The Spanish language distance classroom

a look at engagement and alignment through the lens of Multimodal Conversation Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents the analytical findings of an investigation conducted in the Spanish language classroom. Using Multimodal Conversation Analysis (MCA), we describe and analyze interactional events from an online additional language classroom  of a public university in the Midwest of Brazil. The course  focused on the improvement of communicative competence, productive and interactive skills in Spanish, with a focus on written expression, and it was aimed at undergraduate students of the Language course. Although the course prioritized writing, it is the oral interactions that interest us in this research. For our analyses, we used the recordings of the classes that took place during the end of the year 2021 and beginning of the year 2022 that were transcribed and analyzed from the theoretical-methodological approach of MCA. Our goal in this study is to investigate students’ engagement and alignment practices in the institutional interactional context. The results show that, in the interactions that took place, the way in which speaking proposals are initiated by the teacher result in changes in the students’ participation organization. Questions or orality expression proposals generate the most engagement during classes, while actions that expect voluntary participation from students or more generic requests for engagement are not very effective. We also observed that having the cameras open or not has an influence on the students' alignment. We understand that a detailed analytical look at the classroom contributes to the context of teacher training and to the reflection on the process of additional language teaching and learning. We also understand that this study can contribute to enhance the understanding of ACM beyond theoretical-methodological boundaries.