Télécollaboration en langues et émergence d’une communauté virtuelle d’apprentissage

Abstract

This study examines the conditions leading to the emergence of virtual learning communities in French as a foreign language and bilingual (French-English) online exchanges, with particular attention to a phase that is less addressed in research, namely the initial communication held asynchronously on a social network and a collaborative bulletin board (Padlet). To understand better the characteristics of these exchanges, we examine the relevance of the notions of communities of practice and virtual learning communities adopted in the field of online education, the dynamics of their emergence, as well as the digital environments used for different modes of interaction. We then present the contexts of empirical studies carried out since 2017, the study corpus and methodology based on the analysis of online discourse behaviors. The findings suggest that the peculiarities of virtual learning communities in the context of telecollaborations in language learning are mainly linked to their spatial and temporal boundaries, the institutional affiliations of the interacting groups and their navigation between languages and varied digital environments.

Keywords

• asynchronous communication
• language learning
• telecollaboration
• community of practice