Multimodal student interaction online: an ecological perspective

This article describes the influence of tool and task design on student interaction in languagelearning at a distance. Interaction in a multimodal desktop video conferencing environment,FlashMeeting, is analyzed from an ecological perspective with two main foci: participationrates and conversational feedback strategies. The quantitative analysis of participation ratesshows that as far as verbal interaction is concerned, multimodality did not have an equalizingeffect in this context, contradicting previous research on multimodal student interaction.Additionally, the qualitative analysis of conversational feedback strategies shows that whereassome multimodal strategies were employed, the students did not manage to fully act upon thecommunicative affordances of the tool, as the feedback ratio during and after the often longbroadcasts was relatively low. These findings are related to task and tool design and the articlediscusses how design improvements in these areas might result in a more constructive languagelearning ecology