Between the technological and the humanly possible: a comparative multimodal analysis of referencing in online and in-person teaching and learning interactions

Abstract

The COVID-19 global crisis has changed in many ways how educational activities happen, especially when the encounters migrated to video-mediated settings. In this paper, from a comparative perspective, we investigate online and in-person classes. We examine a recurring practice in pedagogical contexts: referencing objects – e.g. a task in a textbook, a document, or a non-digital object. We analyze how teachers and learners interactionally accomplish referencing. We describe the multimodal resources deployed and reflect on the affordances and challenges in each environment. Using Multimodal Conversation Analysis (SACKS, 1992; MONDADA, 2014), we conduct a fine-grained analysis of the unfolding of referencing practices in audio and video-recorded online and in-person classes. The analysis reveals that although many of the resources mobilized by teachers to refer to an object are common to both environments, they are accomplished through different means due to contingencies imposed by each environment. However, there are crucial differences that generate important repercussions. The in-person environment, for example, is characterized by being a context in which learners and their objects are visually accessible (i.e., independent from a camera that captures them), thus enabling their monitoring and, consequently, ensuring the full accomplishment of the referencing process, something which is not possible (yet) in the virtual environment. Furthermore, in online classes, when referencing an object, learners also need to deal with specific contingencies of the non-physical copresence, especially with those that demand synchrony of actions and visual access (both ways) to mobilize joint attention. Therefore, we show how these (and other) challenges imply interactional efforts by the participants to make the teaching and learning process possible.