Responding to proposals in video-mediated virtual exchange interactions: A conversation analytic study

Virtual Exchange (VE) has become a mainstream practice in language teacher education due to the unique opportunities it provides. Within VE projects in language teacher education, designing tasks is one of the primary activities through which collaboration and learning are organized, planned, and refined in an international setting. This collaboration during task (re)design conversations involves making and responding to the proposals, through which the outcome of task (re)design is shaped. Yet how these sequences unfold among pre-service teachers (PSTs) during task (re)design conversations in VE remains underexplored. This study investigates how PSTs use proposals as interactional resources when reaching a joint decision, and what resources they employ while accepting, modifying, or rejecting task (re)design ideas during video-mediated VE interactions. Drawing on 45 hours of screen-recorded, transnational meetings from a VE project between Türkiye and Canada, the study employs multimodal conversation analysis to examine proposal sequences from an emic perspective. The findings reveal an overwhelming prevalence of direct agreement to proposals, while also including instances of conditional agreement, where PSTs asserted a condition to accept the proposals, and alternative joint action proposals, where PSTs constructively built upon or refined ideas. Conversely, direct disagreement was notably rare. It was also found that PSTs mostly used modal declaratives (e.g., "we could…," "maybe we can…") to formulate proposals. PSTs employ various resources to maintain a collaborative environment and achieve consensus, building on each other's proposals and avoiding direct conflict. These findings indicate that proposals serve as critical interactional resources for joint pedagogical decision-making, thus influencing task (re)design within VE projects.