. The study discusses these findings in the following section in a more detailed way.

Discussion and Conclusions

Virtual exchange settings inherently provide interactive environments in which the participants can use L2 actively and engage with other people from geographically dispersed areas (O’Dowd, 2018). This study concentrated on this interactive setting, using a longitudinal conversation analytic perspective to uncover how a VE project can create opportunities for the development of the participants’ interactional competences in transnational groups of video-mediated interactions. The study’s main findings will be discussed from two key perspectives: (i) development of interactional competence in VE settings, and (ii) the methodology employed to document this development.

The study demonstrated that a participant who displayed her participation only with minimal responses and embodied actions in the beginning diversified her participatory actions over the course of the VE project resulting in a more increased participation trajectory in the team interactions. This change has gradually developed on a longitudinal aspect. Initially, she engaged through embodied actions and only provided solicited contributions, answering only when explicitly asked (Extract 1) in TEM1. Over time, she started to elaborate on her previously given responses (Extract 2) in TEM2, started topic shifting by adding different layers to the ongoing interaction in an unsolicited way (Extract 3) in TEM3, initiated task-related conversation in the team interaction (Extract 4) in TEM4, contributed to an ongoing VE product proposal by suggesting alternatives, hence displaying active participation in the team product which is the essence of the VE project (Extract 5) in TEM6. Finally, she engaged more and more in the team interaction by displaying her responsiveness to the co-participants’ turns, including acknowledgements, asking relevant follow-up questions, doing topic expansions in the last team exchange meeting (Extract 6) in TEM7. That is, the focal participant successfully managed navigating the intricacies of turn-taking (Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, 2015) and participating in multiparty interaction in a much fine-tuned way as the project progressed. This is evidenced by her adeptness in the flow of interaction, and her deliberate and progressive engagement in the VE setting, corroborating the results of previous research documenting a similar change in speakers’ participatory actions (i.e., Burch, 2019; Cekaite, 2007; Pallotti, 2001; Young & Miller, 2004; Deppermann, 2018; Pfänder et al., 2024; Watanabe, 2017). Importantly, once these participatory actions developed, she incorporated them into the subsequent team exchange meetings, continuing practices like elaboration and topic shifting until the end of the VE project. The same situation was also seen for the other practices (in Extracts 3, 4 and 5). Accordingly, it is noteworthy to mention here that this diversification of participatory actions was in a linear fashion in that the focal participant used, for instance, elaboration for the first time and this specific participatory action continued until the very end of the project by adding some other ones in the upcoming processes and transformed into a combination of all at the end of the VE project. Therefore, the diversification trajectory in her participatory actions indicate that she developed her L2 interactional competence over the course of the VE project by better tailoring her methods (i.e., participatory actions) in the team interaction (Skogmyr Marian & Balaman, 2018). In this sense, she has gone from a not-yet-competent member to a competent member in the VE setting in terms of her participatory actions (Gudmundsen, 2023; Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018). This shows how important creating VE settings for the participants is, because the focal participant developed her interactional competence by participating in the team interaction repeatedly and using the social interactional setting as an opportunity to use the target language in action despite the absence of a mentor/teacher or instructor.

An important concern can be addressed about the focal participant’s overcoming of the (potential) emotional barriers (e.g., anxiety, shyness etc.) in the team setting resulting her participatory actions to become more active in the team interaction. In this case, it is essential to note that the conversation analytic perspective about a naturally occurring talk requires the researchers to analyze what is apparent and observed in the interaction by the help of next-turn proof procedure (Sacks et al., 1974). With this in mind, the focal participant apparently provided minimal contributions to the team interaction in the beginning, but over time, she changed her participatory actions in a more and more engaged way in the team by taking turns, responding to others, and elaborating on her points, asking questions, initiating tasks etc. The participants in the team, the participation framework, and the specific VE context were constant throughout the VE project; however, the focal participant’s diversification of participatory actions has become more recipient-designed and context-sensitive (i.e., contributing and engaging more in the team interaction) (Filipi, 2015; Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018). Thus, it can be said that the focal participant’s display of peripheral participation in the beginning and her changing it into full participation potentially accentuated a key process about her socialization in the VE community of practice, accompanied by the development of her interactional competence (Cekaite, 2007; Nguyen, 2011b).

Similar to earlier VE research documenting affordances of VE projects for the participants in terms of L2 use, intercultural and pragmatic competence (Angelova & Zhao, 2016; Akiyama, 2017; Belz & Vyatkina, 2005; Lee & Markey, 2014; Liaw & Bunn-Le Master, 2010; O’Dowd & Lewis, 2016; Uzum et al., 2020), the focal participant self-reported changes in her final reflection paper in response to the question “What did you learn? What do you take with you?” as a learning or developmental area. In the reflection paper, she shared her own epistemic stance claiming that she could not get along with international partners at first, however, prefacing contrastive marker “but”, she signalled a developmental change (hence, “being able to get along”) in relation to this point following the VE project (Uyar & Can Daşkın, 2024). Differently from the previous VE research, the present study highlighted the minute-detailed interactional trajectory that has potentially paved the way for the focal participant to experience such a change. The analysis demonstrated that this change primarily occurred in her engagement in the team interaction via the manifestation of her diversified participatory actions. In this sense, similar to earlier studies using CA to longitudinally track different interactional practices (Ekin et al., 2024; Badem-Korkmaz et al., 2022), this study brings new methodological perspectives to analyze rich VE settings and digs out the intricacies of video mediated transnational interactions by connecting what a participant self-reported at the end of a VE project to what she indeed did during the VE project (Ekin & Balaman, 2024) using specifically “longitudinal CA” as the research methodology, hence bridging the gap between reported experiences and observable actual doings.

The use of longitudinal CA methodology in depicting the change helped this study also explore how participants might potentially develop their intercultural competence in a VE project. The ways the focal participant deployed to participate more in the transnational team interaction can be regarded as a representation of development in intercultural competence, which is defined as “the ability to navigate interactions comfortably with others from different cultural backgrounds” (O’Dowd, 2020, p. 477). Converging with this definition, the focal participant has navigated the transnational team interaction more comfortably over time evidenced by her diversifying interactional practices in situ. While this study does not claim to make significant contributions to the broader construct of intercultural communicative competence with its different domains in VE research (Byram, 1997, 2008), it emphasizes the importance of understanding the interactional mechanisms that the VE participants navigate intercultural communication in transnational teams. By examining these mechanisms, the present study offers new insights that can recalibrate research on intercultural communicative competence in VE settings, topicalizing the need for extensive exploration of such settings through the lenses of conversation analytic and interactional perspectives to gain a deeper understanding of participant’s actual doings.

Overall, this study explored how a VE participant changes and diversifies her participatory actions in a VE setting using longitudinal CA methodology. Besides the benefits of longitudinal CA, it should also be acknowledged that there may be some challenges of using such longitudinal CA for the researchers (Nguyen, 2011b). Documenting the change in the focal participant’s participatory actions was particularly challenging due to the need to provide evidence of the interactional competence development via the diversification on repeated and similar cases out of a very dynamic and complex interactional setting (i.e., VE setting). Consequently, the analysis focused only on turn-taking or turn entry moments of the focal participant in the team interaction which has enabled establishing this comparison-based documentation across a timeline. This way, the study has been an important contribution to longitudinal CA and VE research by analyzing the dynamic nature of the VE setting from a conversation analytic perspective. Further studies can focus on how participants in the VE settings use specifically repair practices in a transnational team setting, whether there are any longitudinal changes related to negotiation of cultural artifacts, how culture and the cultural learning moments are manifested in relation to epistemics in CA research and how the dynamics of transnational team settings in VE unfold interactionally (e.g., identity, agency, silences, communication breakdowns, latency, or overlaps etc.), which still remains largely unexplored.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Semih Ekin

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Development of Interactional Competence in a Virtual Exchange Setting: Focus on Diversification of Participatory Actions

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Background to the Study

Development of Interactional Competence

Participatory Actions in Social Interaction

Virtual Exchange Settings

Methodology

The Virtual Exchange Project

Analytic Background to the Study

Analysis and Findings

Extract 1: Minimal Participation (Team Exchange Meeting 1 - 15:28 – 16:07)

Extract 2: Elaborating (Team Exchange Meeting 2 / 29:30 – 30:16)

Extract 3: Topic Shifting (Team Exchange Meeting 3 / 33:22 – 34:02)

Extract 4: Opening task-related conversation (Team Exchange Meeting 4 / 05:24 - 06:34)

Extract 5: Proposing Alternatives (Team Exchange Meeting 6 / 37:48 – 38:42)

Extract 6: Diversification of Participatory Actions (Team Exchange Meeting 7 / 16:21 – 17:09)

Discussion and Conclusions

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

References