To Örebro University

The empirical study presented here focuses upon naturalistic social interaction in online synchronous communities within higher education. Our interests here relate to accounting for the communicative strategies employed by participants who are dealing with a common task, and how these specific tasks are negotiated within the constraints and opportunities accorded in the multimodal multilingual virtual setting. Taking sociocultural theoretical points of departure, we focus on students' languaging and use of tools when they have access to a range of resources inside the online videoconferencing program. The study is based upon screen recordings of both student-only and teacher-lead meetings during one semester in the online course Italian for beginners offered by a Swedish university. The analysis is two-fold: we provide an overview of the interactional patterns at the general lesson level in the data complemented by a micro-interactional analysis of selected slices of everyday life from two meetings. Our findings indicate that students make use of several resources that dialectically shape how they get positioned within the virtual community culture. These identification processes function as ways of enriching and nurturing learning, both of appropriating the target language, as well as enabling ways of being in multimodal, multilingual communities of practices.

The use of digital tools like computers and tablets in institutional learning arenas give rise to forms of flexibility where time and space boundaries become diffuse. Online learning sites are understood as being crucial today, especially in large parts of the Global North, where anyone anywhere potentially can become a student and have access to educational opportunities. 

This study focuses on the analysis of recorded sessions, part of an “Italian for (adult) beginners” online course. Our interests relate to accounting for how students negotiate different language varieties, including modalities, and how communication in virtual learning settings enables both flexible participation trajectories and identity positions in and across the boundaries of time and space.

The sociocultural and dialogical analyses here are framed in terms of fluidity of “glocal” positions and (trans)languaging that emerge in and across time and space in Technology Mediated Communication. Our findings suggest that online environments support meaning-making where it is possible to identify alternative ways of (co)constructing and mediating learning. Such hybridity as well as the performative character of learning and identity display have important implications for online glocal communities.