Video-Mediated Lesson Planning Conversations of Pre-Service Language Teachers in A Transnational Virtual Exchange Project

Abstract

The virtual exchange (VE) projects in language teacher education programs have become widely utilized sets of activities due to their potential affordances for teachers to develop a variety of skills and competences in technology-mediated settings. To this end, this study explores how pre-service language teachers (PSTs) make use of a VE project and VE-based teacher education activities in a trilateral exchange environment. The participants were pre-service language teachers based in Türkiye, Germany and Sweden in the VE project. All the activities were completed online and the ultimate goal for the PSTs was to create a shared lesson plan collaboratively in their teams. The data included the screen-recordings of the PSTs’ video-mediated interactions, written outputs and the collaborative products that they created during the course of the project. The study used multimodal conversation analysis as the research methodology and treated every piece of the data in terms of an emic and participant-relevant perspective. The line-by-line analyses of participants’ video-mediated interactions showed that the PSTs use what they have experienced during the VE project as a resource to shape their own lesson plans in-and-through their lesson planning conversations. They do so by deploying retrospective or immediate orientation to their shared experiential practices while supporting or proposing lesson plan idea, which results in a collaborative pedagogical decision about their shared product in-situ. The study demonstrates that the PSTs potentially transform the VE project into an experiential learning setting promoting their professional development, thus bringing new insights into language teacher education and virtual exchange.