Supporting an effective review of telecollaboration for second language learning by visualising the participation and engagement at Dublin City University

We share our experience of developing and deploying a videoconference-based conversation visualisation system called L2L during the Spring semester 2021 to support a tandem telecollaboration project between language students by visually summarising their oral participation rates and interactional engagement.

60 Irish students learning French in the School of Applied Languages and Intercultural Studies (DCU) and 45 French students learning English in a French university enrolled and participated in 7 weekly Zoom-based telecollaboration sessions. Students from both universities were grouped into teams of 2-4 students, and took part in a self-scheduled, hour-long, Zoom conversation on a specific topic each week. Interactions took place in French for the first half an hour and in English for the second.

At the end of each session, our L2L system used Zoom audio transcripts to automatically analyse aspects of the conversations including the duration of speech contributed by each student and the ratio of their turn-taking. This gave a set of metrics from each session characterising the levels of participation and interactional engagement. The web-based system presents an interactive and visual template on which a timeline of the session shows the utterances of each student and allows playback of any part of the Zoom-recorded video by clicking on the timeline. The flow of conversation reveals who spoke after whom, indicating the dynamics among the speakers during the conversation. The degree of “disorder” or volatility showed how irregular, jumpy and/or dynamic the conversations were for the English- and French-speaking parts of the session. Students and their lecturer reviewed these measures after each session, reflecting and identifying points of learning and progress. Evidenced from 210 sessions in which 30 teams participated over a 3-month period, we share the ways in which the system facilitated an increased participation and engagement in the telecollaboration project.