Tracking telecollaborative tasks through design, feedback, implementation, and reflection processes in pre-service language teacher education

Abstract

Abstract Telecollaborative exchanges between students from different countries are increasingly becoming a common practice in foreign language education and calling for new teacher competences for task design in order to maximize interactional opportunities in these settings. Considering that tasks are dynamic in nature and subject to constant change from their initial design to implementation by L2 learners, there is a need for teacher training activities promoting opportunities for improving the required digital and pedagogical competences. With this in mind, this paper sets out to explore the interactional architecture of the multiple steps involved in the training of pre-service language teachers in pedagogical task design for telecollaboration-oriented video-mediated interactional settings. We describe the procedural unfolding of the telecollaborative tasks by analyzing (i) pre-service teachers’ collaborative design meetings and (ii) written design reports; (iii) peer and mentor evaluation of these design ideas in whole-class feedback sessions in teacher training classrooms; (iv) written reports of redesigns after the feedback session, (v) video-mediated implementation by telecollaborative task participants, and finally (vi) pre-service teachers’ written reflections based on the implementation of their own designs. We use Conversation Analysis to closely examine audio and screen-recording data and draw on the textual data to present the procedural unfolding of two tasks over multiple phases, namely design, feedback, implementation, and reflection. The findings show that a telecollaborative task is a co-construction by the pre-service teachers as task designers, the teacher trainer as the mentor, and the L2 learners as the end users in interactionally trackable ways across the teacher education events. The results bring insights into the novel sets of digital, pedagogical, and interactional competencies in L2 contexts. We conclude that task enhanced telecollaboration holds great potential to critically advance research and practice in L2 teaching and teacher education worldwide.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 48 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.