Facilitating Participation in Second Language Remote Meetings

Abstract

The affordances for organising social conduct in multilingual interaction vary depending on the setting. This article examines multilingual remote meetings and the ways in which second language speakers’ participation in interaction is facilitated by other speakers. More specifically, the focus is on moments of language-related troubles that become solved by entries accomplished by a non-primary recipient (i.e., third party) of the trouble turn. Drawing on screen-recorded data and conversation analysis (CA), we illustrate how second language speakers’ troubles are attended to either retrospectively (i.e., via repair) or prospectively, and how the entries require fine-grained coordination of verbal, embodied and technological resources. The analysis shows facilitation through third-party assistance as a complex process with professional and pedagogical dimensions. Our study provides insight into the ways in which technology-mediated environments may both create opportunities and limit the possibilities for second language speakers to recruit help from others via subtle (e.g., embodied) means.

Keywords

• conversation analysis
• workplace interaction
• technology-mediated interaction
• third-party facilitation
• language assistance