„Vielleicht kann ich meinen Bildschirm teilen“ – Management von Spanisch-Online-Interaktionen im Rahmen eines Virtual Exchange

Abstract

Virtual Exchange (VE) initiatives in higher education have seen an extraordinary increase in recent years. While the language of communication in VE in the great majority of cases is English, there is a considerable lack of studies on how VEs are conducted in other languages. In this paper, we report on some preliminary results of a VE project with Spanish as the lingua franca that took place in 2021 between members of the ENLIGHT Network as an extra-curricular activity. During the project various students of Spanish from different study backgrounds met in small groups via Zoom. The interactions, therefore, had the character of conversations-for-learning (Kasper/Kim 2015). None of the participants had the official role of a teacher or leader. The focus of this paper is on the question of the interactional self-management which means that we are looking at how the leading roles are managed. Specifically, we will analyze the common strategy of sharing the screen on Zoom. By comparing groups, we also provide insights into the effects of this particular practice on the interactions.