Word search sequences in video-mediated task-oriented virtual exchange interactions

Telecollaboration enables geographically dispersed foreign language speakers to communicate with each other in the target language, and many researchers have investigated various interactional practices that L2 learners use in these online settings. However, word search practices as a common interactional practice at talk have remained underexplored in online interactional settings. The dataset of this thesis is based on a telecollaboration (also known as virtual exchange, online intercultural exchange) project between a Turkish and a Tunisian university. The project was carried out with the participation of 19 students from each university in a three-week period. Adopting conversation analysis as the research methodology and conducting a micro-analytic investigation into the screen recordings of two dyads' task-enhanced video-mediated interactions, this study describes the various practices that participants employ specifically at the onset of the search and when the search is in progress. The analysis shows that the participants use both verbal utterances and embodied actions such as gestures and screen- based actions to indicate the initiation of the search and request help from the co-participant when the speaker is unable to resolve the trouble himself/herself. Depending on how the co-participant responds to the invitation, two ways of accomplishing word searches become visible, (i) word searches are completed by the original speaker (self-initiated / self- completed) and (ii) co-participants are involved in the search in other cases (self-initiated / other-completed). However, not all word search sequences end with the resolution in the data of this study. Therefore, the abandonment of word searches has also been examined under the scope of this thesis. This study brings insights into video-mediated task-oriented L2 interactions and provides pedagogical implications for language teachers, language learners, and task designers. Keywords: word search; video-mediated interaction; telecollaboration, Conversation Analysis, task- enhanced L2 interaction