The Use of Classroom Video Clips As an Interactional Resource in Video-Mediated Pre-Service Language Teacher Discussion Groups

Abstract

Video-mediated interaction has started to be one of the main research areas in recent years, and there is a recognized need for understanding how people interact by using the affordances of video-mediated settings. Several studies focused on video-mediated interaction in various contexts and interactional resources that people use in online settings. However, the number of studies on video-mediated interaction in language teacher education is still limited, and there is a need to investigate how video-mediated settings can contribute to language teacher education. To fill this gap in literature, the present study aimed to examine physically distant pre-service teachers' video-mediated interactions on the videoconferencing tool, Microsoft Teams software. The research is based on 10 hours of screen recordings of pre-service teachers' online group discussions in which they analyzed video clips of classroom interaction, and multimodal Conversation Analysis was adopted as the research methodology to conduct this study. The findings indicated that participants used affordances of the video (e.g., rewinding and fast-forwarding the video clips) as context-specific interactional resources to enhance the visibility of the video clips in three ways: (i) soliciting assistance for the visibility of the video clips, (ii) unsolicited assistance for the visibility of the video clips, (iii) using the video clips in one own’s extended turns. Furthermore, deployment of the context specific resources created opportunities for pre-service teachers to recruit assistance and work collaboratively in their discussions. The findings of this thesis contribute to identify new sets of interactional resources in video-mediated settings, and help provide suggestions and new insights into language teacher education in video-mediated settings informed by multimodal Conversation Analysis.