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Multimodal student interaction online: an ecological perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2009

Therese Örnberg Berglund
Therese Örnberg Berglund
Affiliation:
Department of Language Studies, Umea University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden (e-mail: [email protected])
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Abstract

This article describes the influence of tool and task design on student interaction in language learning at a distance. Interaction in a multimodal desktop video conferencing environment, FlashMeeting, is analyzed from an ecological perspective with two main foci: participation rates and conversational feedback strategies. The quantitative analysis of participation rates shows that as far as verbal interaction is concerned, multimodality did not have an equalizing effect in this context, contradicting previous research on multimodal student interaction. Additionally, the qualitative analysis of conversational feedback strategies shows that whereas some multimodal strategies were employed, the students did not manage to fully act upon the communicative affordances of the tool, as the feedback ratio during and after the often long broadcasts was relatively low. These findings are related to task and tool design and the article discusses how design improvements in these areas might result in a more constructive language learning ecology.

Keywords

Language learning ecologytask and tool designmultimodal desktop video conferencingequalizationcommon groundconversational feedback
Type
Original Article
Information
ReCALL , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , May 2009 , pp. 186 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning 2009

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