A Conversation Analytic Study on the Displays of Task Difficulty in Task-Oriented Video-Mediated Interactions

Abstract

Technology-mediated task-based language teaching growingly sets to become a vital methodology in language teaching and the learning process yet arises questions regarding the viable implications of task design that affect task complexity and task difficulty. This issue has largely been examined in the classroom environment yet remained unexplored in the technology-mediated and online interactional environments. This study aims to present participants’ ways of displaying task difficulty in collaborative information-gap tasks. The data includes screen recordings captured by task participants as a part of a telecollaboration project. The analyses rely on the micro-analytic lens of multimodal Conversation Analysis to examine video-mediated interactions on Skype or Google Hangouts and on-screen behaviours in situ. The findings reveal that task participants deploy diverse sources to display and tackle task difficulty over the process of task engagement such as: (i) expressing the difficulty in an explicit way; (ii) revealing the task-relevant trouble through exclamation; (iii) displaying task difficulty with claims of insufficient knowledge; (iv) orienting to skip the relevant task components after not finding a candidate answer, which becomes observable in-and-through video-mediated interactions. In the light of the results, this study provides significant implications for understanding the concept of task difficulty in interaction, epistemic stances of participants in the act of co-construction of meaning, the implementation of task-based language teaching (TBLT), and its premises for computer-assisted language learning (CALL), and synchronous telecollaboration projects. Keywords: task difficulty, telecollaboration projects, conversation analysis, task-based language teaching (TBLT), computer-assisted language learning (CALL)