Vlogging : Identity construction and intercultural exchanges in a self learning language context.

International audienceAs Crystal (2011) wrote in his last book, the Internet is the largest database of language the world has ever seen and a new field is emerging as a consequence: Internet linguistics. This field of digital discourse and screen-based multimodal analysis is recent, vast and promising to explore. After the emergence of Web 2.0, online communication spaces have diversified. Since the development of the webcam and its integration with various communication tools (such as laptops, tablets and mobile phones), Internet users can easily create personal videos, publish and share them. In this paper, we study the little explored discursive phenomenon of the French speaker's videolog (or vlog from now) on YouTube. Our research consists of a corpus of study of two public YouTube channels of the same protagonist who is a young American learner of French. The corpus of reference consists of 38 videos (from 0:58 to 1:07 minutes published between 28th June 2011 and 23rd January 2015) extracted from the 'texfrancais' channel and 43 videos (from 1:00 to 8:01 minutes published between 16th December 2011 and 6th July 2013) extracted from the 'EveryJour' channel, as well as the written comments they attracted. In this communication, we analyse this representative corpus of study by revisiting traditional semiodiscursive and interaction analysis tools. Thus, through a multimodal micro-analysis, we attempt to answer the following question: how is a vlogger’s identity formed in an intercultural communication context