Developing teachers’ semio-pedagogical competence for webconference-supported teaching through teacher training

International audienceAs more and more language courses are offered online using webconferencing platforms, it is important for teacher trainers to reflect on the diverse competences required by online teachers (Lamy & Hampel 2007). Among these, it is crucial for teachers to develop their understanding of the contribution to meaning making of coverbal semiotic resources (McNeill 1992, 2005; Goldin-Meadow 2003), including gestures, head and body movements, gaze and facial expressions. Furthermore, it is important to raise teachers’ awareness as to how these multimodal resources combine and how they are orchestrated (Norris 2004) in webconference-supported teaching environments. By developing teachers’ semio-pedagogical competence (Guichon & Cohen, to be published), defined here as the appropriate use of semiotic resources to foster learning, teachers should manage online teaching more effectively.The context of the research presented in this paper is the telecollaborative project ISMAEL (InteractionS and Multimodality in lAnguage LEarning) in which 12 trainee teachers of French as a foreign language met for online teaching sessions in French with 18 undergraduate Business students attending an Irish university. Each trainee teacher met with the same learner (or pair of learners) once a week for approximately 40 minutes over a six-week period using the webconferencing platform Visu (Bétrancourt et al. 2011). During the sessions, the trainee teachers proposed a range of business French interactional tasks to their learners. A screen recorder captured all onscreen activity for each session. Multimodal transcriptions were made of these sessions using ELAN (Sloetjes & Wittenburg 2008), with separate annotation layers for speech turns and the multimodal resources under investigation here (e.g. gestures and gaze). The day after each online session, the trainee teachers attended a group debriefing session with a teacher trainer, which included the viewing and discussion of several video extracts from the previous day’s online interactions, selected by the trainee teachers themselves. One of the aims of these sessions was to sensitise the trainee teachers to the affordances of the webcam and to develop their critical semiotic awareness and pedagogical competence to fit the demands of a situation where multimodality and its different components could be experienced. Audio recordings and written transcriptions were made of these debriefing sessions. We use a qualitative approach to investigate the effect of the debriefing sessions on the performance of one of the trainee teachers. During the second debriefing session, she expressed displeasure about her over expressive facial expressions and constant smiling, and during the third debriefing session, she expressed a strong desire to improve her positioning in front of the webcam. Focusing on these pedagogical objectives, we explore how the different multimodal resources are deployed and how they contribute to the development of the teacher’s semio-pedagogical competence. This study endeavours not only to enable us to gain a better understanding of the interplay between the different multimodal semiotic resources in online teaching environments but ultimately to enrich the content of training programmes for teachers working in webconference-supported teaching environments