Features of Online Second Language Interactional Competence in a German-Israeli Virtual Exchange

Virtual Exchange (VE) is a method of intercultural online learning in which groups of learners collaborate with partners from another culture or geographical area in joint projects. Lingua Franca VEs combine numerous advantages, such as the acquisition of digital and intercultural skills, and further create an environment in which the foreign language is used in an authentic and immersive setting. Although VE is a highly communicative method, Second Language Interactional Competence (L2 IC) has barely been subjected to scientific scrutiny in this context yet. By investigating the first thirty minutes of ten initial student group meetings, this cross-sectional study explores the interactional resources that participants display during online talk-in-interaction. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is applied to the data consisting of GAT2 transcriptions of recorded ZOOM video conferences. These online meetings between EFL undergraduate students in secondary school teacher training are part of the VE project Extended Telecollaboration Practice (Waldman, Harel & Schwab, 2019) between Israel and Germany which was initiated in 2015 and is still on-going. This paper depicts the online-specific strategies that EFL-students adopt in order to gain common ground. Further, it will argue that some L2 IC features, such as turn-taking and multilingual resources, come with particular dynamics and characteristics in a VE context.